A Nation Addicted to Enslaver Appeasement
The system of institutional racism has been built, repaired, maintained, and regularly since the country’s founding
From its colonial beginnings to the present day, the United States has repeatedly appeased violent white supremacists. Not just racists—violent white supremacists: the kind who enslave, terrorize, burn, lynch, bomb, and shoot. At every turning point in our national story, when this country has been forced to choose between confronting that violence or accommodating it, it has almost always chosen appeasement.
This essay draws a distinction between broad societal racism—which is real and deeply embedded—and the violent white supremacists who have used brutality as a political tool to shape American policy. These are the men who threatened secession, who formed lynch mobs, who wore police badges and white hoods, who bombed churches, and who stormed the Capitol in 2021 waving Confederate flags. Time and again, they have issued demands backed by violence. And time and again, America has made concessions.
It began before the Constitution, when the price of unity was protecting slavery. It continued through generations of compromise, surrender, and silence—from the three-fifths clause to the Compromise of 1877, from Plessy v. Ferguson to Nixon’s Southern Strategy, from the war on drugs to the refusal to prosecute insurrectionists. Each time, appeasement has failed. And each time, we’ve tried it again.
The legacy of these decisions is not confined to history books. It lives on in today’s institutions: in mass incarceration, voter suppression, redlined neighborhoods, and militarized policing. It lives on in the fact that even now, Black Americans are still forced to prove their humanity, while white grievance is treated as a political constituency worth courting. Each act of appeasement leaves a scar—but also a blueprint.
What follows is a chronological record of these moments of surrender: when Congress caved, when courts surrendered, when presidents looked the other way. It begins before the birth of the Republic and stretches into our own moment. The names change. The slogans change. The cycle does not.
This timeline and essay are here to chart that cycle. Not to rehash it. To expose it. Because until we understand that we are living inside a pattern—one that rewards violence, protects whiteness, and sacrifices justice—we will keep paddling in circles. The only way forward is through a clear-eyed reckoning with the past we’ve been taught to forget.
Early America to the Civil War
🗓️ 1776 – Declaration of Independence Cuts a Deal with Slavery
Before the Constitution, there was already compromise. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence opened with the words, “All men are created equal”—penned by an enslaver, Thomas Jefferson. That same document originally included a direct condemnation of the transatlantic slave trade, blaming King George III for violating human rights by perpetuating it. But that section was deleted. Delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, along with Northern slave traders, refused to sign unless Jefferson’s critique was stripped. So it was. In its final form, the Declaration made no mention of slavery at all—a silence that spoke volumes. Even in a moment meant to declare universal liberty, white supremacists demanded exemption. And the country gave it to them. From the outset, American freedom was negotiated around Black bondage.
Sources:
Primary: Thomas Jefferson, Original Draft of the Declaration, Library of Congress .
Secondary: David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1975.
🗓️ 1783 – Articles of Confederation Avoid the Slavery Question
By the time the Revolutionary War ended, the United States was operating under the Articles of Confederation—a loose framework that deliberately sidestepped slavery. Southern states made it clear: any federal mention of enslavement risked breaking the fragile alliance. So Congress stayed quiet. A proposed clause to count enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for taxation purposes surfaced but wasn’t ratified. Meanwhile, the Confederation Congress banned slavery in the Northwest Territory, covering land from Ohio to Minnesota. It was a rare early limitation on the spread of slavery—but even that was framed to avoid offending Southern states. The pattern was set: appease the violent white supremacists by avoiding confrontation, by pretending the issue could be ignored. In reality, those early silences only gave enslavers more room to grow their power.
Sources:
Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Confederation, 1940.
Paul Finkelman, “Slavery and the Founders,” Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, 2001.
🗓️ 1820 – The Missouri Compromise: A Deal to Protect Expansion
By 1820, violent white supremacists were demanding new territory to expand their system of slavery. The Missouri Compromise gave it to them. Missouri entered the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free one, and Congress drew a line across the continent: north of it, slavery was banned; south of it, allowed. It was sold as a balance between regions—but it was really another appeasement, built on the assumption that slavery was here to stay. Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky, already saturated with enslaved labor, became breeding grounds, selling enslaved people into new western territories. The compromise quieted disunion threats for the moment, but it also legitimized the idea that enslavers had a right to expand. Once again, the United States chose short-term calm over moral clarity—and empowered violent white supremacists to press for even more.
Sources:
Primary: Missouri Compromise Text, U.S. Congress, 1820.
Secondary: Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 2005.
🗓️ 1836 – The Gag Rule Silences Anti-Slavery Voices
As the abolitionist movement gained momentum in the 1830s, violent white supremacists in Congress responded with outrage—not debate. In 1836, the House passed the “Gag Rule,” a resolution that automatically tabled all petitions related to slavery without discussion. Northerners and Southerners alike went along, desperate to preserve national unity. The message was clear: white supremacists didn’t need to argue their position—they just needed to threaten disruption. And Congress would fold. For nearly a decade, antislavery appeals from ordinary citizens were treated as unmentionable, shoved into silence to protect the feelings and power of the enslaving class. The Gag Rule wasn’t just a procedural trick—it was a direct appeasement of men who used the machinery of government to defend a system of terror. And it proved, once again, that in America, white rage gets results.
Sources:
Primary: U.S. Congressional Globe, 24th Congress, 1836 session records.
Secondary: William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress, 1996.
Secondary: Paul Finkelman, “The Gag Rule, John Quincy Adams, and the Right to Petition,” in Slavery and the Law, 1997.
🗓️ 1836 – Texas Fights for Slavery, Not Freedom
The myth says the Alamo was about liberty. The truth is, it was about slavery. When Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, American settlers in its northern province of Texas didn’t comply—they smuggled in enslaved people anyway. Mexico tried to enforce its laws. The settlers, many of them from the Deep South, revolted. Their rebellion wasn’t about self-government—it was about preserving the right to enslave. As historian Andrew Torget put it, “Slavery was the cornerstone of the Texas economy.” The Alamo fell, but within months the slaveholding rebels won independence and created a republic with slavery written into its constitution. The United States, watching from the sidelines, saw a chance to appease Southern white supremacists by adding a new slaveholding ally. When Texas was annexed in 1845, it wasn’t a victory for liberty. It was a reward for insurrectionists who fought to keep humans in chains.
🗓️ 1846–1848 – The Mexican-American War: Conquest for Slavery
The Mexican-American War was a war of expansion—but not for freedom or democracy. It was fought to give violent white supremacists more land to spread slavery. After Texas was annexed in 1845, enslavers looked west, eyeing the vast Mexican territories of California and the Southwest. President James K. Polk, himself a Tennessee enslaver, provoked the conflict under the banner of “Manifest Destiny,” but the real motive was clear to abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, who called it a war “waged solely for the detestable and horrible purpose of extending slavery.” The U.S. won, seizing over 500,000 square miles of land. Once again, white supremacist threats of disunion and violence were rewarded—not resisted. And with every new acre, the pressure to appease their demands only grew. America didn’t just expand—it exported its most brutal institution westward, on the backs of Mexican corpses and enslaved Black labor.
🗓️ 1850 – The Compromise of 1850: Legalizing Kidnapping to Appease the South
The Compromise of 1850 was sold as a way to preserve the Union. In truth, it was a surrender. To pacify Southern enslavers after the Mexican-American War, Congress made a deal: California would enter as a free state—but in return, white supremacists got the most aggressive federal law yet to protect slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act deputized every American, North or South, into the slave-catching business. It denied accused fugitives a trial by jury and rewarded officials for returning people to bondage, even if they’d lived free for years. It made the entire country an extension of the Southern plantation. Frederick Douglass called it “an insult to God.” Senator Calhoun, on his deathbed, warned that anything less than full submission to Southern demands would end in secession. Congress chose submission. Once again, the United States bowed to violent white supremacists, treating their threats as law and their brutality as business as usual.
Sources:
Primary: Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, National Archives .
Secondary: Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, 2010.
🗓️ 1854 – Kansas-Nebraska Act: Appeasement by Popular Vote
With the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Congress didn’t just cave to white supremacist demands—it gave them a new weapon. The law repealed the Missouri Compromise line and opened new territories to slavery based on “popular sovereignty”—meaning white settlers would vote on whether to legalize human bondage. It was pitched as democratic, but in practice, it handed violent white supremacists an invitation to flood the region, armed and ready to impose their will. Proslavery mobs poured into Kansas, burning towns and killing abolitionists. “Bleeding Kansas” wasn’t a breakdown of order—it was the predictable result of appeasement. As Abraham Lincoln warned, this wasn’t neutrality. It was complicity. “If this thing is allowed to continue,” he said, “you will see slavery legalized in all the states.” The Kansas-Nebraska Act showed, once again, that giving ground to enslavers didn’t buy peace—it lit the fuse.
Sources:
Primary: Kansas-Nebraska Act, Library of Congress .
Secondary: Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era, 2004.
🗓️ 1856 – The Caning of Charles Sumner: Brutality in the Senate Chamber
In May 1856, violence in defense of slavery didn’t just spill into the streets—it reached the floor of the United States Senate. Charles Sumner, an abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, had delivered a fiery speech condemning the Kansas-Nebraska Act and denouncing Southern leaders, including Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina. Days later, Butler’s cousin, Congressman Preston Brooks, entered the Senate chamber with a heavy gold-tipped cane. He found Sumner at his desk, bolted to the floor—and struck him again and again and again.
This was no symbolic protest. Brooks beat Sumner so savagely that he broke his cane into pieces. Sumner, trapped behind his desk, couldn’t escape. He lost consciousness, bleeding and battered, and took years to recover. The assault nearly killed him.
The response? Brooks was fined $300. He received no jail time. Instead, Southerners sent him replacement canes, some engraved with phrases like “Hit him again.” He was celebrated as a hero. The attack wasn’t just personal—it was political. It sent a clear message: in the United States, even the halls of Congress were not safe from white supremacist violence. And once again, the government’s reaction was appeasement.
Sources:
Primary: Charles Sumner, “The Crime Against Kansas” speech, May 19–20, 1856, Congressional Globe.
Secondary: David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights, 2005.
🗓️ 1856 – Bleeding Kansas: White Terror, Federal Silence, and John Brown’s Defense
By 1856, Kansas Territory was under siege. The Kansas-Nebraska Act had invited “popular sovereignty,” but what it unleashed was terror. Armed white supremacists known as “border ruffians” crossed from Missouri to intimidate voters, burn homes, and kill Free Soil settlers. In May, they attacked the abolitionist town of Lawrence, looting businesses and setting fire to its printing presses—while federal authorities did nothing. Days later, John Brown acted. He led a preemptive strike at Pottawatomie Creek, targeting five men who were not just proslavery settlers, but violent ruffians actively plotting to murder Brown and his family. There was no law, no police, and no protection in the territory—only violence and silence. President Franklin Pierce and, later, James Buchanan refused to support the legitimate Free State government and backed a proslavery puppet regime instead. The result was chaos. Bleeding Kansas wasn’t a policy failure—it was a deliberate act of appeasement, one that left abolitionists to fend for themselves while white supremacists ruled by the gun.
Sources:
Primary: Kansas Congressional Investigative Committee Report, 1856.
Secondary: David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 2005.
Secondary: Louis A. DeCaro Jr., Freedom’s Dawn: The Last Days of John Brown in Virginia, 2015.
🗓️ 1857 – Dred Scott v. Sandford: The Supreme Court Bows to White Supremacy
In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t just side with enslavers—it rewrote the Constitution to serve them. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The Court ruled that Congress had no authority to ban slavery in the territories and that enslaved people—and even free Black Americans—could never be citizens. It was a white supremacist manifesto wrapped in legal robes. This wasn’t an act of law—it was an act of submission. By erasing any federal power to restrict slavery, the Court handed violent white supremacists a blank check to expand and enforce their system wherever they pleased. It nullified decades of compromise and proved what abolitionists already knew: the government wasn’t neutral. It was loyal to the men with whips and chains.
Sources:
Primary: Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857).
Secondary: Paul Finkelman, Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents, 1997.
🗓️ 1860 – Secession and the Cornerstone of White Supremacy
After Abraham Lincoln was elected without carrying a single Southern state, violent white supremacists made good on decades of threats: they seceded. South Carolina went first, citing Northern refusal to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. One by one, other slave states followed. Their declarations of secession named the cause plainly—slavery, and the refusal of the federal government to keep appeasing it. Then came the Cornerstone Speech. In March 1861, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens announced the Confederacy’s foundation: “Our new government is founded… upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery… is his natural and normal condition.” This wasn’t a rebellion over tariffs or states’ rights. It was a war to preserve white supremacy. The United States had appeased enslavers for nearly a century. When it finally stopped bending, the men it had empowered for generations turned to war.
Sources:
🗓️ 1861 – Lincoln’s Inaugural: One Last Offer to the Enslavers
Even as states were seceding and militias were arming, President-elect Abraham Lincoln tried one final act of appeasement. In his First Inaugural Address, delivered in March 1861, Lincoln reassured the South: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” He even endorsed a proposed constitutional amendment that would have permanently protected slavery where it already existed. It was the last desperate offer in a long line of compromises, concessions, and silences. But it didn’t matter. The violent white supremacists had gotten everything they’d demanded for generations—and still, they wanted more. Lincoln’s olive branch was torched before the ink was dry. A month later, they opened fire on Fort Sumter. Appeasement had failed again, and this time, the cost would be civil war.
Sources:
Primary: First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1861.
Secondary: Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial, 2010.
Post Civil War Appeasement
🗓️ 1865 – The 13th Amendment and the Birth of the Black Codes
The Civil War ended, the Confederacy surrendered, and slavery was finally abolished—on paper. The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” It was a monumental victory, but one immediately undermined by appeasement. Southern states passed a wave of laws known as the Black Codes, designed to reassert white control and criminalize Black life. In Mississippi, Black people could be arrested for not having a job, fined, and then “leased” out to white landowners to work off their debt. It was slavery by another name. President Andrew Johnson, a Southern sympathizer, vetoed federal efforts to stop the Black Codes and offered mass pardons to Confederate leaders. While Congress eventually overrode some of his actions, the damage was done. Instead of dismantling the system of white supremacy, the United States allowed it to rebrand—and rewarded traitors with their land, their power, and their impunity intact.
Sources:
Primary: U.S. Constitution, Amendment XIII, ratified December 6, 1865.
Primary: Mississippi Black Code (1865); South Carolina vagrancy law excerpts.Secondary: Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
Secondary: Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Vintage, 1980.
🗓️ 1866 – The Rise of the Klan and the Green Light for White Terror
In the ashes of the Confederacy, white supremacists regrouped. By 1866, the Ku Klux Klan had formed in Tennessee—its purpose clear: to terrorize Black Americans and anyone who supported their rights. Armed night riders burned homes, lynched teachers, whipped voters, and murdered elected officials. These weren’t isolated acts of violence—they were part of an organized political strategy to reverse the outcome of the Civil War. The federal government knew it. Congress heard testimonies, collected affidavits, and received letters begging for protection. But President Andrew Johnson refused to act. He vetoed civil rights bills, mocked Black citizenship, and let former Confederates re-enter public life. His message was unmistakable: white terror would not be punished. The Klan flourished under that silence. And once again, the United States chose appeasement—letting violent white supremacists trade their gray uniforms for white hoods and pick up where they left off.
Sources:
Primary: Report of the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. U.S. Congress, 1872.
Secondary: Elaine Frantz Parsons, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Secondary: Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
🗓️ 1868 – The 14th Amendment and the Slow Fade of Federal Will
The 14th Amendment promised to fix what the Constitution had broken: it granted birthright citizenship, equal protection under the law, and due process to all persons. It was supposed to be the death blow to white supremacist lawmaking. But it wasn’t. Southern states ratified it under military pressure—and then immediately began working to ignore or subvert it. Meanwhile, the North’s political will was already beginning to falter. The amendment’s broad language gave Congress the power to enforce its provisions, but that power was rarely used. White supremacist violence continued. Black officials were attacked. Freedpeople were arrested en masse under vagrancy laws. And federal troops, stretched thin and undermined by President Johnson, struggled to respond. The amendment looked good on paper, but without enforcement, it was a promise without protection. Once again, America extended rights to Black people with one hand—while allowing violent white supremacists to claw them back with the other.
Sources:
Primary: U.S. Constitution, Amendment XIV, ratified July 9, 1868.
Secondary: Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. New York: W.W. Norton, 2019.
Secondary: Michael Les Benedict, “Preserving the Constitution: Progressivism and the Limits of Constitutional Democracy,” in Reconstruction and the Constitution, 2006.
🗓️ 1875 – The Civil Rights Act and Its Quiet Burial
In a final effort to protect Black Americans, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. It guaranteed equal access to public accommodations—hotels, theaters, transportation—and aimed to curb the everyday humiliations of Jim Crow before they could take root. But it came too late. White supremacist violence was already rampant, and federal enforcement was crumbling. The North, exhausted by the fight and consumed with economic crisis, looked away. When the Supreme Court struck the law down in 1883, ruling that the 14th Amendment didn’t apply to private businesses, there was barely a whisper of protest. The decision opened the floodgates to segregation, and the federal government let it happen. What began as a promise of equality ended in a shrug. The United States had one more chance to stand up to violent white supremacists—and once again, it chose to sit down.
Sources:
Primary: Civil Rights Act of 1875, U.S. Statutes at Large, 18 Stat. 335.
Primary: Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).
Secondary: George Rutherglen, Civil Rights in the Shadow of Slavery: The Constitution, Common Law, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
🗓️ 1876 – U.S. v. Cruikshank: White Massacre, Black Silence
In 1873, over 100 Black men were murdered in Colfax, Louisiana, by a white mob angry that Black citizens had held political power. It was one of the worst racial massacres in American history—and the federal government tried to bring the killers to justice. But in 1876, the Supreme Court overturned every conviction in United States v. Cruikshank, ruling that the federal government had no authority to prosecute private citizens for civil rights violations. According to the Court, only states could do that—and the state of Louisiana had already refused. The ruling gutted the 14th Amendment, stripped the federal government of power to protect Black lives, and effectively gave white terrorists a blank check. The message was clear: mass murder of Black citizens would go unpunished. Instead of confronting the resurgence of white supremacist violence, the Court codified it. In one decision, the law became a tool of appeasement—and the Reconstruction project began to bleed out.
Sources:
Primary: United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876).
Primary: Testimony from congressional hearings on the Colfax Massacre, 1873.
Secondary: Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction. New York: Henry Holt, 2008.
🗓️ 1877 – The Compromise of 1877: The Betrayal is Complete
The 1876 presidential election ended in chaos, with disputed returns in several Southern states. To break the deadlock, Republicans struck a deal with Southern Democrats: Rutherford B. Hayes would become president, and in return, federal troops would be withdrawn from the South. The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction—not with a law, but with a handshake behind closed doors. Overnight, the fragile protection Black Americans had fought for disappeared. Southern white supremacists, already organized and armed, moved in to crush Black political power, reassert racial control, and rewrite the South in their image. The federal government offered no resistance. The promise of emancipation, the amendments, the votes—all abandoned in exchange for political peace. Reconstruction didn’t fail. It was sabotaged. The United States once again appeased violent white supremacists, and this time, it cost a century of stolen freedom.
Sources:
Primary: Hayes-Tilden Compromise documents and correspondence. Library of Congress archives.
Secondary: Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Secondary: Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
Post Reconstruction Appeasement
🗓️ 1877–1890 – Redemption and the Birth of Jim Crow
After the Compromise of 1877, Southern white supremacists called their resurgence “Redemption.” What they meant was restoration: restoring white rule, restoring racial control, and restoring the violent order that slavery had once guaranteed. With federal troops gone and Reconstruction governments starved of support, Southern Democrats—many of them ex-Confederates—retook statehouses through a wave of voter suppression, ballot fraud, and paramilitary violence. In Mississippi, the “Shotgun Policy” used open threats and murder to drive Black voters from the polls. Once back in power, they rewrote state constitutions to disenfranchise Black citizens, replacing the language of liberty with poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. Segregation was codified. Black schools were gutted. White juries became standard. These laws didn’t emerge from thin air—they were the political reward for decades of appeasement. The federal government had walked away, and in the vacuum, violent white supremacists didn’t just return. They built a new regime.
Sources:
Primary: Proceedings of the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention.
Primary: Early Jim Crow statutes from Southern states.
Secondary: C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955.
Secondary: Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
🗓️ 1896 – Plessy v. Ferguson: Segregation Gets the Supreme Court’s Blessing
In 1896, the Supreme Court gave segregation its stamp of legitimacy. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court upheld a Louisiana law requiring separate train cars for Black and white passengers, ruling that “separate but equal” did not violate the 14th Amendment. It was a legal green light for white supremacist rule. Homer Plessy, a light-skinned Black man who challenged the law, argued that segregation marked Black people as inferior. The Court didn’t disagree—it just didn’t care. Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote the majority opinion; the lone dissenter, Justice John Marshall Harlan, warned the ruling would become as infamous as Dred Scott. He was right. After Plessy, states across the South and beyond accelerated the codification of Jim Crow—segregated schools, waiting rooms, cemeteries, even Bibles in courtrooms. The United States didn’t just tolerate apartheid—it legalized it. Once again, the highest levels of power chose appeasement over equality, writing white supremacy into the lawbooks of the land.
Sources:
Primary: Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
Secondary: Charles A. Lofgren, The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
🗓️ 1915 – Birth of a Nation: Hollywood Glorifies the Klan, and Washington Applauds
In 1915, D.W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation, a three-hour epic that rewrote the history of Reconstruction into a white supremacist fantasy. The film portrayed Black people as dangerous, ignorant, and violent—and cast the Ku Klux Klan as heroic saviors of civilization. It was propaganda dressed as art, and it worked. President Woodrow Wilson, a segregationist himself, screened the film in the White House—the first movie ever shown there. According to reports, he called it “like writing history with lightning.” The message was received. The Klan, long dormant, was reborn just months later. Within a few years, it had grown into a national force, marching in state capitals and recruiting from church pews. The Birth of a Nation wasn’t just a movie—it was a cultural pardon for white terrorism. And the federal government, instead of condemning it, gave it the red carpet treatment.
Sources:
Primary: D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (film, 1915).
Primary: Accounts of White House screening and reactions from Woodrow Wilson.
Secondary: Dick Lehr, The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America’s Civil War. New York: PublicAffairs, 2014.
🗓️ 1921 – The Tulsa Massacre: Prosperity Punished, Justice Denied
On May 31, 1921, a white mob descended on Greenwood, a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as “Black Wall Street.” Triggered by a fabricated accusation against a young Black man, the mob looted and burned homes, businesses, churches, and hospitals. In less than 24 hours, they reduced 35 city blocks to ash. Planes dropped firebombs. Thousands were left homeless. As many as 300 Black residents were killed—but no one was ever charged. National Guard troops didn’t arrive to stop the violence; they rounded up Black survivors and marched them into internment camps. State and local officials covered it up. The newspapers went quiet. Insurance companies refused to pay claims. And the federal government said nothing. The Tulsa Massacre wasn’t just a riot—it was a white supremacist purge, erased in real time. Appeasement took the form of silence, and silence became complicity.
Sources:
Primary: Tulsa Race Riot Commission Report, 2001.
Primary: Red Cross reports and survivor testimony from 1921.
Secondary: Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.
🗓️ 1930s–1940s – The New Deal: Relief for Whites, Exclusion for Black America
When the Great Depression hit, the federal government stepped in with sweeping programs to rescue the economy—the New Deal. But behind its promises of equality and uplift was a quiet, calculated deal with white supremacists. To secure the support of Southern Democrats in Congress, President Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed key programs to exclude Black Americans. The Social Security Act left out agricultural and domestic workers—jobs held disproportionately by Black laborers. The National Labor Relations Act protected union rights, but looked the other way when white unions excluded Black workers. The Federal Housing Administration refused to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods, institutionalizing redlining and segregating American cities. These were not oversights. They were compromises—intentional appeasements to keep racist coalitions intact. The New Deal lifted millions of white Americans into the middle class. For millions of Black Americans, it reinforced a brutal message: progress is for others. You’re on your own.
Sources:
Primary: Social Security Act of 1935 and National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (excluded agricultural and domestic workers).
Secondary: Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.
Secondary: Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
🗓️ 1948 – Dixiecrats Walk Out: The First Fracture Over Civil Rights
In 1948, President Harry Truman issued an executive order desegregating the U.S. military. It was a bold move in support of racial equality—and it split the Democratic Party wide open. Southern white supremacists, enraged by Truman’s stance, stormed out of the Democratic National Convention and formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party, better known as the Dixiecrats. Their platform was simple: protect segregation and the “Southern way of life.” Led by South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, they ran their own presidential candidate and carried four Southern states. Truman still won, but the message was received: if the federal government pushed too hard on civil rights, the South would bolt. From that point on, both parties treated white supremacist outrage as a political variable to manage. Even when facing down open defiance, America’s instinct was the same as always—compromise, delay, and appease.
Source:
Primary: Executive Order 9981, July 26, 1948;
Secondary: DNC walkout coverage in The New York Times, July 15–17, 1948.
🗓️ 1954 – Brown v. Board and the Launch of Massive Resistance
In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were unconstitutional. It was a landmark decision—but the response revealed the depth of white supremacist power. Southern officials refused to comply. Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia called for “Massive Resistance,” a coordinated campaign to defy integration by any means. Entire school districts shut down rather than admit Black children. White Citizens’ Councils formed to pressure school boards, intimidate families, and maintain segregation without the Klan’s hoods. President Eisenhower said he believed integration couldn’t be achieved “by force,” and federal enforcement was nearly nonexistent for years. In many places, desegregation didn’t come until the 1970s. The ruling was a legal victory—but the federal government’s reluctance to act turned it into another empty promise. Once again, America blinked in the face of white supremacist outrage—and children paid the price.
Source:
Primary: Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
Secondary: James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy, 2001.
🗓️ 1957 – Little Rock: Troops for Justice, but Only After the Mob
Three years after Brown, integration was still mostly a theory—until Little Rock forced the issue. When nine Black students tried to attend the all-white Central High School in Arkansas, they were met by an angry mob and the Arkansas National Guard, deployed by Governor Orval Faubus to block their entry. For weeks, the students were barred while white crowds threatened, spat on, and screamed at them. President Eisenhower hesitated—he wasn’t a supporter of civil rights, but he couldn’t ignore a governor defying federal authority on live television. Only after national embarrassment did Eisenhower send the 101st Airborne to escort the students to class. Even then, violence and harassment continued. The event is remembered as a federal stand for justice—but it was really a reluctant step taken under pressure. The message to white supremacists wasn’t defiance—it was to delay them just long enough, and maybe Washington won’t act at all.
Sources:
Primary: Eisenhower, Dwight D. “Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Situation in Little Rock.” September 24, 1957. Presidential Archives.
Secondary: Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High, 1994.
🗓️ 1964–1965 – Civil Rights Won, White Terror Unleashed
After years of marches, sit-ins, beatings, and murders, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Together, they outlawed segregation, banned discrimination, and struck down racist barriers to voting. It was a legislative turning point—and a spark for violent white backlash. In the year following the Civil Rights Act, Ku Klux Klan membership exploded. Churches were bombed. Civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Mississippi by local law enforcement and Klansmen working together. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dragged his feet on civil rights enforcement and instead poured resources into spying on Black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., whom he labeled a threat to national security. The federal government had finally acted—but in many places, it did more to monitor the resistance than to stop the terror. Even in victory, Black Americans were left to walk the road alone.
Sources:
Primary: Civil Rights Act of 1964, Pub.L. 88–352; Voting Rights Act of 1965, Pub.L. 89–110.
Primary: FBI surveillance of MLK: Church Committee Reports, Book III, 1976.
Primary: Mississippi Burning murders: FBI Vault, Freedom Summer Files.
🗓️ 1968 – Nixon’s Southern Strategy: Appeasement by Design
In 1968, Richard Nixon didn’t just win the presidency—he won the white backlash. His campaign deployed what became known as the “Southern Strategy,” a deliberate plan to court white voters angry about civil rights. Without openly embracing segregation, Nixon promised “law and order,” attacked “welfare cheats,” and talked about states’ rights—all coded language aimed at white resentment. Behind closed doors, his advisers were explicit. “You’re talking about cutting the guts out of the Black vote,” one strategist explained. The Republican Party absorbed the base once loyal to the Dixiecrats and made appeasing white grievance a permanent part of national politics. And it worked. The South flipped. Black communities faced increasing surveillance, harsher policing, and a collapsing safety net. Violent white supremacy no longer needed mobs—it had ballots, platforms, and policy. The dog whistle replaced the bullhorn, but the message stayed the same: power, preserved by appeasement.
Sources:
Primary: John Ehrlichman (Nixon adviser), interview in Harper’s, 1994: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin… we could disrupt those communities.”
Secondary: Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, 2008.
Secondary: Kevin Phillips, Nixon campaign strategist, quoted in The Emerging Republican Majority, 1969.
🗓️ 1971–1980 – The War on Drugs: Policy as a Weapon of Appeasement
In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one.” But behind the scenes, the war wasn’t about health—it was about race. Nixon aide John Ehrlichman later admitted the strategy: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be Black or against the war, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin… we could disrupt those communities.” Arrests skyrocketed. Federal funding for police departments ballooned. Harsh sentencing laws targeted nonviolent drug offenses, disproportionately affecting Black Americans. In 1980, Ronald Reagan doubled down, officially launching his own war on drugs with a new wave of federal crackdowns. It wasn’t about stopping crime—it was about sending a message. White voters were reassured that “order” would be restored, while Black neighborhoods were flooded with cops and stripped of opportunity. This wasn’t justice—it was appeasement in uniform.
Sources:
Primary: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 1980, DOJ, 1981.
Secondary: Dan Baum, “Legalize It All,” Harper’s Magazine, April 2016 (Ehrlichman quote).
Secondary: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 2010.
🗓️ 1981–1989 – Reagan, the “Welfare Queen,” and the Myth That Sold Inequality
Ronald Reagan didn’t invent the term “welfare queen,” but he turned it into national policy. On the campaign trail, he repeatedly told the story of a woman in Chicago who “has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards” and “is collecting veterans benefits on four non-existent deceased husbands.” The woman was real—but the story was a grotesque exaggeration. It was also highly effective. Reagan’s racialized image of government “dependents” became a pretext to gut social programs. Federal spending on housing, food assistance, and public health was slashed—while corporate subsidies and tax breaks soared. By turning Black poverty into a moral failure, Reagan secured white voter loyalty and appeased decades of resentment over civil rights gains. The message was implicit but unmistakable: white Americans would be protected, Black Americans would be punished, and the government would use policy to enforce the difference.
Sources:
Primary: Reagan speeches, 1976–1980 campaign trail, cited in Washington Post, Dec. 2019.
Josh Levin, The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth, 2019.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit, 2019.
🗓️ 1994 – The Crime Bill: Bipartisan Appeasement Goes Federal
In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—the largest crime bill in American history. Written with the support of then-Senator Joe Biden, the law funneled billions into prisons and police departments. It created new federal crimes, expanded the death penalty, and implemented mandatory minimums. It also included the now-infamous “three strikes” provision, which sentenced people to life for a third felony—often nonviolent. Though the bill included some community programs, its core was carceral. Clinton framed it as a necessary response to rising crime—but the truth is, crime had already begun to decline. What hadn’t declined was white fear. Democrats, eager to win back working-class white voters, embraced the GOP’s language of law and order. The result? Mass incarceration exploded. Black and brown communities were decimated. The bill didn’t make America safer—it made white appeasement bipartisan.
Sources:
Primary: Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, Pub.L. 103–322 (1994).
Secondary: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 2010.
Secondary: “Joe Biden and the 1994 Crime Bill,” NPR, June 2019.
Secondary: Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 1999.
🗓️ 2005 – Hurricane Katrina: Drowning in Indifference
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, the storm was natural—but the disaster was manmade. The levees broke, the floodwaters rose, and the federal government failed. Tens of thousands—mostly Black and low-income residents—were stranded without food, water, or medical care for days. Bodies floated in the streets. People begged for help from rooftops and overpasses. President George W. Bush praised FEMA’s performance; his director, Michael Brown, was infamously told, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” But no one was doing the job. Emergency response was slow, chaotic, and indifferent. The Superdome became a makeshift prison. Thousands were left to die, or evacuate on their own. Katrina made visible what white appeasement had long obscured: in America, when the crisis comes, Black communities are on their own. The storm exposed the rot—and the rot was structural.
Sources
Primary: U.S. House of Representatives, A Failure of Initiative: Final Report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina, 2006.
Secondary: Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, 2006.
Secondary: “Katrina’s Hidden Race War,” The Nation, Dec. 17, 2008.
🗓️ 2015 – Charleston Church Massacre: Mourning Before Action
On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist walked into Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, sat through Bible study with nine Black parishioners, and then murdered them in cold blood. The shooter, draped in Confederate iconography and Nazi symbols, made his motive clear: he wanted to start a race war. The massacre shocked the nation—but the signs had been there. The Confederate flag still flew on the South Carolina State House grounds, a symbol long defended as “heritage.” In the wake of the killings, calls to remove it intensified. Politicians who had spent decades defending the flag suddenly reversed course. It came down—but only after blood ran down the church pews. The shooter had been radicalized online, inspired by white nationalist propaganda and years of tolerated racism. Once again, change didn’t come through leadership. It came through tragedy. The country mourned—but only because it had first refused to act.
Sources
Primary: “Transcript of Dylann Roof’s Confession,” FBI Interview, June 2015.
Secondary: Jelani Cobb, “False Equivalence and the Flag,” The New Yorker, June 2015.
Secondary: David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 2001.
🗓️ 2020 – George Floyd: Millions March, the State Holds the Line
On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, killing him on camera while Floyd pleaded, “I can’t breathe.” The video sparked the largest protest movement in American history. Millions flooded the streets in all 50 states and around the world, demanding justice—not just for Floyd, but for Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others. What they got in return was curfews, rubber bullets, tear gas, and militarized police. President Donald Trump called for the National Guard to “dominate” protestors and posed for a photo op with a Bible after federal forces violently cleared peaceful demonstrators in D.C. Cities painted “Black Lives Matter” on streets but passed no sweeping reforms. Police budgets were restored. Qualified immunity remained untouched. Once again, America chose symbolism over structure. The people called for transformation, but the state offered appeasement.
Sources:
Primary: State of Minnesota v. Derek Michael Chauvin, Court File No. 27-CR-20-12646.
Secondary: “George Floyd Protests: A Timeline,” NPR, May–July 2020.
Secondary: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “The End of Black Politics,” The New Yorker, June 2020.
🗓️ 2021–2024 – From Charlottesville to the Capitol: Impunity as Policy
The signs were everywhere. In 2017, white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us.” They carried torches and Nazi flags—and when confronted, one of them rammed his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer. President Donald Trump refused to condemn them outright, insisting there were “very fine people on both sides.” Then, on January 6, 2021, a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to overturn a democratic election, waving Confederate flags and Christian nationalist banners. Many were current or former law enforcement. Some had planned it in plain sight. The response? Lax security, delayed reinforcements, and months of legal leniency. Members of Congress called it “tourism.” Trump praised them as patriots. Across the country, white nationalist groups continued organizing, arming, and infiltrating local government. The FBI warned of rising domestic extremism—but prosecutions remained rare, and political leaders kept their distance. The violence wasn’t just tolerated. It was protected.
Sources:
Primary: United States v. Thomas Edward Caldwell et al., DOJ Indictment, Jan. 2021.
Secondary: “Unite the Right Rally Coverage,” New York Times and ProPublica, Aug. 2017.
Secondary: “FBI Domestic Terrorism Threat Report,” Congressional Testimony, Sept. 2022.
Secondary: Barton Gellman, The Atlantic, Dec. 2021: “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.”