eeing to Kansas from the terror in Louisiana and Mississippi. Their stories were gathered and other testimony was given to a U.S. Senate committee investigating the reasons they had left the south.
The terror campaign against African-Americans for the next eighty years would be justified by "Retrogressionist" propaganda, which claimed that African-Americans were entirely lacking in morality and had to be variously controlled, punished, educated, or otherwise managed. A central claim in such propaganda was that African-Americans had no stable family structures, that most African-American children grew up in families headed by only an unwed mother and therefore had no chance to learn mainstream values. In fact, as Gutman documents, African-Americans had extremely tenacious family structures, since these were one of the few resources they had that enabled them to survive the era of slavery with any sanity at all. One may suspect that current claims that the crime rate among Afr
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