How a nation that promised freedom allowed white supremacy to regroup retool, and reign.
My great-grandmother was born in North Carolina in the 1880s, just fifteen years after the Civil War supposedly ended slavery and brought the Union’s promise of freedom to my people. They say the North won. They say the Confederacy fell. But if you were a Black person living in the South during the reign of Jim Crow and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference.The phrase goes, “To the victor go the spoils.” But in the South, it seems the losers got the loot. In the 1880s when my GG was a child, the same men who proudly once wore Confederate gray had switched to white hoods. The same families who profited from my family’s unpaid labor now sat on courthouse benches, ran the banks, and published the newspapers that called members of my family and their community criminals for breathing. The same towns that once auctioned off my ancestors now erected monuments to their captors, calling them heroes.
The North may have won the war, but the South won the peace.
During Reconstruction, there was a flicker of hope. We voted. Some of us even held office. We built schools, churches, towns. But that didn’t last. Not because we failed, but because the white South refused to accept a world where we were free. So, they lynched us. They wrote new laws to re-enslave us. They called it “vagrancy” when we stood on a street corner without a job, and they locked us up and sold our labor to the highest bidder.
The Klan rode openly back then. They didn’t hide their faces. They didn’t have to. Sheriffs looked the other way, if they were not already in or even leading the crowd. Judges dismissed charges, if charges were ever brought. My people’s homes were burned, our men were hanged, our women raped, and our children taught that their lives were worth less than the dirt in a cotton or tobacco field. The white newspapers called it order. The Black church called it crucifixion.
So, I ask you: if the Union won, why did my people have to live like this? Why did the victors have to beg for justice while the defeated ruled with impunity?
Because the North fought to preserve the Union, not to abolish white supremacy. And when the cannons stopped firing, they abandoned the formerly enslaved. Abandoned. Unprotected. Surrounded. The South was allowed to rewrite the terms of surrender. It is true that they couldn’t own us by name anymore, so they invented new ways of creating the same results. We know these names: convict, tenant, servant, felon. We still hear many of them today.
Today, it is increasingly clear that we live under a regime that lost the war but won the narrative. They teach their children that the Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery. They say the Old South was genteel, not genocidal. They say we were better off then, not brutalized.
In the South, the Confederacy didn’t fall. It rebranded. It buried its uniforms and raised its flags in our courthouses. It traded plantations for chain gangs. It swapped slave codes for Jim Crow laws. And while Washington looked the other way, the so-called vanquished built an empire of racial terror atop the ashes of Appomattox.
Legislation like the Voting Rights Act that was passed after decades of struggle during the Civil Rights Movement has been gutted. There has been a successful movement to ban books that teach the truth about this history. And now, the Return to the Land (RTTL) movement in Arkansas is building all-white settlements—openly, proudly, and with little resistance. They aren’t hiding anymore. They don’t have to. Because whiteness in America doesn’t need to win the war; it just needs to wait out the outrage.
We were told we were free. But they have rewritten the past, restricted the present, and are now rebuilding a future where we are once again pushed to the margins. This isn’t the resurgence of something old. This is the continuation of something that never ended.
