The increasing world demand for cotton and tobacco, rotten whites with a history of raping, breeding and enslaving Black people in the millions, a butter-soft Black population not ever willing to unify and end its own enslavement by force of arms, coupled with the absence of an economic revolution was the condition for the political alliance of the one time Southern enslavers with the Northern industrialists.  These whites looked at one central fact:  cotton had to be picked.  Somebody had to pick it with or without conviction.  Black folk were left to hang from trees and burn from stakes; the cotton was picked and Blacks still picked it.  Force was the final decision-maker.  Whites had it, Blacks did not.   

By 1874, Reconstruction was over; and so was the pacification campaign aimed at keeping Blacks from rebelling while the war-torn white cities were vulnerable.  From the poorest redneck white to the reddest red republican white, they all agreed on one thing:  Black people would continue to do the nation's dirtiest work.  In 1896, Plessey vs. Ferguson sealed it.  The white abolitionist movement disbanded, the red republicans became liberal and moderate "do-gooder's" without cause, compassion, or conviction.  The white backlash followed with fury. Standard operating procedure.  Look at history on back to the Greek occupation of North African.

This was inevitable, a certainty, a foregone conclusion.  It is not possible to truly liberate enslaved people unless they liberate themselves.  This is essential to liberation theory.  If one never learns to fight for freedom, at anytime and in anyplace, any group of people can enslave them.  A rapist cannot liberate the raped; the raped must empower themselves to crush those who rape or attempt to rape them.  A slavemaster cannot free the enslaved; the enslaved must seize their own freedom, break the chains, get off their knees, smash any skull that gets in their path to freedom, or they will forever be dependent/soft/vulnerable.  Study this carefully.  Even still the enslavers will find others who are weak, unprepared, and defenseless to enslave until they find more efficient energy to produce the wealth they seek.  Reconstruction ended with the re-enslavement of Black folk as voteless sharecroppers, now under Northern rule, with a Southern landlord reporting to a Northern banker/financier on Wall Street. This arrangement lasted from 1874 to the 1950's.

The sorry slave-owning whites in the South were used to using Blacks, enslaving them, raping them, breeding them, stealing and selling their children, whipping them, mutilating them, cheating them.  It was not much of a stretch to condemn the newly freed-on-paper Africans to a new and more brutal form of exploitation given the domestic and international demand for cotton, tobacco, and sugar products.  The violence against the Black people was the means of condemning millions of landless, jobless Black people to the sharecropping system and labor slavery. The legalization of segregation and discrimination against the Black people  (Plessey vs. Ferguson and the Black Codes/Jim Crow) guaranteed that Blacks stayed at the manual level below whites' mechanized machine level in the labor/standard of living hierarchy.  After the disfranchisement of the African Americans, the laws passed against the black tenant farmer allowed for lynchmob law against any Black.  From 1874 to the early 1950's these degenerate whites lynched Blacks at will, burning them at the stake, cheating them, beating them, holding them down in every sense. 

Generally, the American whites, as is usually the case, joined together across class lines (through the vote, rope, and gun) to make sure that Blacks continue to do the dirtiest, lowest paying, and most profitable work for the benefit of whites.  WIthin this context, the abolition of slavery was a premature social reform without a preceding or corresponding technological then economic revolution in the South.  Though Blacks needed to end slavery the day it started, common cause with other whites only occured essentailly when the whites saw greater profit in mechanized farm production as opposed to manul human slave production.  The Blacks were to be moved from front and center to the rear as sharecroppers. The North was having an industrial revolution, but the South had been hampered, stunted, retarded, held back by its reliance on obsolete forms of manual labor when mechanical/machine-based labor had become the norm. 

Southern agriculture was not yet industrialized; but the North, after the South started the war, imposed a reform in social relations upon the South after winning the war, with the partial/temporary freeing of the enslaved Africans. This paper emancipation transferred property worth some $7.8 billion dollars in the form of enslaved Black people from the master/slave class to the northern whites through their emerging Southern white landlord class from their Black sharecropping class.  But paper will put up with anything written on it.  In the real world, whites kept ownership of the land, farm implements, fertilizer, and homes.  Blacks, thru para-military terror, lynchmob law, black codes, anti-loitering laws, and trickery were forced back onto the very same plantations to be worked to death for another 100 years as sharecroppers.  This is worth white democracy in action: freedoms for whites to continue to take advantage of Blacks; even when reforming their degenerate slave systems they still must reform them for their own benefit first and foremost.

This alliance, with the Black abolitionist movement being bought-off and integrated into the white abolitionist movement, which had disbanded, made Black slavery in a new sharecropping form certain. The growing monopolization of industry in the North had its reflection in the South as the defeat of post-war land redistribution and reconstruction. The ex-enslaved Africans, freed with little more than the rags on their backs, families in disarray, hungry, homeless, barefoot, disorganized, lacking elementary education, mistreated---yet, they still had a need for land to "cast their buckets where they stood." There was no way for the majority of them to purchase land. At that time, sharecropping appeared to hold out the possibility of someday owning land; but this was yet another trick.  Blacks were cheated by the millions, terrorized into farming the same land they had farmed enslaved, for the right to pay off debts for land they'd never own.  The post-war plantation system stabilized, and sharecropping as a specific form of tenant farming evolved with Blacks again being worked to death farming fiber, food, and fixtures for whites.  Sharecropping and the convict-lease system became new forms of slavery. This was another rotten system of exploitation heaped on Blacks, and even on millions of poor whites.

The sharecropping Black people, cheated by the landlords, brutalized by the legal authorities, terrorized by the extra-legal forces were reduced to the level of the apartheid Blacks in South Africa.  The era of segregation, lasting some 346 years, legal and extra-legal pressure of the whites, stripped of names, religions, holidays, clothing, culture, language, heroes/heroines; living from crib to grave led around by whites and Arabs---nothing but brutes, bullies armed with gun and blade, dragging around unarmed, innocent Black people by the 10's of millions. 

By the 1940's, with the African Americans tractored off the land, the essential purpose (using Blacks for manual agricultural production) for segregation and brutality against them was spent and had run its course.  In short, the whites and their ruling classes by 1950 needed a civil rights movement as much as the Black people. Study this inference carefully.  The mechanization of Southern agriculture resulted in a massive migration of African Americans from the South to the North, from farms to factories, from country-sides to cities. The migrations reduced the huge majority of Black people relative to whites in the South, but it did not change the racial discrimination Blacks faced wherever they went. On every level, the well-being of the whites and Black people were counter-posed with the whites having better life chances in general, and this is still the case. Education, health care, housing, diet/food quality, clothing, transportation, waste disposal, air quality, recreation, legal representation, scientific preparation, engineering, employment, death benefits, public accommodations---everything had a parallel tract for whites and Blacks with Blacks getting the worst/filthiest/poorest quality. 

The tools, the sharecropping slavery, the poverty of the South changed very little from 1870 to 1940.  The invention of the cotton picker and the development of weed-killing chemicals in 1952, forcing millions Blacks off land into the cities was the economic revolution for the civil rights movement and the social reforms of the 1960's to stand on. The passing away of sharecropping slavery was followed by a civil rights, desegregation, integration movement and the partial outlawing of segregation and some forms of overt discrimination.

But Black folk remained on the bottom of everything.