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I've heard progressives say that abolishing the Civil Rights Act is absolutely letting back in Jim Crow and full blown racism. They don't believe Constitutional talk of the value of federalism or decentralization and private, voluntary action. No, CRA removal is just an exterminationist aim.
But Jim Crow wasn't exterminationist. The sum total of all lynchings of blacks in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968 was 3,446, according to the Tuskeegee Institute (who I don't think are incentivized to be conservative with the number).
I haven't seen any type of coordination or planning to it, which is something common to most other historical examples I would call "ethnic cleansing." To my knowledge, the 60's and 70's radicalism was not focused on forcing whites out of cities, but rather blaming whites for self-segregating in areas away from blacks.
Like 2rafa, however, I would certainly agree that it was "ethnic replacement," with a fair amount of inter-ethnic conflict as well. I would also call the displacement of blacks out of many areas of Southern California by latinos "replacement" as opposed to "cleansing," because it was an emergent phenomenon and not premeditated.
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It was at least a form of ethnic displacement. I think the case for ‘cleansing’ is that some of the action that led to large scale population movement (like bussing) was top down state implemented rather than organically decided by communities, and this probably pushes it into ethnic cleansing, even if unintentional, by state and successive federal governments. Then again, can ethnic cleansing be unintentional?
Similarly, whether black people were subject to a policy of ethnic cleansing in the South isn’t completely clear. Obviously many left in the Great Migration (which ultimately spurred the above), but while both good job opportunities in Northern cities and racism and ill treatment in the South are cited as reasons they did so, I think the former was a bigger draw than the latter was a push.
(Similarly we might say that many whites left the inner cities not only or even primarily because of high crime rates, but because many actually wanted the bigger houses, gardens and so on of the suburbs. Suburbanization didn’t begin in 1965 after all. But there’s enough of a historical record of an immediate collapse between ‘65 and ‘75 that it’s clear something exceptional did happen.)
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While I would agree that Jim Crow wasn’t exterminationist, my understanding is that lynching refers to one special category of violence and does not cover all white-on-black terror of this period.
The definition of a "lynching" from the Tuskegee institute is "a confirmed extra-legal death in which three or more people participated as perpetrators."
"Terror" is very different from "extermination," and distinguishing the two doesn't support your case. Terror can, and often is, employed in order to punish people who are seen as stepping outside of the proper, socially-prescribed role. Thus, a black man who tried to vote in the Jim Crow South, or who insisted on dating a white woman, might well be terrorized with a nighttime visit from the Klan and a flaming cross on his lawn. But if the black man stopped trying to vote, or broke up with the white woman, he would then be left alone - the terror had performed its purpose. That is malevolent, but not an attempt at extermination.
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What about modern how many of the lynchings were correct extra judicial hangings (eg the decedent did in fact rape a woman)? I don’t think extra judicial is good (big believer in process) but it doesn’t strike me as a huge problem if say 39/40 of the annual lynchings were based on an accurate view of crime.
To me, the problem of Jim Crow was more the laws that made it difficult for blacks to earn income etc.
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