White people have largely made their peace with the changes that were initiated with the Civil Rights Act that Lyndon B. Johnson signed in 1964 in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. The Jim Crow era that included segregated schools and other indignities is long gone, but it took a hundred years past the Civil War to reach that point.
Race has always been a factor in American life dating back to the importation of the first slaves to the colony of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. One of America’s leading historians, Thomas Fleming recently had a new book published, “A Disease in the Public Mind: Why We Fought the Civil War”, that recounts the problems the Founding Father’s encountered as they sought to fashion the Constitution in 1787. The issue of slavery was an obstacle and, as the Founders feared, it led to the Civil War.
In the years immediately preceding the war, the calls for the abolition of slavery increased at the same time white southerners had spent decades gripped with growing fears of being killed by the slaves who vastly outnumbered them. There were approximately 4,000,000 slaves, mostly in the south, and some 500,000 free blacks, generally in the north. They were a substantial part of the population, but it is little known that only six percent of the southern white population, approximately 316,632, owned slaves. It is even less known that some free blacks owned slaves as well.
Fleming asked “Why did they (the southerners) sacrifice over 300,000 of their sons to preserve an institution in which they apparently had no personal stake?” The answer, generally stated, was that, by 1861 the northern states passionately hated the southern states and vice versa. That was the disease in the public mind.
I cite this bit of history because I keep hearing the question “If Zimmerman is acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin, will there be race riots?” Like the southerners of old, whites, Hispanics and others today are concerned about black violence.