President Andrew Johnson a White Supremacist
Racist White newspapers supported the murderous activity of the KKK during Reconstruction. Hatred against Black people was so intense, a result of the slave owners losing the Civil War that in 1867, in Alabama, racist whites called for a day of fasting and prayer to God to end the rule of Black people. Perhaps no other president did more to generate white supremacist hatred than President Andrew Johnson. President Andrew Johnson, 1865-1869, was the worst traitor to the human rights of Black people after the Civil War. Johnson made the argument that God removed Lincoln by assassination so that he could become president and outrageously compared himself to Jesus Christ for pardoning the traitors of the Confederacy.
Andrew Johnson regarded the politics of Reconstruction, an attempt to give Black people rights, education, and freedom, as “unconstitutional’ and a violation of right of the states to deny Black people the right to vote. Andrew Johnson went down in history as the man that helped white supremacy to extend itself into the world of today. Johnson, a democrat, who worked with racist Republicans, sought to bring peace to the nation at the expense of Black people. It was more popular for the racist slave owning South to be forgiven for their acts of treachery than to give Black people the right to vote. Johnson was an ignorant crude racist who once referred to Frederick Douglas, a Black leader and abolitionist, as “Just like any (N-word).” Johnson issued pardons to confederate officials by the hundreds and ordered hundreds of acres of land given to the formally enslaved to be returned to white racists. This resulted in the forced eviction of freedmen from lands given to them.
These actions were what caused the defeated south to develop “Black Codes” and later Jim Crow laws that would poison democracy. Johnson fueled violence across the South and later supported the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The Freedmen’s Bureau recorded that many Blacks were murdered by hanging, beaten to death, or whipped to death with the lash. Black officials in Texas were quoted as saying that Black people are “Shot down like wild beasts without provocation.” In Arkansas, one witness reported that “24 men, women, and children were hanging from trees.”White supremacists, like Andrew Johnson, believed that Black people were put here to service their needs—the needs of the lazy gentlemen of the southern plantation class. Hence, with Andrew Johnson’s help the KKK became the terrorist arm of the believers in white supremacy.
Racist Republicans found a friend in the white newspapers of that day, such as the Atlanta Constitution and the Nashville Union paper. These papers ran articles that supported the terror of the Klan and often incited violence. One of the founders of the KKK, and the leader of the massacre at Fort Pillow of Black soldiers Nathan Bedford Forrest, who became the “grand Wizard’ of this terrorist group, said that Black people were “totally unfit to exercise the full prerogatives of citizenship” and claimed that allowing Blacks to vote was a political crime. He was a true friend of Andrew Johnson. Another white newspaper, the Memphis Appeal, praised Nathan Forrest for his remarks. This is why symbols named after this criminal racist have been removed. Forrest was a professional liar as testimony before Congress in 1871 revealed. Forrest used the old KKK trick of claiming to be against violence and claiming he was a “good American.” Thanks to the racist Andrew Johnson, violence and hatred would become entrenched in America for years to come.
