“The white South, if it responded at all to the atrocities [committed to freed blacks after the Civil War], chose to recall how slavery had afforded black men and women a positive protection from such violence”

– Leon Litwack, "Many Thousands Gone: Black Southerners and the Confederacy”, 1984.

You gotta appreciate the logic of that. The passive-aggressive violence, the self-justification, the shifting of the blame.