Charles M. Blow: 'How long before this unpopular repression also loses favor and falls into decline?'
FILE - In this May 15, 1929, file photo authorities unload cases of whiskey crates labeled as green tomatoes from a refrigerator car in the Washington yards. The grower's express cargo train was en route from Holandale, Fla., to Newark, N.J. Statistically, Prohibition was not an utter failure. Deaths from alcohol-related cirrhosis declined, as did arrests for public drunkenness. What the statistics don't measure is how extensively Prohibition was flouted.
This revelry was not so much to reward the enslaved than it was a device to keep down “the spirit of insurrection,” as Douglass put it. In his estimation, “The slave’s happiness is not the end sought, but, rather, the master’s safety,” by making the enslaved “as glad to return to their work, as they were to leave it.”
Many of the people who crusaded for abolishing slavery later embraced the temperance movement and lobbied for Prohibition, with many Black people supporting restrictions on alcohol because it had long been used to keep them in bondage. Later, in the United States, the media portrayed the Black legislators elected during Reconstruction not only as uncivilized and corrupt, but also as drunkards.
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