After the Civil War, white southerners felt threatened by the political power wielded by newly enfranchised Blacks. Radical Reconstruction only exacerbated this fear, and--according to many historians--the fear soon led to the emergence of a new form of absolute racism under the guise of the Reconstruction-era Democratic party.2 Although not all ex-slaveholding Confederates were Democrats, a vast majority pledged their allegiance to the conservative values of the political party which brought about the end of Reconstruction. Not all Reconstruction-era southern Democrats were racist, but the stated Democratic party platform in just about every southern state included the goal of establishing Black Codes to limit Black suffrage.3 The Black Codes were undeniably racist: they restricted the civil rights of ex-slaves and in many areas left them completely disenfranchised. John Hope Franklin gives a primary example of the racism associated with the conservative Democratic party in his book Reconstruction: After the Civil War. An ex-Confederate army colonel from Virginia, R. E. Withers, successfully won the Virginia governorship after a hotly contested race in the early 1870s. He expressed the view of many southern Democrats when he stated the following:.
"I do not ask the support of the Negroes, nor do I expect it, for I consider them unfit to exercise the right to vote."4.
It was racism like this that fueled the rise of the Democratic party and eventually ended Reconstruction. As Conservatives (Democrats) gained control of gubernatorial chairs and legislatures in the South, there was little that supporters of Black equality could do to prevent the end of Reconstruction.
Southerner ex-slaveholders became obsessed with absolute racism, building upon the racist values with which they had been indoctrinated by the previous generation. An editor of an Alabama newspaper maintained, "We must render this either a white man's government, or convert the land into a Negro man's cemetery.