Good Morning POU! This week we’ll share the real stories of people who lived during Jim Crow and live with its effects to this day. Remembering Jim Crow is produced in cooperation with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and its Behind the Veil oral history project.
The Land
For years, I always heard my mother speak about “the land.” Often when she spoke about it, it would be with that somewhat shy and embarassed tone that educated black folks living up north use when talking about the folks they left back home. It was one of those pieces of history that over time had to become myth or else you would spend too much time worrying over it. That’s what my mother’s aunt and her people were doing, back in Natchez, worrying too much about that Land. Larry Boy, my mother’s cousin, who was just a few years older then me, carried around a briefcase full of papers. Every now and then he would call us, soliciting funds for a lawsuit over the land. I reacted like my mother until one day, I went to Natchez for a family reunion and looked at Larry’s papers. The papers told a pretty straight forward story, though I cannot now remember it all.
It seems that we could have been oil barons.
Apparently, my mother’s father or great grandfather had a piece of land back in the 1920s that I think was given to him by the owners of a plantation where he was a slave. He kept this land until the 1920s when someone claimed he had not paid taxes on the land. The land was then seized, auctioned and purchased by one of the rich families of Natchez. Then, oil was found on the land. This is the story Larry told me as he pulled a photocopy of a tax receipt showing that my great grandfather had paid his taxes and that the land was really stolen from him. Then he showed me more papers about the lawsuit filed against the thieves by my mother’s uncle, and papers declaring an old aunt, the rightful heir, insane so they could file the suit.
Everybody agreed that he shouldn’t have. He was probably cheated. But this was 1950s Natchez, now. He was black. Not well educated. They were white and they were the law. What more was there to say? So everyone got a couple of hundred dollars rather than tens of thousands perhaps. It could have given my family some real wealth, something for us to inherit that would put us on equal footing rather than a legacy of oppression and slavery that everyone tries to convince us is more myth than real. Today, Larry Boy still goes to city hall, poring over records and worrying about a piece of land that must now be a superfund site. So whenever people mention the word reparations, I think of the land (and so must the heirs of those who stole it).
Stephen Casmier
St. Louis , MO
Chants from the Schoolyard
I started elementary school in 1963 in Asheville, North Carolina. It was segregated and many whites vocalized and put in to print that blacks had everything that they needed and could not understand why blacks wanted to go to school with white children.
The science labs, reading material, and audio-visual equipment as it was called at that time was greatly inferior. I saw what were called filmstrips at the “colored” elementary school that I attended. When integration took place in the mid 1960s, out of the blue, came science equipment and, as it was called back then, moving or motion films.
I remember vividly a chant that white students would sing when standing outside of Aycock Elementary School when black children from the Burton Street area of West Asheville began attending that school when integration was implemented. The words were:
Bonnie and Clyde
Were sitting by the river
Eating chocolate liver
Along came a nigger
And pushed them in the river
I’m grateful that I had a family and a community that stood fast and weathered the storm.
Travis McGahee
Antioch, CA