Great: when?
This, extract below, is the world I grew up in. America was not Great. It's a continuing amazement to me that, whatever we grow up in, at least if we are On Top, we think that's the way the world is supposed to be; it never occurred to us that it was wrong, that we were wrong, the depth of inhuman immorality. For some reason I realized it my first year at college 1953-54, although the University of Florida was an all-White institution my years there.
Told here several Times in the past fifteen years, my night on a bus, August 1954, from Panama City to Birmingham. Eighteen going on nineteen, I had a window seat in the middle of the bus, which was nearly empty when we left Panama City. The bus began to fill as we stopped at various places to pick up passengers. By the Time we left Marianna the bus was full, or nearly so, with Black passengers standing in the aisle. I motioned for a Black mother holding an infant to take the empty seat beside me, and she did. On the empty dark highway north of Marianna the bus suddenly slammed to a halt. The driver stood up and made his way down the aisle. Stopping midway, he pointed at me and ordered me to take a seat at the front of the bus. I said, "I'm fine." He said, "Get up and move to a front seat or I'll put you off my bus." Embarrassed, all eyes on me, and ashamed for giving in, I complied. In my life history, I count it the night I became a Black person.
Prominent on University Avenue, my fraternity at Florida was housed in an old-Time Southern mansion with a huge Confederate battle flag hanging over the front entryway and sidewalk. Large portrait of Robert E Lee over the fireplace in the main front room. With General Lee as hero and life example of Southern Gentleman, we were proudly, singularly, specifically White and Southern. An "Old South Ball" the spring semester every year, when we dressed in Confederate gray uniforms for our dates. The brothers were nice, and when I went back to Gainesville for my sophomore year I stuck with it. But my junior year I just didn't return to the fraternity house, doing other things as an upperclassman, mainly working for the university's Food Service Division as a banquet supervisor and learning to supervise other students. The fraternity has long since evolved with the Times along with the rest of the South. But for any number of reasons it just wasn't for me at the Time.
When I entered the U S Navy as an officer candidate and then new ensign in 1958, my first ship was in Norfolk, Virginia. Integrating the state's public schools was all the news, and the forming of charter academies for White children to avoid going to school with Black children. When we are certain that we are right and they are wrong, we'll do anything to preserve right and rights. During that era, there was an Episcopal parish in St Augustine, Florida that had a major set-to with their rector over allowing, welcoming Blacks, and the vestry locking the rector out. I'm sure it wasn't the only case, Episcopalians can be as certitudinous as anyone.
This is an old, old topic with me, including on my +Time blog. I'll just let it go at that even as I wonder when and where it was that America was Great that we want to Make it back there Again? It certainly wasn't in my growing up years, but I thought we were getting there in recent decades as compassion and lovingkindness seemed to be surfacing even in the political sphere.
Uncle Bubba closing this morning grieving that two more children are dead in the madness.
LHM CHM LHM
T89&c
Below from DelanceyPlace
Today's encore selection -- from The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. Jim Crow: "It is unknown precisely who Jim Crow was or if someone by that name actually existed. There are several stories as to the term's origins. It came into public use in the 1830s after Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New York-born itinerant white actor, popularized a song-and-dance routine called 'the Jim Crow' in minstrel shows across the country. He wore blackface and ragged clothes and performed a jouncy, palsied imitation of a handicapped black stable hand he had likely seen in his travels singing a song about 'Jumping Jim Crow.' Jim Crow was said to be the name of either the stable hand or his owner living in Kentucky or Ohio. Rice became a national sensation impersonating a crippled black man, but died penniless in 1860 of a paralytic condition that limited his speech and movement by the end of his life. "The term caught the fancy of whites across the country and came to be used as a perjorative for colored people and things related to colored people, and, by 1841, was applied to the laws to segregate them. The first such laws were passed not in the South, but in Massachusetts, as a means of designating a railcar set apart for black passengers. Florida, Mississippi, and Texas enacted the first Jim Crow laws in the South right after the Confederates lost the Civil War -- Florida and Mississippi in 1865 and Texas in 1866. The northerners who took over the South during Reconstruction repealed those hastily passed laws. The Federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 explicitly outlawed segregation. But the northerners who were there to enforce the law retreated by the late 1870s and left the South to its own devices. As the twentieth century approached, the South resurrected Jim Crow. "Streetcars, widely in use from the 1880s, had open seating in the South, until Georgia demanded separate seating by race in 1891. By 1905, every southern state, from Florida to Texas, outlawed blacks from sitting next to whites on public conveyances. The following year, Montgomery, Alabama, went a step further and required streetcars for whites and streetcars for blacks. By 1909, a new curfew required blacks to be off the streets by 10 P.M. in Mobile, Alabama. By 1915, black and white textile workers in South Carolina could not use the same 'water bucket, pails, cups, dippers or glasses,' work in the same room, or even go up or down a stairway at the same time. "This new reality forced colored parents to search for ways to explain the insanity of the caste system to their uncomprehending children. When two little girls in 1930s Florida wanted to know why they couldn't play on a swing like the white children or had to sit in a dirty waiting room instead of the clean one, their father, the theologian Howard Thurman, had to think about how best to make them understand. 'The measure of a man's estimate of your strength,' he finally told them, 'is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.' "All told, these statutes only served to worsen race relations, alienating one group from the other and removing the few informal interactions that might have helped both sides see the potential good and humanity in the other. ... "There were days when whites could go to the amusement park and a day when blacks could go, if they were permitted at all. There were white elevators and colored elevators (meaning the freight elevators in back); white train platforms and colored train platforms. There were white ambulances and colored ambulances to ferry the sick, and white hearses and colored hearses for those who didn't survive whatever was wrong with them. "There were white waiting rooms and colored waiting rooms in any conceivable place where a person might have to wait for something, from the bus depot to the doctor's office. A total of four restrooms had to be constructed and maintained at significant expense in any public establishment that bothered to provided any for colored people: one for white men, one for white women, one for colored men, and one for colored women. In 1958, a new bus station went up in Jacksonville, Florida, with two of everything, including two segregated cocktail lounges, 'lest the races brush elbows over a martini,' The Wall Street Journalreported. The president of Southeastern Greyhound told the Journal, 'It frequently costs fifty percent more to build a terminal with segregated facilities.' But most southern businessmen didn't dare complain about the extra cost. 'The question is dynamite,' the president of a southern theater told the Journal. 'Don't even say what state I'm in.' "The was a colored window at the post office in Pensacola, Florida, and there were white and colored telephone booths in Oklahoma. White and colored went to separate windows to get their license plates in Indianola, Mississippi, and to separate tellers to make their deposits at the First National Bank of Atlanta. There were taxicabs for colored people and taxicabs for white people in Jacksonville, Birmingham, Atlanta, and the entire state of Mississippi. Colored people had to be off the streets and out of the city by 8 P.M. in Palm Beach and Miami Beach. "Throughout the South, the conventional rules of the road did not apply when a colored motorist was behind the wheel. If he reached an intersection first, he had to let the white motorist go ahead of him. He could not pass a white motorist on the road no matter how slowly the white motorist was going and had to take extreme caution to avoid an accident because he would likely be blamed no matter who was at fault. In everyday interactions, a black person could not contradict a white person or speak unless spoken to first. A black person could not be the first to offer to shake a white person's hand. A handshake could occur only if a white person so gestured, leaving many people having never shaken hands with a person of the other race."
|
