Black Rednecks or Black Africans?

A reader responds to my VDARE article:

This is a really superb piece of commentary on Thomas Sowell, who is also one of my heroes--as Grady McWhiney [author of Cracker Culture] is one of my old friends and was once a colleague here at U of Alabama. I think you make a very important point about the residue of African culture in the behavior of present day blacks. I hope Sowell sees your argument, which seems to me to be correct and compelling.

I also think you are right to distinguish between redneck and what I call hillbilly culture in southern whites. Here in Alabama, the hillbillies (mostly Scots Irish in ancestry living in the northern part of the state) did not own slaves and in some cases refused to join the Confederacy to fight for the institution. A couple of hillbilly counties even seceded from the state when it seceded from the Union. The rednecks from the southern part of the state, where land is flatter and richer, are more often English in ancestry and became shareholders after the civil war, raising cotton formerly raised by slaves. The difference was typified in the last half of the twentieth century by the contrast and conflict between federal judge Frank M. Johnson, an enforcer of civil rights law, and redneck rabble rouser George Wallace, both Alabamians and both graduates the same year from the UA school of law. Johnson was from northern, Wallace from southern, Alabama.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer