(Photo) KKK/Neo-Nazis “patrolling” white neighborhoods in Sanford, FL — the city where Trayvon Martin was murdered by a still-at-large racist. 

It wouldn’t surprise me if these white supremacist groups in Sanford have active connections with the local police (who have evinced a pattern of crass racism over the years in their own right).

Most of the reports I’ve read which document extremist right-wing hate groups in the South (for instance, see the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center), note that some of the largest appeal for these far-right groups is among cops, prosecution attorneys, prison guards, etc. (besides the obvious “lumpen-proletarian”, poor, “trailer-park” whites).

This is why I say that the Civil War didn’t go far enough, especially given that the post-war ”Radical Reconstruction” period was quickly abandoned as the result of a compromise between wealthy Northern industrial capitalists and the Southern plantation-owning aristocrats.

One can actually trace a more or less straight line between the defeat of Reconstruction, the advent of the Black Codes in the 1880s and 1890s, the rise of Jim Crow segregration, and through to the present (taking a brief — though nonetheless important — detour during the 50s/60s civil rights movement) …