White Backlash to Electing Black Politicians – Then & Now

This blog entry from CNN discusses how the first Black man to be elected to the U.S. Senate was met with a white backlash that “helped destroy Reconstruction” after the Civil War.  It draws parallels between the white backlash then and the white backlash to electing Obama in 2008.  What are your thoughts? Is is a reasonable comparison to make? The post quotes a history professor from Fordham who says we aren’t post-racial but we also aren’t going back to the days of legal segregation. So what does the “middle” between those two ends of a continuum look like? The backlash is certainly less “visible” than it was in the Jim Crow era, but is it any less insidious or divisive? What other points does the article (or the comments responding to it) raise for you?

Here is the link:

http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/01/parallels-to-countrys-racist-past-haunt-age-of-obama/?hpt=hp_c1