Posted on 24 April 2011 in the Out and About blogs by Sam
One might consider gay the new black in Tennessee. A couple of years ago, there was a ruckus about whether or not gay is the new black, and historical and political theoretical analyses suggests that there is a comparison to be made.
HISTORICAL ANALYSIS
The Tennessee Republican Party has taken homophobia from Lifeway’s (the Southern Baptist Convention’s commercial arm) employment application and is trying to legislate discrimination against GLBT people in much the same way that the 1870s Tennessee Democratic Party took racism from farmers’ employment requirements and successfully legislated discrimination against black people.
A friend recently emailed me a .pdf file of an article from the Tennessee Historical Quarterly titled “Tennessee and Twentieth-Century American Politics,” authored by Dr. Dewey W. Grantham. She had to read it for a Tennessee History class.
She pointed-out to me that Grantham included in his article a piece from Harper’s Weekly of October 21, 1876.
In 1876, the Tennessee Democratic Party was entirely racist, and Tennessee’s slaves had been emancipated. The Radicals (then thought to be radical because they supported voting rights for black Tennesseans) opposed the Democratic Party and had controlled Tennessee politics during Reconstruction.
The caption in the Harper’s Weekly piece included the text from a well-known 1876 Democratic Party newspaper titled the State. The State reportedly published, in all capital letters, the following statement: “Let it be known before the election that the farmers have agreed to spot every leading Radical negro in the county, and treat him as an enemy for all time to come. The rotten ring must and shall be broken at any and all costs. The Democrats have determined to withdraw all employment from their enemies. Let this fact be known.”
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