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March 1, 2021 - February 20, 2023
What few people seemed to realize or perhaps dared admit was that the thick walls of the caste system kept everyone in prison. The rules that defined a group’s supremacy were so tightly wound as to put pressure on everyone trying to stay within the narrow confines of acceptability. It meant being a certain kind of Protestant, holding a particular occupation, having a respectable level of wealth or the appearance of it, and drawing the patronizingly appropriate lines between oneself and those of lower rank of either race in that world.
Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929,
Each generation had to learn the rules without understanding why, because there was no understanding why, and each one either accepted or rebelled in that moment of realization and paid a price whichever they chose.
The striving colored people in town, stooped and trodden the rest of the week, invested their very beings into the church and quarreled over how things should be run and who should be in charge of the one thing they had total control over. In the
One thing they had control over = church
a member of a resented clan in a small, clannish subculture inside a segregated pressure cooker of a life. The incident was so unseemly and beneath him
Segregated pressure cooker of life
The layers of accumulated assets built up by the better-paid dominant caste, generation after generation, would factor into a wealth disparity of white Americans having an average net worth ten times that of black Americans by the turn of the twenty-first century, dampening the economic prospects of the children and grandchildren of both Jim Crow and the Great Migration before they were even born.
Why we need reparations
“The money allocated to the colored children is spent on the education of the white children,” a local school superintendent in Louisiana said bluntly. “We have twice as many colored children of school age as we have white, and we use their money. Colored children are mighty profitable to us.”
Exploitation of a different nature
their very existence, their personal aspirations, and the purpose of their days were in direct opposition to the white ruling-class policy on colored education—that is, that colored people needed no education to fulfill their God-given role in the South.
Segregation at its finest (sardonic tone intended)
Firefighters tried to save the courthouse, but the mob slashed the water hoses to keep the blaze going. The mob then dynamited the vault where Hughes had been left. The mob found him dead, crushed by the explosion, the water bucket almost empty. The courthouse then burned to the ground.
Burn it down rather than having a fair trial and basically lynch him
half-dozen colored homes escaped the torching only because a white man told the mob the houses belonged
Look for the helpers
but there was nobody to buy it. So the boss men went without new Model T Fords. The sharecroppers went without shoes.
Enormous discrepancy
debt peonage,
somewhere between indentured servitude and sharecropping and slavery
that one set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn’t see the bars.
Segregation affects.evryone
had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, deserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to
The great migration
safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.
the Overground Railroad for slavery’s grandchildren.
Underground Railroad this then was the train system
in time the railroad’s cars were packed with the peasant caste of the South, “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” in their own country and, save for their race and citizenry, not unlike the passengers crossing the Atlantic in steerage with the intention of never returning to the old country.
Refugees from the south
It was the car that would take the brunt of any collision in the event of a train wreck. It was where the luggage and colored passengers were placed, even though their train fare was no different from what white passengers in the quieter rear of the train paid for the same class of service. He and
Back of the bus, front of the train - loudest dirtiest and most dangerous
Thus, there developed a kind of underground railroad for colored travelers, spread by word of mouth among friends and in fold-up maps and green paperback guidebooks that listed colored lodgings by state or city.
Green books
He and other middle-class migrants from the South, it turns out, were not unlike the immigrant taxi drivers you hear about who had been doctors or engineers back in Pakistan. Dunlap
Like the Jewish doctor in Boy iSP
to the very heart of the basic difference between the North and South, between the authoritarian control over colored lives under Jim Crow and the laissez-faire passivity in the big, anonymous cities of the North and West.
Systemic racism explicit and implicit on both sides of the Mason Dixon line
controlling the movements of blacks by controlling the minds of whites.
Movement and minds
“Indeed, in educational attainment, Negro in-migrants to northern cities were equal to or slightly higher than the resident white population.”
yet still seen as ignorant!
The percentage of postwar black migrants who had graduated from high school was as high as or higher than that of native whites in New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and St. Louis and close to the percentage of whites in Chicago.
The minority is rarely as ignorant or cruel as we white Americans
who, it turns out, often had as much as or more education than those they met, colored or white, in the cities to which they fled, though they were often looked down upon.
Should mean more
Thus began a pattern of overcharging and underinvestment in black neighborhoods that would lay the foundation for decades of economic disparities in the urban
Still evidence now
when the least-paid people were forced to pay the highest rents for the most dilapidated housing owned by absentee landlords trying to wring the most money out of a place nobody cared about.
The least in the least for the worst reasons and costing the most $
Contrary to modern-day assumptions, for much of the history of the United States—from the Draft Riots of the 1860s to the violence over desegregation a century later—riots were often carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival. Thus riots would become to the North what lynchings were to the South, each a display of uncontained rage by put-upon people directed toward the scapegoats of their condition.
Disaffected white men are usually still starting the fires
They were essentially the same people except for the color of their skin, and many of them arrived into these anonymous receiving stations at around the same time, one set against the other and unable to see the commonality of their mutual plight.
Commonalities are so much harder to realize than differences (and perhaps more radical as well)
A white-led, biracial commission set up to investigate the climate and circumstances leading to the riots
white led does not equal biracial especially then
It urged that the police rid the city’s colored section of the vice and prostitution that
What about white vice and prostitution?
the one to thwart a bill that would have made lynching a federal crime.
Bill making lynching a federal crime would not succeed until 2022!!
that simple gesture, she was defying the very heart of the southern caste system,
To vote
The attitude against the colored is only the same as it was against the Slavs or the foreign races when they first intruded the field.”
Words like intruded already smack negative and exclusionary
The manager asked them to wait a week and, if they still objected, he would let her go.” As it turned out, the white girls grew to like the colored girl, and she was permitted
Get to know someone not just dismiss because of external characteristics
The reality was that Jim Crow filtered through the economy, north and south, and pressed down on poor and working-class people of all races. The southern caste system that held down the wages of colored people also undercut the earning power of the whites around them, who could not command higher pay as long as colored people were forced to accept subsistence wages.
Did Jim Crow create systemic racism?
The reality was that Jim Crow filtered through the economy, north and south, and pressed down on poor and working-class people of all races. The southern caste system that held down the wages of colored people also undercut the earning power of the whites around them, who could not command higher pay as long as colored people were forced to accept subsistence wages.
How racism affects everyone and Jim Crow was alive and well on BOTH sides of the Mason Dixon line
“Their presence and availability for some of the work being performed by whites, whether they are actually employed or not,” wrote the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, “acts as a control on wages.”
The sum of us - racism affects everyone
in those days of southern apartheid:
Exactly what it was - like calling plantations labor camps
Harry and Harriette Moore, considered by some the first casualties of the modern civil rights movement.
Should remembrr and celebrate them. Especially Since he was an educator
Harry and Harriette Moore, considered by some the first casualties of the modern civil rights movement.
There would be way too many more to follow
A mob stormed the apartment and threw the family’s furniture out of a third-floor window as the crowds cheered below. The neighbors burned the couple’s marriage license and the children’s baby pictures. They overturned the refrigerator and tore the stove and plumbing fixtures out of the wall. They tore up the carpet. They shattered the mirrors. They bashed in the toilet bowl. They ripped out the radiators. They smashed the piano Clark had worked overtime to buy for his daughter. And when they were done, they set the whole pile of the family’s belongings, now strewn on the ground below, on
...more
they'd destroy the apartment before letting black people move in
The bombing gutted the twenty-unit building and forced even the white tenants out. The rioters overturned police cars and threw stones at the firefighters who were trying to put out the blaze.
How racism hurts the sum of us all
A total of 118 men were arrested in the riot. A Cook County grand jury failed to indict any of the rioters.
118 rioters arrested - 0 charged!
To make an example of such people, indictments were handed down against the rental agent, the owner of the apartment building, and others who had helped the Clarks on charges of inciting a riot.
The people who helped the family were the ones charged with inciting a riot
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the decline in property values and neighborhood prestige was a by-product of the fear and tension itself, sociologists found. The decline often began, they noted, in barely perceptible ways, before the first colored buyer moved in. The instability of a white neighborhood under pressure from the very possibility of integration put the neighborhood into a kind of real estate purgatory.
economy issues didn't occur because of a black family moving in, but rather due to white families' fear
The arrival of colored home buyers was often the final verdict on a neighborhood’s falling property value rather than the cause of
Cause white people got scared about something that wasn’t yet happening
Effect black families could finally afford decent housing
was a chilling parallel to the war playing out at the very same time in the South, from the arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955 for refusing to give up a bus seat in Alabama to white troops blocking nine colored students in 1957 on their first day of school in Little Rock, Arkansas, after the Supreme Court said they had the right to enroll.
Again brutal conflict both in the south AND in the north
deaths of four little girls just before a Sunday church service in Birmingham, the assassinations of civil rights workers, black and white, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner and Medgar Evers, the confrontation on a bridge in Selma, Alabama. Those would not come until Jim Crow’s fitful last hours.
Jim Crow’s final hours when some of the most “most bold-faced terrors” (if it’s possible to talk about it in degrees) would happen - Jim Crow would not go down without a fight and brutal deaths caused by hatred
flee from behind the Cotton Curtain,” King
The cotton curtain ~ the iron curtain
