would you have been an anti-war activist in the 60s?

[urbanguerrilla]

the 1860s.

I sure as hell would have been. If anything, the decision to not let those backward states peacefully secede set back race relations a century, hell they're not even near fixed yet. Slavery was evil, but it's not wishful thinking to foresee that a movement of poor whites would have risen up and overthrown the feudalistic CSA government denying them jobs, as that DID actually happen in the late 19th century, starting in the late 1870s, populist movement, mostly comprised of southerners. As it is, Reconstruction is what made the angry white male feel persecuted throughout the generations, but had the civil war never happened, I believe the populist movement would have included blacks instead of what happened in the current timeline and maybe an eventual rejoining of the union.

Thoughts?

[McKenzie]

1. an activist blast from the past (1968) inside

a dear friend of mine and his wife were there.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/17/newsid_2818000/2818967.stm

[itzamirakul]

2. I was....

a Civil Rights activist in the 1960s. Protest marches and all. But I did not go to the South and march in any of the marches in Alabama and places like that. Sometimes I feel a little guilty about that, especially when I see footage that shows how cruelly people were treated. I marched in the Midwest mainly.

[urbanguerrilla]

3. I would definitely have had been there if I had been alive

but the point of my original post is that there might not have had to have been a Civil Rights movement had Lincoln chosen to let the states peacefully secede.

[itzamirakul]

7. But can you imagine what...

would have happened to the black people stuck in those states that seceded? They were already slaves. With no one to control them, the whites would have added even more slaves, they would have set up business with foreign powers and shipped out of the coastal states to Europe all of which would have increased the Middle Passage Slave Trade. I know that Lincoln did not originally intend to end slavery in the South, but I think there was always an intent to limit its growth.

New York City almost seceded with the Southern States because they had so much money and investments tied up in the cotton-growing industry and also in the supplying of slaves. Few people know that New York sold slaves at the foot of Wall Street in the Slave Market.
Slavery ended in New York in 1827 but New York businessmen continued to deal in the sale of slaves until the 1860s. They brought Africans across the Atlantic on the Middle Passage and sold them to Southern planters.

Nowadays, the rightwing, homeschooling text books teach their childen that the Civil War was really about taxes on cotton and not about slavery at all because, according to one site that I read, they do not want to raise white children to feel guilty about slavery.

To my way of thinking the only way you can feel guilty is if you still treat people cruelly because of race and if you secretly wish to reinstate the slave system.

[boi1946]

4. There were marches in Houston--

I was at two of them. Good turnout, and I still remember the energy.

[daydreamer]

5. We are for justice

We fight for justice and peace whenever.

[candy]

6. I was too damn busy in the 60's raising five kids----------------

as were most of my friends.

[starroute]

8. I could have been but wasn't

I got to college in the fall of 1963. I went to one introductory meeting of whatever the current left-wing group was on campus (I think it was still the the anti-nuclear movement at that point.) Only three other people showed up and they set around discussion how badly the movement (whichever one it was) had fragmented since a year or two previously.

So I kind of went "ecch" and gave up on that.

A year later, the civil rights movement was in full swing. But the people involved in it were ... how should I say this ... they reminded me of people I'd known in high school who were sort of popular in an artsy kind of a way and sort of self-satisfied and who always made me feel like a helplessly out-of-it geek.

I felt no inclination to hang out with the activists. I hung out with other geeks instead and only got politically involved occasionally, like for one of the major anti-war marches in 1968.

Especially when you're in your teens, it's more about the people than about the politics. And the people here on DU are a far more diverse and overall a far more interesting bunch than the sort of people who tend to be activists when they're in college.

[hobbit709]

9. Was

and still more radical than most