In 1855, the self-emancipated slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass said that “the slaveholders, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeded in making the said white man almost as much of a slave as the black himself. Both were plundered by the same plunderers.”

As we saw last time, though, the “double emancipation” of abolition was tragically squandered with the “murder” of the First Reconstruction of Democracy. Behind the cynical mask of white supremacy, the bi-racial plundering continued.

And so, in 1892, Populist Party leader Tom Watson, a white Georgian, returned to the theme, arguing for an alliance between black and white farmers.

“You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings,” he said. “You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both.”

His efforts failed. The bi-racial fleecing continued.

In 1949, Harvard political scientist V.O. Key, a white Texan, observed the same con. White supremacist rhetoric, he said, allowed economic elites “to maintain the status quo by using the race issue to blot up the discontents of the lesser whites.” By deliberately rousing racist resentments against blacks, “the governing classes kill off or minimize pressures for improved governmental services from whites….”

Contemporary historians take this for granted. In 2014, Barbara Fields of Columbia University commented on the well-known “double mission of white supremacy — to hold down black people and white people alike.”

The galling reality is that, for most of our history, it was the literal goal of most in the South’s “governing classes” to keep the majority of the population (white as well as black) comparatively unschooled and in varying degrees of poverty, and to do so by keeping them in conflict with one another. Early 20th century Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis said that, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” The South didn’t have both.

Only a “Second Reconstruction” — otherwise known as the Civil Rights Movement — could bring a second “double emancipation,” one benefitting Southern whites as well as blacks. As historian Gavin Wright has shown in great detail, the removal of heavy-handed Jim Crow regulations in the 1960s    invigorated the Southern economy to the benefit of both races.

Journalist Peter Applebome even asserted that “the Civil Rights Revolution turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to the white South.”

Former Gov. William Winter personalized the sentiment. In 1984, he told Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of martyred Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers, that “all the white folks in Mississippi owed you and Medgar as much as black folks. He freed us; we were all prisoners of that system. Because of you, we were able to shake off the bonds that held us.” Emphatically, we all owe a debt of gratitude to the activists of that era.

So now, to take stock – in the 1860s and ’70s, most Southerners, whites as well as blacks, were grievously harmed by the Confederacy and the terroristic deconstruction of the First Reconstruction of Democracy. However, in the 1960s, most Southerners, whites as well as blacks, were greatly helped by the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Reconstruction of Democracy. Today, nationally, some in our “governing classes” are again deliberately stirring racial resentments as a way to undermine democracy, and to mask their plunder and fleecing.

The question is will we allow this Second Deconstruction to succeed?

JIM WIGGINS is a retired Copiah-Lincoln Community College history instructor.