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Well put, I say. I have had Percys Knotheads on my mind ever since the emergence of the Tea Party, and the birthers, and all the others viscerally at odds with the image of a black man in the White House. ** These folks are careful to avoid (most of the time) obvious racist comments, but racism is clearly driving them.
I am currently re-reading (after 30 or more years) the Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward, and Kenneth Stampps revisionist history (written in 1965) of Reconstruction. Woodward teaches that Jim Crow didnt erect himself until the 1890s, following a period in which relatively speaking there was a real progress in race relations. Stampp points out that the Souths retrospective loathing of Reconstruction was distorted to an unwarranted extreme by histories written in 1890 1910 sympathetic to the fantasy of the patrician South.
There was, at that time in 1890 - 1910, growing sympathies in the North to the situation of the white man in the South vis a vis the Negro, prompted by (among other factors) xenophobic reactions in the North to immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The sociology, anthropology and psychology popular at that time supported a racist view, as did the law (e.g., Plessy v Fergusons imprimatur of the demonstrably unsound and intellectually bankrupt notion of separate but equal). Racism was its height then. The KKK re-emerged, the movie Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith, etc.
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