Of course, no such struggle between white workers and Black workers was inevitable. The apologists of the new monopoly c

Of course, no such struggle between white workers and Black workers was inevitable. The apologists of the new monopoly capitalist class were, however, determined to provoke these racist divisions. Around the same time that Kearney spoke before the New Orleans convention, an identical alarm was issued to the U.S. Senate. On February 24, 1903, Senator Ben Tillman from South Carolina warned that the colleges and schools for Black people in the South would lead inexorably to racial conflict. Designed to equip “these people” who, in his eyes, were “the nearest to the missing link with the monkey” to “compete with their white neighbors,” these schools would „… create an antagonism between the poorer classes of our citizens and these people upon whose level they are in the labor market.” Moreover,

“There has been no contribution to elevate the white people in the South, to aid and assist the Anglo-Saxon Americans, the men who are descended from the people who fought with Marion and Dumter. They are allowed to struggle in poverty and in ignorance and to do everything they can to get along, and they see Northern people pouring in thousands and thousands to help build up an African domination.”

Contrary to Kearney’s and Tillman’s logic, racial conflict did not emerge spontaneously, but rather was consciously planned by the representatives of the economically ascendant class. They needed to impede working-class unity so as to facilitate their own exploitative designs. The forthcoming “race riots”—Atlanta; Brownsville, Texas; Springfield, Ohio—like the 1898 massacres in Wilmington and Phoenix, South Carolina, were orchestrated precisely in order to heighten the tensions and antagonism within the multi-racial working class.

Angela Davis, Woman Suffrage at the Turn of the Century: The Rising Influence of Racism