B. U. G. S.

You have heard of a grandfather clause and of “grandfathering” some privilege when it is abolished for younger folks.

The NAACP’s first court victory was in 1915, when the Supreme Court struck down the original ”grandfather clause.”

After Reconstruction, the whole business of championing of blacks became an embarrassment for Northern politicians. In 1908, the Republican demand for black suffrage, which had been in the platform since 1868, was removed.

Southern states, to contravene the fifteenth amendment, made laws that said that a person could vote if his grandfather could vote. Since it was brought to them, the Supreme Court could hardly refuse to face the fact that the only purpose of such a law was to allow only whites to vote.

What is remarkable is not that the NAACP won the case, but how few politicians by 1915 had any interest in blacks.

One major reason Reconstruction ended was because it was so expensive. Military occupation of the South gave all its representatives to the Republicans Party, but the cost, in terms of the government of the time, was backbreaking.

The cost of Reconstruction was so high that even with all the electoral votes of the Southern States Republicans were in danger of losing so much of the North they could lose the national elections.

And, astonishing as it may seem, the moment the last troops pulled out of the South, where ninety percent of the blacks were, political interest the black vote began to fall fast.

By 1940 anyone who looked to history as Inevitable would have seen the future as bleak for the black vote. Its importance had been steadily going down since 1877.

Nothing changes as fast as history. This has become really obvious in our day of carbon dating and the finding that dinosaurs not only had feathers, but WERE birds.

But this fact has only become OBVIOUS even to some Mommy Professors because of recent technology. The fact is that if you gave me a history book I could almost certainly tell you the decade it was written in.

But those who denounce religion the most loudly as superstition are the ones who maintain this superstitious, Marxist faith that there is a Tide of history, an Inevitable History which occupies the exact same space that God does in other religions.

C.S. Lewis was upset at people who were so obsessed with the Future that they used it as an excuse to be cruel today. As Lenin put it, “It does not matter whether the world contains half a billion people or two billion people, so long as that the half billion is Communist.”

One thing that makes C.S. Lewis’ theological ideas seem so logical is his common sense approach to things. He points out that, “The only Historical Inevitably is that today will be succeeded by tomorrow, and there will be a day after that…”