When Anger Trumped Progress - The New York Times:
JOHN YOUNG was born into slavery, on July 4, 1855. By 15 he was a free man and an electrifying orator, recruiting black voters around his native South Carolina to the Republican Party with “pyrotechnical” rhetoric and mustache-waggling jokes. In the late 1860s, it looked as if he might help his party make real change in the post-Civil War South.
But soon Young noticed white Northerners losing interest, more concerned with corruption in Washington than freedom in Charleston. His former allies, distracted by scandals, “just sat back” and let the South “skin us out of our rights,” he later said. By the late 1870s, anger at government had helped kill Reconstruction, punishing the most vulnerable for the crimes of the most crooked. We should be wary of this today, as we grapple with race and populist rage yet again.
Just as in the 1870s, America is struggling against racial inequity andseething at our political establishment. The two issues appear unrelated, but they have a perverse connection: Anger makes Americans dismiss government and politics altogether — and that dismissal makes it harder to tackle racial injustice.
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