The South Didn’t Lose the Civil War — Until 1964.

March on Washington, 1963. Library of Congress (“No known restrictions on publication.”)

And they’ve been fighting a new war ever since.

A luta continua (“the struggle continues”)

(Some music as you read)

Wars seldom end when one side formally concedes. There may be decades of adjustment before the conflict can be said to be over once and for all. The occupation of Germany and Japan after the official end of WWII lasted from 1945–1952.

Robert E. Lee’s surrender to U. S. Grant in 1865 did not mark the end of the war. Like Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who didn’t know that WWII had ended, and remained on duty in a jungle in the Philippines until 1974 (BBC), the southern states continued their struggle, undermining the gains that previously enslaved Africans had made in the decade or two after Lee’s surrender.

Slavery may have been abolished (along with the “state’s right” to legalize slavery), but white southerners who re-gained power during the Reconstruction era found Jim Crow laws, lynchings, disenfranchisement, and segregation to be the next best…