 Welcome this week's legislative update. I'm Jim Baumgart, your host. Thank you for joining us. And by us, of course, it is my old friend, Cal Potter. I shouldn't say old friend. I have. My good friend. We're on a mission that every citizen should be on from time to time because of the issues that took place in Virginia and issues of the Ku Klux Klan and the Civil War and Civil War statutes and other things. It's good to bring somebody like Cal Potter, who has a history major and good background, with my background, which hopefully is reasonably good, to discuss things so that people have a better understanding and then can make choices for themselves on what we're talking about. One of the things that has been an issue is the Civil War. And if you were a Southerner, Cal Potter, nobody likes to lose, whether it's a fight or a game or whatever it might be. And they lost a major war that took not only tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of southern soldiers, but the same for northern soldiers. And the reason is because they were afraid of Lincoln and that they would lose slavery. And so some people would like to glorify acts that have taken place during the Civil War, like major battles or great generals or people that became leaders or spies and other things. But we have to remember that the South left a union. As I recall from this, it said they violated the Constitution of the United States in 1861, April 12, the South ceded immediately after Lincoln was elected president. Doesn't sound like they were debating this in Congress. South Carolina called for a state convention to remove itself from the United States of America. Sounds like a violation of our Constitution and was quickly followed by Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas, later followed by the rest of the South. It sounds like they were asking for a fight, unfortunately. Well, there was no redeeming legal or moral road here. They left the union. They violated the Constitution. I mean, they tried to make it look legal by setting up constitutional conventions and electing presidents, but a charade. And what they did is basically did a traitorous thing. They were traitors to the United States and took up arms and eventually it was a war with the United States. And so to somehow glorify, codify what they did, there's no legal reason basis to do it. And the moral issue, of course, is that the Southern economy, its cotton and other commodities, were based on the backs of people who were slaves. I mean, they weren't treated as human beings. They were bought and sold, whipped, treated like animals. And as a result, there's no moral ground here at all. And so sometimes it was the defense of their culture. Well, their culture was a slave culture. And there's no way in God's Earth that you could justify maintaining that or calling it right. And so people who say we want to remember our culture, we want to go back to that time, they want to go back to the time when they had separation of the races, basically. I mean, after slavery was gone, then the Jim Crow laws came in effect. And as we've said in our previous program, on the books, basically, the elimination of that type of separation and that type of prejudice wasn't until 1965. And when Lyndon Johnson signed both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, he turned to his press secretary, Bill Moyer, who you see on PBS, everyone, and said, when I signed this, Bill, he says, the Democratic Party will lose the South for two generations. Well, Lyndon Johnson, as good of a man as he was, was wrong because probably gonna be 10 generations the way it's going. We're more than two generations now, past 1965, when Southern Democrats went from blue states to red states. They were called Dixie Crats at that time. And what's interesting about trying to solve racism and do away with laws is Lyndon Johnson knew he didn't have, in his own party, the Southern Democrats had enough votes. And so, we talk about bipartisanship and going across the aisle and working together. Lyndon Johnson called an Everett Dirksen, a Republican from Illinois, and he said, I'm down, he says, Everett, you know what's right here, you know what we gotta do, I need your help. And Lyndon and Everett Dirksen did find the votes in the Republican side to help Democrats from the North. And then, of course, after that, all hell broke loose for the Democratic Party today. And so, the conservative West, some of your states like Wyoming and Montana, and so, have gone Republican, but the South is solidly Republican. I don't, you know, you don't, hell freezes over before you'll see a Democrat elected. And that all goes back to the fact that the Democrats pushed civil rights legislation in the 60s. Well, they wanted people to be able to freely go to school that they were near to. And, I mean, that was the wallest thing and the standing, getting, sending in National Guard, you know, the general Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, sending in National Guard to protect people. It wasn't a free and friendly welcome of the South to make sure that they became a integral part of the whole United States. Matter of fact, when Grant accepted the Robert E. Lee's surrender, which Robert E. Lee hated, and, matter of fact, he hated and strongly didn't want to join the Southern thing because he knew it was a violation of his laws and his conscience as a, I think he was a West pointer, as I recall, but he wanted to go with the state and he fought very well for the state, but nevertheless he fought illegally. And when Grant accepted his surrender, he gave extremely broad positive things for the Southern soldier. He let them keep their horses if they owned them and their guns if it was something they could use to harvest deer or whatever. And very few were punished, you know, there were people that ran concentration camps or prisoner of war camps. They were punished if they had done inhumane things, but pretty much forgave the South. And they turned on them again. Well, and like we said in the last program, when you got into the later 1800s, it didn't take long for the reunion troops to be pulled out of the South. There just was no interest. And it's constantly. Sure. And a lot of it had to do with attitudes in both parties not to be punitive against people who were racist. Like I said, in the 19, well, President Wilson was very much a racist. In the 1920s, you started to see some change. In the 1920s, you had a lot of flooding down South, particularly along the Mississippi River. And a lot of black people who were tenant farmers were stranded, they were in dire straits, and they were appealing to the federal government for help to come at least get them. And white landowners down South, particularly lobbied Republicans in power in Washington, the conservative administrations, not to do anything because they said if they did, you're probably going to exacerbate what was just beginning of that thing was a massive movement of black people from the rural agrarian society to the North where there were the jobs in the cities. And so the Republicans did not do anything. And for the first time, Republicans before that had a lot of support from black people because Abe Lincoln was a Republican. And Democrats, of course, were in power down South because they were Democrats because Abe Lincoln was a Republican. And as a result, you didn't see a lot of movement politically to do something about the plate of the black. The big change that occurred, started to occur, was under Roosevelt. Roosevelt being a very wealthy person did have a social conscience, as you know, so security came out of that to write to join a union and so on. He was really a progressive individual. But even better than Franklin was his wife, Eleanor. She had a great empathy for black people. And she went around and helped them organize and had empathy for them and sympathy. And had she been president, we would have seen a lot more movement, I think, on equality for black people, have movement against the South Jim Crow laws along before that. After Roosevelt of course was Harry Truman, Harry Truman did desegregate the military and I think it was 1947. So again, we're moving to fairly modern times. During the 50s, of course, Eisenhower wasn't a racist, but he didn't have, he had a Republican conservative Congress that has now moved over to being very much the white party. And as a result, you didn't see much in the way of laws. He had to send troops in to try to quell disturbances. But it wasn't until Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, particularly, who started to anguish, what are we gonna do about this problem? This is a blemish on our society, on our, we need to do something. And so the plot started to boil and it culminated, of course, in when Johnson was president in the Civil Rights and Voting Rate Act of 64 and 65. Well, and this is one of the reasons why people have to be careful because the many individuals of the South would like to glorify some of the things that their leaders did, great battles, victories. And that's okay. You want historically factual information, but you don't wanna glorify somebody who has violated the law and has left the Union and has turned on their nation. You should understand historically that they were criminals and they were forgiven, but they certainly didn't return the favor they tried to regain. And that's understandable. That people that had power would like to get their power back, but they went to great lengths by either promoting different issues or Klu Klux Klan that we talked about last time, or just not allowing people to vote or to go to school or to get the kind of education that would have brought them up to equal standards as the nation tried to provide the South when they lost the war by giving them pretty good deals on the victory and the loss. Well, the post-war, post-Civil War South until fairly recent times was a very segregated, a very racist community. I mean, there were black communities that didn't have sewers, didn't have water. People lived in hovels, people didn't own land. They were tenant farmers working for white people at very, very poor wages. When they called the white trash or the white poor, they were in the same situation as many of the blacks. Sure. And oftentimes, as you're in the same status, you blame the other person for getting a job that you shouldn't. Well, sure. It's the black that got me in this poor situation, right? And so you saw, you know, there was nothing done about Jim Crow laws or lynchings or any of those type of activities or, you know, even to this day, you will find, if you go down South, you'll find a lot of white kids in private schools and the poor black schools are public schools. So I personally couldn't live down South, unless you're in like a university town and maybe Atlanta, some of that's become very sophisticated, but there are a lot of racist places. I mean, it's bad enough up here in people, I deal with like, who are racists, but we still have that, it's a major problem in this country that isn't faced. Well, and talking about it and discussing the issue, and we are in the last program and this one in the next two, hopefully we'll be added to the 50,000 that just protested the Klan and others. Where was that in? Boston? Boston, I think, yes. And in Madison and other places, people have protested. We need to protest a little bit and we need to make sure that people understand the history and with that, thank you, Cal Potter, for joining this program. Until next week, this has been Legislative Update.