Compare the historic US Senate vote in 1967, which confirmed the first Black man to the Supreme Court, with that of 2022, which confirmed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court.
You’ll see the evolution of White Supremacy in the United States, how we have regressed over the past 55 years.
The summary Senate votes for Justices Thurgood Marshall and Ketanji Brown Jackson (69-11-20 v 53-47-0) differ dramatically. A 69% yea confirmation vote is a level of bipartisanship that we’ve not seen in decades.
Attorney Teri Kanefield reminds us that we have generations of precedent pushing for such a regression:
Under the 19th century American patriarchy, society was ordered with white men at the top and Black women at the bottom. People embrace hierarchy because they think nature naturally forms a hierarchy. They see people demanding equality as trying to displace them.
Heather Cox Richardson provides more context in her critically acclaimed history, How the South Won the Civil War, where she draws a parallel between mid-20th century Republicans and mid-19th century Democrats:
In [Barry] Goldwater’s time, people claiming to be embattled holdouts defending American liberty called themselves “Movement Conservatives.” A century before, their predecessors had called themselves “Confederates.”
Goldwater was a Republican Senator from Arizona (1953-1965; 1969-1987) and the Republican nominee for the Presidency in 1964. Yet during “his time,” the US Senate overwhelmingly confirmed a Black man as a Supreme Court Justice.
The symbol of White supremacy
In the intervening years, we’ve normalized (‘whitewashed’?) the Confederacy. A principle symbol of that normalization is the neo-Confederate flag.
The neo-Confederate flag bandied about today is the chosen symbol of segregationists, White supremacists, and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as well as many Donald Trump devotees. Its mid-20th century design is based on a battle flag used by the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV), “an army raised to kill in defense of slavery (emphasis added).”
I rarely saw a neo-Confederate flag while growing up in South Georgia. Now you see it on trucks, outside homes and for sale at/waving at rallies across the nation.
Hello from the Trump rally in Selma, North Carolina. pic.twitter.com/n6HbJ6iEnv
— Natalie Allison (@natalie_allison) April 9, 2022
“The Confederate flag made it deeper into Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, than it did during the Civil War,” one historian said. It was a piercing reminder of the persistence of white supremacism more than 150 years after the end of the Civil War. https://t.co/YiDpcKAUmc
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 14, 2021
A flag on display from a vendor near the line for #Trump rally in #Lansing shows an upside down American flag being pulled away to reveal a Confederate flag. @LSJNews pic.twitter.com/MCqQIyGO0M
— Sarah Lehr (@SarahGLehr) October 27, 2020
There have been 173 pro-Confederate flag rallies since the Charleston church shooting. http://t.co/h7Jwb9yIZa pic.twitter.com/JNiqPjoYcM
— ProPublica (@propublica) August 17, 2015
KKK to rally for #ConfederateFlag July 18 at #SouthCarolina Statehouse. http://t.co/giUg8mqutO #scnews #chsnews pic.twitter.com/s25xBfTP2z
— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) June 29, 2015
Speaking to the Washington Post in 2018, author Jarret Ruminski was adamant:
[T]he history of the flag is very clear and unambiguously connected to white supremacy. That history is undeniable, whether people want to acknowledge it or not.
How do we overcome our legacy of White supremacy?
In order to rejoin the Union, Confederate states had to adopt the 14th amendment. Nevertheless, 19th century reconstruction gave birth to the KKK, which is what most Americans probably envision when they read or hear ‘White supremacy.’ The KKK had a revival in the early 20th century as a “Protestant nativist movement.”
Yale law professor James Q. Whitman points out that in the early 20th century we were “not just a country with racism,” but were “THE leading racist jurisdiction” in the world. “[E]ven Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration.”
As an example of US racist rhetoric, in 1938 U.S. Sen. Theodore Bilbo (who had also served two terms as governor of Mississippi) infamously claimed that “even one drop of Negro blood placed in the veins of the purest Caucasian destroys the inventive genius of his mind and palsies his creative faculty.”
Rolling Stone writer Carl Skutsch points out how the Klan refuses to go quietly into the night.
The third Klan rose during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Whites, angry at attempts to end segregation, again put on white hoods and joined local officials – often they were the local officials – in attacking Civil Rights workers. Blacks and whites were targeted for beatings, bombings and assassination. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 put the final legal nails in segregation. Support for the Klan dwindled.
White supremacy has once again moved mainstream, creating a ‘fourth Klan’ that is emboldened by visual rhetoric like that on display by GOP Senators last week.
This group is increasingly violent, as Skutsch notes:
One of the perversities of American history is that there has been more fear of the left (the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground) than the far more violent right (the Order, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Militia movement).
2015: Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners in Charleston, SC. There’s an infamous photo of him carrying a neo-Confederate flag.
2016: Founding of the Proud Boys, designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. “White nationalists and neo-Nazis themselves have cited [Gavin] McInnes as a gateway to the alt-right.”
2017: President Trump indirectly defended organizers of a Charlottesville, VA neo-Nazi rally, where a bystander was killed, when he said, “I think there is blame on both sides.”
2017: White supremacists were “directly responsible” for 18 of 34 U.S. extremist-related deaths. It was the “the fifth deadliest year on record for extremist violence since 1970.”
2017: The FBI reported that White supremacists have “produced more fatalities than any other category of domestic terrorists since 2000.”
2018: The Tree of Life synagogue shooter killed 11 people and wounded seven, including five police officers, in Pittsburgh, PA. It was “the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history.”
2019: “An internal U.S. Customs and Border Protection investigation revealed that 62 Border Patrol agents, including the agency’s chief, participated in a secret Facebook group that included racist, nativist, and misogynistic material, including threats to members of Congress.”
2019: In El Paso, Texas, a gunman targeting Mexicans and Hispanics murdered 22 people and injured 26 others at a Walmart.
2020: three White men murdered Ahmaud Arbery near Brunswick, GA
2021: January 6th.
In its 2021 report, the FBI cataloged the more racially-motivated hate crimes in 2020 than it had since 2008.
We won’t overcome White supremacy by whitewashing our history or ignoring systemic racism.
We won’t overcome White supremacy by failing to teach high school students that Hitler’s Germany found inspiration in America’s racist laws when developing its Nuremberg race laws. (I didn’t learn this in high school or college history classes.)
Inspiration came, for example, from our having stripped citizenship for Native Americans and our passing the “harshest” laws against interracial marriage. Yet the Nazis described our one-drop rule used to prohibit interracial marriage “as inhuman.” Their solution for defining the Jewish for discrimination: having three or more Jewish grandparents.
We won’t overcome White supremacy by failing to name it when we see it. All of us, but especially all political leaders and everyone reporting the news.
Compare voting records
To see how the nation has changed since 1967, inspect Senate voting records for the two justices (below) by analyzing votes in four post-Civil War groups. Remember that the Democrats of the Civil War evolved to become today’s Republicans. Mid-20th-century southern Democrats were steadfast in their opposition to expanding civil rights.
You can see the voting patterns shift along the edges of the south and into western states, reflecting how southern views about Whites versus “Other” have become accepted elsewhere.
No Senator abstained last week. Apparently it’s not a widespread social or political faux pax to appear bigoted today compared with 1967, which had 20 bipartisan abstentions and only 11 nays.
Confederate states (11)
| 1967 Thurgood Marshall (5-11-6) Yea: D-3, R-2 Nay: D-10, R-1 Abstain: D-6, R-0 |
2022 Ketanji Brown Jackson (4-18-0) Yea: D-4, R-0 Nay: D-0, R-18 Abstain: D-0, R-0 |
| State | 1967 | 2022 | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ds | Rs | Ds | Rs | |||||||||
| Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | |
| Alabama | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||
| Arkansas | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Georgia | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Florida | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Louisiana | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||
| Mississippi | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| North Carolina | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| South Carolina | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Tennessee | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Texas | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Virginia | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Total | 3 | 10 | 6 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 18 | 0 |
| Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | |
| 1967 | 2022 | |||||||||||
Border states (5)
| 1967 Thurgood Marshall (9-1-0) Yea: D-5, R-4 Nay: D-1, R-0 Abstain: D-0, R-0 |
2022 Ketanji Brown Jackson (5-5-0) Yea: D-5, R-0 Nay: D-0, R-5 Abstain: D-0, R-0 |
| State | 1967 | 2022 | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ds | Rs | Ds | Rs | |||||||||
| Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | |
| Delaware | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||
| Kentucky | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||
| Maryland | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||
| Missouri | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||
| West Virginia | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Total | 5 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 1 | 5 | ||||||
| Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | |
| 1967 | 2022 | |||||||||||
Union states in 1865 (20)
| 1967 Thurgood Marshall (33-0-7) Yea: D-17, R-16 Nay: D-0, R-0 Abstain: D-5, R-2 |
2022 Ketanji Brown Jackson (28-12-0) Yea: D-27, R-1 Nay: D-0, R-12 Abstain: D-0, R-0 |
| State | 1967 | 2022 | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ds | Rs | Ds | Rs | |||||||||
| Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | |
| California | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Connecticut | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||
| Illinois | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||
| Indiana | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Iowa | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Kansas | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||
| Maine | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Massachusetts | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Michigan | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Minnesota | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Nevada | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| New Hampshire | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| New Jersey | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| New York | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Ohio | 2 | 1 | 1 | |||||||||
| Oregon | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Pennsylvania | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Rhode Island | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||
| Vermont | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||
| Wisconsin | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Total | 17 | 0 | 5 | 16 | 0 | 2 | 27 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 12 | 0 |
| Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | |
| 1967 | 2022 | |||||||||||
Became a state after 1865 (14)
| 1967 Thurgood Marshall (21-0-7) Yea: D-11, R-10 Nay: D-0, R-0 Abstain: D-6, R-1 |
2022 Ketanji Brown Jackson (13-15-0) Yea: D-11, R-2 Nay: D-0, R-15 Abstain: D-0, R-0 |
| State | 1967 | 2022 | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ds | Rs | Ds | Rs | |||||||||
| Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | |
| Alaska | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Arizona | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Colorado | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||
| Hawaii | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Idaho | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Montana | 2 | 1 | 1 | |||||||||
| Nebraska | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||
| New Mexico | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| North Dakota | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Oklahoma | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| South Dakota | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Utah | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Washington | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||
| Wyoming | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| Total | 11 | 0 | 6 | 10 | 0 | 1 | 11 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 15 | 0 |
| Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | Y | N | A | |
| 1967 | 2022 | |||||||||||
Updated at 3:00 pm Pacific on 11 April 2022 to correct a typo and to add summary rows at the bottom of the voting tables. Also added White supremacy violence.
