Tom Watson’s Racism, 100 Years Later

Hunter Wallace
Occidental Dissent
December 29, 2013

Warren Throckmorton, a longtime antagonist of the League of the South, is upset this morning by Tom Watson’s “racist views”:

“In life — especially later life, Tom E. Watson was a racist politician who found support among white Georgians. In death, he continues to find support from a cadre of white Southerners who want to turn back the clock. However, time marches on and Tom Watson’s statue has been removed from a place of prominence in front of the Georgia Capitol.”

Time has marched on … and Tom Watson, not his detractors, has been vindicated:

“Let them remember that, and quit knocking at us about lynchings. When the crimes stop, lynching will stop. Not a minute before.”
– Tom Watson

Tom Watson was partially wrong here, the heyday of lynching in Georgia was over by 1930, but black crime in Georgia has continued unabated down to the present. The US Congress never passed a federal anti-lynching law because lynching had become almost non-existent by the time of the Civil Rights Movement.

In Atlanta, OD found that blacks were responsible for 100 percent of homicide arrests, 95 percent of rape arrests, 94 percent of robbery arrests, 84 percent of aggravated assault arrests, and 93 percent of burglary arrests from April 2011 to April 2012. In Georgia as a whole, the non-White population (overwhelmingly black) was responsible for 77 percent of homicide, 65 percent of rape, 82 percent of robbery, 63 percent of aggravated assault, and 61 percent of burglary in 2010.

In 2012, there were 445 murders in Georgia, and 358 of them were committed by non-Whites – 80.4% of murder arrests in Georgia were non-White. Since violent crime is usually intraracial, it is reasonable to assume the overwhelming majority of these murder victims were black.

From 1882 until 1968, there were 435 black lynching victims in Georgia. In other words, more blacks are killed in Georgia every two years by other blacks than were lynched in Georgia in the entire Jim Crow era. In modern Atlanta, the only people who are murdering blacks (or anyone in the entire city) are black.

“One of the Civil War Amendments to the Constitution frees our brother in black; and he is now very free, everywhere, and is robustly asserting his right to be more so, especially at the North where he is so universally loved and fondly coddled.”
– Tom Watson, 1917

In 48 percent black Camden, New Jersey (95 percent non-White, including Hispanics), 3 out of 882 high school seniors scored “college ready” on the SAT in 2012. In 2009, Detroit Public School students (88 percent black) turned in the lowest scores ever recorded in the national math proficiency test over its then 21-year history.

Blacks are also robustly asserting their freedom in New York City, where they are responsible for 55.5% percent of homicide, Chicago, where they are responsible for 76.2% of homicide, and Philadelphia, where they are responsible for 83% of homicide. Since 1969, 21,000 people, overwhelmingly black, have been murdered in Detroit alone.

“White men made our social system what it is. White men made our governmental system what it is. White men founded our educational and religious systems. And white men should maintain what their ancestors established. We don’t need any of the colored and inferior races to defend our homes and firesides, our institutions and our liberties. We don’t need the negro in the army, nor in the civil service. We don’t need the Chinaman, the Jap, or the Hindoo. The uniform, the gun, the office, the ballot belong to white men, and our future will never be safe until we exclude from military and political privileges every colored man whomsoever.”
– Tom Watson, 1911

Since the 1960s, blacks have been given the ballot, and they have taken over the “governmental system” in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Birmingham, Jackson, Memphis, and Camden, not to mention around 97 counties in the South.

The paradise that black empowerment has created in the Mississippi Delta, the Alabama Black Belt, Birmingham, St. Louis, and Detroit illustrate what happens whenever blacks are put in charge of formerly White institutions.

“But the Negro? Poor, inferior copyist of the master-race, he is as incapable of maintaining a civilization as he is of originating one. For himself, he can do nothing. Civilize him in America and send him to Liberia, and what happens? He sinks, lapsing toward the barbarous state; and begins to implore the whites to come to his relief.”
– Tom Watson, 1911

In 1911, Liberia was a relatively civilized place compared to the state of Liberia in 2011 in the wake of the Liberian Civil War.

In 2003, the Second Liberian Civil War got so bad that President George W. Bush sent an aircraft carrier and 1,500 US marines into Liberia to overthrow Charles Taylor and put an end to the conflict. The US has propped up the Liberian state ever since.

“Civilize him in San Domingo, and what is the result? As soon as the French go away, and the negro becomes his own boss, down he goes. The varnish of Latin culture wears off, and there’s your nigger. And such is the chaotic bestiality into which he plunges, that the whites must needs rush to the rescue… you seldom see, in one of our towns and cities, a negro buck or young woman who has no bodily defect… Lacking in the characteristics that make for civilization, the negro can not be educated into white black-men.”
– Tom Watson, 1911

In Tom Watson’s time, it was common knowledge that freedom had failed in Haiti and Liberia and that the cause was inherent racial differences in capacity for self government. This was the view of the US State Department:

“The experience of Liberia and Haiti show that the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government. Unquestionably there is an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature. Of course, there are many exceptions to this racial weakness, but it is true of the mass, as we know from experience in this country. It is that which makes the negro problem practically unsolvable.”
– Secretary of State Robert Lansing, 1918

A hundred years later, Haiti after decades of rule by “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier and four years after the 2010 earthquake is still writing in the same misery observed by Tom Watson. The only real difference is that Haiti is now effectively governed by the U.N. and is the home of more NGOs per capita than any other country in the world. Foreigners and NGOs have spent billions of dollars on foreign aid, relief, and charity there since the beginning of the Cold War.

Since the 1950s, Jamaica, Ghana, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa have all followed the same dismal trajectory since independence, which has only been tempered by fluctuations in commodity prices caused by swings in the global economy.

Whose views have withstood the test of the time? Is it Tom Watson, writing in 1911 about the prospects of Haiti and Liberia, or Martin Luther King, Jr, who told America that he saw “the Promised Land” from his rhetorical mountaintop in 1968?

The hysterical moral shrieking from the likes of Warren Throckmorton and his ilk have grown louder over the last half century largely because their liberal fantasies have stubbornly failed to materialize.