The Civil War

[denuseri]

I don' tthink they would have been. Can you imagine independant southern states anno 2011 with slaves?

Considering that in the south in most areas former slaves were litterally still kept in a state of official peonage right up into the 1960's and 70's; coupled with the fact that it wasn't until the Federal Government yet again was forced to deploy troops not once but several times to enforce the civil rights act when it finally made it through congress...which until then the south had for the most part only payed lip service too other laws concerning the equal treatment of blacks, (including amendments to the consitution garenteeing equal staus in the law) all the while continueing not only a tradition of mistreating blacks for their color alone but actually keeping entire poulations of former slaves in a state of fear and terror along with local law enforcment's good ole boy endorsment and encouragment, sometimes even direct support.

Things like water treatments, lynchings, cross burnings, rape, beatings, shootings, capturing of blacks to be tortured with a rowdy night of doing the"Nigga laundry" (a practice where a black man was sumerged in near boiling water and scrubbed with hard bristle brushes until his skin litterally came off) etc etc

(Some towns... one near here near where I live today even had signs up warning blacks that if they were cuaght in the city limits after dark they would be shot on sight)

One city in the south even had postcards made in the 1930's displaying blacks being strung up and hung to rot for days on end in the publoc square in front of their couthouse: touting that "this is what we do to "nigers" when we get our hands on them in our town".

Another town has fields of unmarked graves containing hundreds of remains of blacks who were kidnapped in the night and tortured to death in similar fashion, (last estimate was over 600)...that the south is up in arms about so much that they are refusing to allow any further digging in the area by the archeology students who found them only in the past decade.


So: Yes I can imagine all too well the horror that would have continued perhaps right on up to this day if allowed to go on and it were not impeded by outside force of arms.