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March 1, 2021 - February 20, 2023
the very nature of northern hostility—unwritten, mercurial, opaque, and eminently deniable—made
Not like the explicit discrimination and racism so clearly present in the south
not by edict as in the South but by circumstance in the North,
Segregation was not the law but was still reality
the Northern Paradox. In the North, Myrdal wrote, “almost everybody is against discrimination in general, but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs”—that
Do as I say, not as I do
King would be fighting the ill-defined fear and antipathy that made northern whites flee at the sight of a black neighbor, turn away blacks at realty offices, or not hire them if they chose. The “enemy” was a feeling, a general unease that led to the flight of white people and businesses and sucked the resources out of the ghettos the migrants were quarantined into. No laws could make frightened white northerners care about blacks enough to permit them full access to the system they dominated.
Laws were not the problem or the solution
He had made the journey himself when he went to Boston University for graduate school and while there met his wife, Coretta,
Their marriage and joint mission was a result of their northern migration
For one thing, Daley knew not to make the same mistakes as his southern counterparts. He met with King, appearing cooperative rather than ignoring him or having him thrown into jail.
Daley was keeping up appearances with MLK, Jr. but was so subtle and underhanded in his sabotage
“I have seen many demonstrations in the South,” he said that violent day in the Promised Land. “But I have never seen anything so hostile
Don’t hear much about this confrontation - MLK felt it was worse in Chicago than anything he had endured in the south
But custom had a way of lingering well after the ink was dry.
Nice line - too true
hypersegregation, a kind of separation of the races that was so total and complete that blacks and whites rarely intersected outside of work.
Hypersegregation
To him, spite never settled anything. It only gave your detractors more ammunition and, as it had back when the colored people in Monroe had urinated in the colored section of the Paramount Theater, only ended up hurting the people themselves.
Racism affects eveyone
In a subsequent ruling in 1955, the Court ordered school boards to eliminate segregation “with all deliberate speed.” Much of the South translated that phrase loosely to mean whenever they got around to it, which meant a time frame closer to a decade than a semester.
Make haste is like those folks "yelling" fire in Finian's Rainbow
only after a 1969 court order, Alexander v. Holmes, that gave county and municipal schools in Mississippi until February 1970 to desegregate. But even that deadline would be extended for years for particularly recalcitrant counties.
The first mandate was.15 years before in 1955
In the meantime, in the middle of the turmoil over what would become of the children of Mississippi, dozens of school districts forwent federal funding rather than integrate their schools.
The sum.of us
How could it be that people were fighting to the death over something that was, in the end, so very ordinary?
Why do we make such a big deal out of it all?
“We got to being Americanized,” Reverend Harrison is saying. “It got to where we don’t help each other.”
Americanized means not helping each other
more space than one person could possibly need and, by that measure alone, the very picture of success in California.
Excess = success
In the race toward an alternative, inventors registered nearly five hundred patents between 1901 and 1931, the early decades of the Migration, for some version of a hoped-for machine to pick cotton. That amounted to more than all the patents that had been issued in the entire second half of the nineteenth century, when the South did not have to worry about blacks leaving en masse.
Neccesity is the mother of invention
“instead of the machines displacing labor, they were used to replace the labor that had left the farm.”
Replacing rather than displacing
