Jim Crow was P.C.
I grew up in southern Florida (Miami and Miami Beach). I have vivid memories as a child during the 1950s of being very disturbed that the “colored” children had shack schools, filthy public drinking fountains and had to live behind a big wall in downtown Miami. Adult people of color were not allowed on the streets of our white neighborhood without an identification card. If they were around after dark they were at risk of being abducted by high school boys on a “coon hunt.” Black performers in Miami Beach hotels were not allowed to eat with the guests, use the pool or the hotel amenities. Now, when I hear Caucasians deride “p.c.”, political correctness, I am very angry at the joke some white people have made of the civil rights struggle. I am quick to remind them that when I was a child, segregation and all the danger and degradation that went with it, was very, very “p.c.”.
Barbara Bradshaw Seattle WA
That was Unreal!
I remember Jim Crow: born in ’47, grew up during the 50s and 60s.I remember getting the used text books from the white schools while attending school in Louisiana. How white men would have black women “on the side” and if you dated them you would be severely beaten or come “missing”. I never knew of a single white person who was kind or considerate. My grandmother, who raised me, worked cleaning houses for the wife of the school board director of our town. When I was preparing to go to college, the director’s wife tried her best to talk my grandmother out of sending me to college. Telling her I did not need to go and such. Can you believe that? Oh, but my grannie knew the importance of an education! She had instilled the need for an education in me long ago. There are many more things to relate to you.
Trane Washington Garland, TX
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