Good Morning POU.
Today we take a look at the lives of children under Jim Crow.
I remember the first time my cousin pointed out that in all of the photographs of our grandparents and elder relatives, they never smiled. EVER. From that moment on, I’ve always been drawn to their pictures and would become emotional just looking at them, because there is no smile at all. As if they refused or the smile was taken away so early they don’t even know how. But smiling was almost forbidden. Jim Crow and life as a southern sharecropper made “smiling” too problematic. Smile too much, you’re labeled a fool, slow, or it could be confused as making fun of a white person. Smile, but don’t show your teeth – that was the unspoken rule in order to approach the owner of the farms and for domestic workers. Any sign of happiness by black people would spur anger and violence so at an early age, children were literally beaten for the faintest indiscretion, until there were no smiles.
Fear. The reason punishment was so fast, furious and painful for a black child growing up in the Jim Crow south, was fear. Fear that if the child didn’t learn the ways of strict obedience and humility, they could be killed.
The worst thing that could happen to a colored child in the South was for a parent to hear that a child was “acting up.” There would be no appeals, the punishment was swift and physical. The arbitrary nature of grown people’s wrath gave colored children practice for a life in the caste system, which is why parents, forced to train their children in the ways of subservience, treated their children as the white people running things treated them. It was preparation for the lower-caste role children were expected to have mastered by puberty.
For a young colored boy in the South, “the caste barrier is an every-present, solid fact,”, John Dollard, an anthropologist studyig the region’s caste system wrote at the time. “His education is incomplete until he has learned to make some adjustments to it….The Negro must haul down his social expectations and resign himself to a relative immobility.”
Indeed, breaking from protocol could get a colored boy killed. Under Jim Crow only white people could sit in judgement of a colored person on trial. White hearsay had more weight than a colored eyewitness. Colored people had to put ona show of cheerful subservience and unquestioning obedience in the presence of white people or facee the consequences of being out of line. If children didn’t learn their place, they could get on the wrong side of a white person, and the parents could do nothing to save them.
“The question of the child’s future is a serious dilemma for Negro parents,” wrote J.W. Johnson. “Awaiting each colored boy and girl are cramping limitations;and this dilemma approaches suffering in proportion to the parents knowledge of and the child’s innocence of those conditions.”
There was no time for childish ideals of fair play and equality. Oh you calling those grown folks a lie? Colored parents would say. Them grown folks wouldn’t a said it if they didn’t see you doing it.
By the time a colored child was old enough to notice, it seemed as if the whole world was crazy, not because of any one single event but because the slow discovery of just how sircumscribed life turned out to be. Violence and death awaited any misstep. 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 or realization and paid a price whichever they chose. The caste system trained them to see absurdity as normal.
(From “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson)
Stories from both black and white citizens that grew up during Jim Crow
Nigger Dogs
I spent my childhood life growing up in the “projects.” When I was around 12 years old I took my first job away from home. The job was “helper” for a driver on a soft drink bottling company truck route. Of course, all delivery route drivers were white. The route consisted of delivering bottled drinks to “country stores” in rural North Carolina. My job was to collect the empty glass bottles, put them in the wooden crates, sort them by product, and put them on the truck. The driver would deliver the fresh product and perform the traditional hospitality conversations with the local storeowners.
One day the truck pulled up to a small store somewhere in a rural community and I heard this frightening barrage of barking, obviously from at least two large dogs. The barking came directly from the rear area where the “empties” were stored. I looked at the driver in heart wrenching fear and asked, “What’s that?” He proceeded to deliver to me what he probably thought was a completely obligatory lesson. “Those are Nigger Dogs. Now you be careful not ta git too close to ’em, ya hear!” I sat still and confused in the passenger seat, almost unable to move from fear. He then looked me straight in the eye and asked, “You’re a nigger, ain’t cha?” Being only 12 years old and probably over 50 miles from anywhere recognizable in the countryside, I responded the only way I could, “Yes sir. I guess I am.” And that was one of my first practical lessons in the subtleties of Jim Crow and rural Southern culture.
Jim Akins Grand Rapids, MI