Race in the Failure of Essay

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Contrary to being the most fanatic racists in the world, the depressed and deprived lower class of Southern whites were the pioneers of the populist movement. However, the movement and the racial bridge eventually failed leading to the notion that Southerners are historically incompetent of realizing racial harmony without the intervention of the Northerners.

The most confusing feature of the third-party movement is the relationship between Populism and race in consideration of Watson's betrayal of black voters in the late nineteenth century ("Southern Populists" par, 3). Although fewer and fewer blacks supported the movement year after year, the third party desperately needed the black vote and made efforts to gain it in the 1890s. The decrease in the black votes was because the blacks eventually believed that the movement offered them little and that Populist requests had more to do with opportunism than friendship.
Most of the African-Americans were quickly disillusioned and returned to the Republican Party as the Populists often appeared as prejudiced as Democrats. Amongst other reasons such as lack of enlightened leadership, mismanagement, the relative conservatism of its program and the national split, populism failed majorly because of race. For instance, in some places like Watson's congressional district, the third-party movement employed the Ku Klux Klan to intimidate blacks who wanted to vote for the Democrats. White populists slowly drifted back to the Democratic Party after the defeat of 1896 as Watson demanded for the disenfranchisement of black voters. The former Populists were majorly troubled by this about-face and the growing weirdness in Watson's behavior. In conclusion, race was such an important factor in the failure of southern populism.

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