by Paul Craig Roberts, Paul Craig Roberts:
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The South is blamed for slavery. One encounters this false association, the product of decades of demonization of the South, everywhere, even in books about the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 in Buffalo, New York by a Polish-American, Leon Czolgosz, who was born in Detroit.
Nothing in McKinley’s presidency or in Czolgosz’s life has anything to do with the South or slavery. Yet the author of the book, Eric Rauchway, manages to use the fact that northern whites wanted to lynch Czolgosz, a white man, to pull the South into the story. “White men of the South practiced lynching to terrify black men into submission,” and blacks fled the South because of “the growing number of blacks lynched in the slow-burning race war of the late-nineteenth century South.” These are blanket and unsupported statements.