Brutality on Display

Throughout my life, my mother has often said to me that she “won’t allow someone to cry alone in her presence.” With such a role model in my life, it’s no surprise that I grew up being a person who is acutely sensitive to the pain of those around him. It is very easy for me to see a person in pain and have an immediate and gut-wrenching reaction to it. This made reading Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright and The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes difficult for me, but a valuable experience. I had always thought of Jim Crow as a terrible thing, but I had trouble understanding how emotionally terrifying it truly was. The narratives of life in the Jim Crow South, living in fear of violence for the smallest slight or none at all, affected me very deeply.

Sarah in “Long Black Song” and her tragic tale affected me gravely.[1] In the story, Sarah is watching her child at home while her husband is in town selling cotton, when a traveling salesman visits her house and eventually rapes her. I had studied Jim Crow before, and I understood how rape was used by Whites in the South, both as a tool against African American women and as an excuse for killing African American men. I had never before been able to truly understand this, however, until Richard Wright’s story engendered an emotional connection within me. This story allowed me to feel true anger and outrage over what had been allowed to occur in the nation I call home.

Art from the "Hateful Things" traveling exhibit from the Jim Crow Museum

The only other time that I was confronted with the pain and terror of living in the Jim Crow South, was on a visit during my undergrad at Central Michigan University to the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. Professor David Pilgrim, Ph.D. founded the museum and curates it today. Dr. Pilgrim is an African American man who grew up in Mobile, Alabama and has collected racist memorabilia since he was a young man. Dr. Pilgrim explains in an essay on the museum’s website that he has collected racist memorabilia because of how deeply he hates it and he decided to found the Jim Crow Museum in an effort to “use objects of intolerance to teach tolerance.”[2] The collection at the Museum is extensive and often as troubling as the stories by Richard Wright and Langston Hughes.

One thing that I have never been able to understand, and most likely never will, is the desire to collect such objects. I have read Dr. Pilgrim’s essay and I can recite why he collects such hateful things, but I don’t think I will ever be able to see an object that elicits such negative emotions within me and desire to own them. I am just thankful that there are such people out there like Dr. Pilgrim, because using these objects to teach tolerance and assure such terrible things as Jim Crow never return is far more important than avoiding the pain of revisiting such topics.

 

[1] Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children, (HarperCollins: Pymble, Australia) 2009

[2] Dr. David Pilgrim, “Why I Collect Racist Objects”, http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/menu.htm

Skeletons in the American Closet

Imagine that you are on vacation with your family.  You want to have a “historical experience.”  Maybe you want to go to Colonial Williamsburg and celebrate America’s colonial roots.  Or maybe viewing the Star Spangled Banner at the National Museum of American History is more your style.  Whatever it is, most visitors to museums and historic sites want to hear an uplifting and inspirational story.  What about institutions like the U.S. Holocaust Museum you say?  While it is much “heavier” history, at the end Americans can feel a certain pride at being the liberators.  Do you think you would visit a museum called The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia? Well you could if you wished.  It is housed at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, MI.  Though it is uncomfortable history for most Americans, it represents an important lesson- that we can learn from our own mistakes.  In addition to the shining moments in America’s history, we must also acknowledge our own flawed past and the lessons that can be derived from it.

The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia is located in a small 500 square-foot room on the Ferris State campus.  Dr. David Pilgrim, a sociology professor and Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, is both donor and curator of the over 4,000 objects housed here. He envisions the museum “as an international leader in the anti-racism movement,” however he acknowledges that the small institution still has a long way to go. [1]   Currently, Dr. Pilgrim views the museum as a “learning and teaching laboratory.”  It is not open to the public on a daily basis, but visits are instead incorporated into academic courses, workshops, and seminars.  Future plans for the museum will hopefully change this, providing a new location with 2,100 square-feet of space for exhibits and multi-media displays that tell the story of Jim Crow.

One of the museum’s frequently-asked-questions is, “If we forget about the past, will not these racist images die?” In response, Dr. Pilgrim states that, “The items in the museum are still being sold. More significantly, all of the items in the museum are still being created. Yes! These Jim Crow images are still being created and distributed. Some are created as fake antiques. Some are created as cheap reproductions that do not pretend to be originals. And, some are new racist items which use old Jim Crow images.” [2]  The museum site also references the continuance of hate crimes, such as the brutal 1998 murder of James Byrd, Jr.  In Through the Eyes of Others, which also references the Byrd murder, authors Sorin and Aimonovitch present an even more current episode of racial intimidation in 2007 when a noose was placed on the door of a Columbia University Professor.  They state that “the presence of a noose has become a symbol of intimidation and hate against black Americans that persists.” [3] Similarly, the Jim Crow Museum recognizes the negative sentiments that still abound in the country and the continual production and sale of racist items and imagery.

For the Jim Crow Museum, telling the story of violence, anti-black imagery, and segregation is a necessary step in learning from and moving beyond Jim Crow.  When seminal author Richard Wright reflected on his “Jim Crow education” in his work Uncle Tom’s Children, he recalled both “brutally cruel” and “subtly cruel” treatment. [4]   Similarly, the Jim Crow Museum focuses on how racist depictions and social codes helped reinforce and encourage brutality.  They provide information on minstrel shows, the etiquette norms of Jim Crow, and examples of caricatures like the coon, golliwog, and mammy.  These portrayals and standards served as tools to dehumanize blacks and create societal apathy.  It is for this reason that Dr. Pilgrim argues that the shocking and offensive artifacts at the Jim Crow Museum should be preserved and displayed.

In an even broader sense, the Jim Crow Museum hopes to expand its focus beyond solely African Americans to discriminatory presentations of other groups in popular culture, including Asian American, homosexuals, and poor whites.  The beginnings of this effort can be seen in the museum’s travelling exhibition, “Them.” Comparing these ambitious visions with the current short-term goals of the museum, such as digitizing their collection, illustrates the true breadth of what Dr. Pilgrim is working towards.

So now that you know more about the institution, I will ask again- would you visit the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia?

[1] “Vision of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University,” http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/vision.htm.

[2] “FAQ,” http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/FAQ.htm.

[3] Gretchen Sullivan Sorin and Mary C. Aimonovitch, Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art (Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum, 2008), 51.

[4] Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2004), 13.

“How come yuh didn’t hide?” she asked me. “How come yuh awways fightin’?”

The above Image is featured on American  Radio Works Remembering Jim Crow

This question must be one that Wright asked himself throughout his life. But I wonder if he also asked himself: “Whay am I hiding? Whay ain’t I fightin’?”[1]

In this autobiographical sketch we follow the litany of injustices where Wright is forced to follow the insane pattern of Jim Crowe which always leads to a position of loss by African Americans.

Doing his best to follow the rules in his first job, he believes he is doing the right thing by following the established rules of saying yessir, and standing “straight and neat before the boss.”  But before he knows it he has misread the pattern of place, thinking mistaking his Boss’ assertion that he “like to try to learn something around here”[2] to mean a trade. In reality he finds when he inquires about the process of the work, or how to increase his own skill, the lesson is how to black in the south and work with whites without being brutalized. Except this is only a position that whites feel exists. A Black man can never escape from being who he is so therefore he winds up as Wright does in-between two ignorant white men where both answers to a question can only lead to his banishment.

Faced with his co-workers and tormentors Wright was forced to voluntarily flee to save his own skin.  He hid, and relented in the situation, but the paradox is, his mother and white society would see that as an instance of “not hiding and fightin’”.

In reading the stories in Uncle Tom’s Children, and being faced repeatedly with the brutal endings, I think the class was repeatedly taken aback. I know I asked the question, “Were there any good whites?” But these stories are products of his life. Of the cruel realities that have made him feel guilty and foolish after doing all he could to follow the rules of his “Jim Crow Education.”   The stories are an attempt to come into the open, and exposing the violence and desperation is Wright’s personal fight against oppression.

I think Wrights answer to his mother is “because I can do nothing else. Therefore I will do it well.”

---

[1] Wright, R. (1971). The ethics of living Jim Crow. In S. Cahill & M. F. Cooper (Eds.), The urban reader (pp. 167-177). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

[2] Ibid

“S-O-U-T-H-E-R-N HISTURHEE”

Sign at a park in Grosse Pointe, Mich. (From "Sundown Towns")

I am struggling with an issue which is personal to me: the complicity of all people in the South for the horrors of Jim Crow and all things racist. I have spent time reviewing and researching information that confirms for me that racism was not peculiar to the south and that the north doesn’t   just get a pass from it.

The Book  Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James W. Loewen got me on the road to feeling better about my checkered past.  In the work James Loewen shares his comprehensive study of thousands of cities across America which may or may not be  “sundown towns.” Loween suggests that   starting with Reconstruction and continuing until the fair-housing legislation of the late 1960s — whites in America created thousands of whites-only towns, commonly known as “sundown towns” owing to the signs often posted at their city limits that warned, as one did in Hawthorne, Calif., in the 1930s: “Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Set On YOU In Hawthorne.” [1]

The work is interesting because it documents case after case where there was organized an institutionalized opposition to even allowing African Americans to pass through certain communities.

There is also a fascinating website that accompanies it where you can manipulate a searchable map of sundown communities across America. Notable places of interest for me were Cooperstown and its acknowledged unpleasant past with Minstrel Shows and Levittown, home of America’s first subdivision where Levittown (on LI) contained a clause in the lease for rental properties: “The tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.” [2]

Each city page includes methods of exclusion, a demographic picture from the census and some contain actual reports from “historians.” I am unsure if the site itself is good history but it makes for interesting reading and points toward evidence of a lingering form of racism that isn’t quite lynching, but perhaps the suggestion of its possibilities.

A site that I would use to explore this  nagging question for both black and white  in my classes when I was teaching middle school is from PBS based on its six hour television series Africans in America. It is full of wonderful interviews, important text and images that allowed me to demonstrate to my students, white and black, the universality of the issues of race in our society.  It also had conclusive evidence that it was not only the south that had and continues to have issues with race.  The children I taught were like me. Their forebears came from the surrounding country. At some point during the six week unit we did on race and ethnicity in the United States a child would ask the question, but what about my family? Were we part of the problem? Did we demonstrate? Did we sit in, burn down or stand by? They struggled with the question of complicity and year after year we never arrived at the answer. This site would help to inform the thinking or the realities of what life was like at the time but it could not answer their questions.

I think it is human to want to find reasons for, perhaps be able to live with the actions taken by people in the past, especially when these people may be your own.  Not the heinous examples of terror played out in the pages of the Wright stories and in towns across the south, but the acceptance of an endemically evil system that pervades every aspect of society and a failure to speak out or act. But in the end you don’t. Your Granny still didn’t do anything. Your Uncle still makes those jokes and your cousins taught you your first racist joke. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know that  anyone gets a pass.

[1] James W. Loewen. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism ( New York: New Press, 2005) 205

[2] Possible Sundown Towns in NY http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/sundowntownsshow.php?id=272. 03/28/2010

“Strange Fruit” Four Ways

I’m always a bit ashamed to admit that my memory is quite terrible.  Whereas my siblings and friends all seem to remember the details of their childhood, I always have trouble recalling anything more than vague recollections.  There are some memories that have stuck with me though, and one of those is the first time I heard Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit.”  I don’t remember exactly how old I was (although I believe it must have been the late elementary or early middle school years) or where (I assume in school) or even why I listened to it (again, probably school related), but what I have never forgotten is the absolute feeling of horror as my young mind realized what Billie Holiday was singing about.  To this day I have a hard time even listening to the song, and I always have that initial feeling when I do. 

Race and Place

Trying to locate a museum exhibit or online resource that addressed the issues raised in the reading for this week proved difficult.  Unfortunately, it seems as if the story of African American interest in Communism during the 1920s and 30s has not had the broad appeal of the Civil Rights movement, Black radicalism, or the era of Jim Crow.  Seeing that the African American Communist experience was not being represented, I broadened my search.  What I found was a wonderful project called Race and Place: An African American Community in the Jim Crow South: Charlottesville, VA.

The Race and Place website is a collaborative project between the Virginia Center for Digital History and the Carter G. Woodson Institute of African and Afro-American Studies.  The mission of the project is “to connect race with place by understanding what it was like to live, work, pray, learn, and play in the segregated South. We plan to develop manuscript collections and oral histories of African Americans in the segregation period, and construct the social, political, and economic history to understand race in the context of place.”[1]

Through maps, oral histories, photographs, political materials, and newspapers, this site provides a detailed look at the political and social life of the African American community of Charlottesville, Virginia in the era of Jim Crow.  One particularly informative section was a timeline comparing African American involvement in state vs. local politics.  The timeline shows that while African Americans continued to lose ground in the state political system, they remained active on the local level, fighting for voting rights and participation in the Republican Party.

Republican Party poster urging African Americans to come out and vote, 1901.

Another section providing useful information about the political activities of the African American community in Charlottesville is the newspapers section.  Here, one finds “selected, transcribed articles from two major African-American owned newspapers–the Charlottesville Reflector and the Richmond Planet.”[2]  A quick search turned up several articles that addressed the issue of Communism, and it seems as if this particular community did not concern itself with the movement.  One editorial from The Reflector in 1934 shows that even in this politically active town, the color of one’s skin led to disenfranchisement whether you were Republican, Democrat, or Communist.  The story related in the article is about the cancellation of Richard B. Moore’s, a nationally known Communist, lecture at the University of Virginia.  According the editor, the professor:

did not order the closing of all public buildings to the speaker because of what he may have said against Senator Carter Class or in favor of Karl Marx. No, because Communist speakers have been there before and have, in true Communist fashion, freely discussed all of the “untouchables”, from the existing dual wage scale in Virginia to jury pondering in Alabama, and they were made welcome.

Richard Moore is a Negro and consequently, he was barred for that reason.[3]

[1]Race and Place: An African American Community in the Jim Crow South: Charlottesville, VA. http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/raceandplace/about_main.html

[2]ibid

[3]“What Would Jefferson Think?” The Reflector. May 26, 1934 http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/raceandplace/news_main.html

Beyond the Grave…

“He passed a small graveyard surrounded by a high iron picket fence. A white graveyard, he thought and snickered bitterly. Lawd Gawd in Heaven, even the dead cant be together!” [1]

In Richard Wright’s novella Fire and Cloud, Reverend Taylor notes the racial divide that crosses the fundamental basis of Christianity as he journeys back from near death.  Perhaps the most steadfast belief that could create a common ground between whites and African Americans is a belief in a higher power and eternal life beyond the grave.  But even in death, racism still exists.  Academic studies of segregated cemeteries are surprisingly limited.  The practice by law should have ended with the 1866 Civil Rights Act which states,

“All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every State and Territory to make an enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, penalties, taxes, licenses, and exactions of every kind, and to no other.” [2]

But Jim Crow laws allowed traditionally white public cemeteries to refuse the sale of burial plots to African Americans.  In the 1950s it was estimated that 90% of public cemeteries nationwide included racially restrictive rules. [3]  It was not until 1969 when a dispute erupted in Birmingham, Alabama over the sale of a burial plot for an African American soldier killed in Vietnam that the courts determined the racial restrictions unconstitutional. [4]

Although the practice of segregated cemeteries has been legally abolished, it was alarming to find that the practice is still being carried out socially even today.  An unidentified female murder victim became the subject of a racially charged situation in rural Texas in 2008, when two judges fought over where and by whom the woman should be buried.  The case was initially handled by DeWayne Charleston, the county’s first black justice of the peace, who stated,

“In my time as J.P., I’ve come to understand that I am to call black funeral homes to pick up black people, white funeral homes to pick up white people…I didn’t want to cross that line when I was dealing with white bodies and the families were grieving, because I didn’t want to make a political point out of a case like that.  But here was a case where the body was unidentified.  I believed this was it, this was the opportunity for the cemeteries to be integrated without offending anyone.” [5]

The county’s top elected official, Judge Owen Ralston, who is white, argued that the funeral for the unidentified women would cost much less when handled by the Canon Funeral Home, traditionally used by whites.  The woman’s body was eventually buried by the Canon Funeral Home, but Judge Charleston noted of the woman and his desire to exhume her body, “…if nothing else, the Lord sent her to be laid to rest in Texas for this purpose, for a milestone…she can help heal the racial divide in our community.” [6]

Was Richard Wright admonishing the act of segregating the dead though the thoughts of Reverend Taylor?  I wonder if Wright would accept the current trend of being buried within a socially constructed segregation based on religious or church affiliations and pre-purchased family plots.  Should cemeteries be forcibly integrated by those who are living?  Does it all boil down to a final personal choice that should remain free of judgment? What happens, as in the case of the unidentified woman in Texas, when the person is unable to express their final wishes?

[1] Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children, (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), 203.

[2] Find US Law, “Civil Rights Act of 1866 & Civil Rights Act of 1871,” http://finduslaw.com/civil_rights_act_of_1866_civil_rights_act_of_1871_cra_42_u_s_code_21_1981_1981a_1983_1988.

[3] Kitty Rogers, “Integrating the City of the Dead: The Integration of Cemeteries and the Evolution of Property Law, 1900-1969,” Alabama Law Review 56, no. 1153 (2005).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Steve Friess, “Burial Exposes Racial Rift in Texas,” New York Times, July 5, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/us/05race.html.

[6] Ibid.

Seeing Red.

What is freedom when you cannot do anything? The theme that I recognized throughout this week’s readings was the intolerable claustrophobic environment that restricted any sort of political movement in the black community. The southern white population offered no end to the continuous harassment and restricted living conditions of African Americans, yet wondered in shock and often disbelief why African Americans rose up in various ways against them.

Communist Party poster from the early 20th century. Looks promising.

Many African Americans looked to Communism in the early twentieth century because it claimed to be a system of government that recognized no class or race as superior; the very definition of Communism is founded in the ideal that all people have the same national goal of equality in life and work. Black southerners such as Lovett Fort-Whiteman traveled to Moscow and were amazed at the equal treatment they received from their comrades.

The evil done in the name of Communism by party leaders has tainted (and perhaps even destroyed) the original goal of this system of government. I can understand why this system appealed to those African Americans (and whites as well) living in the 1920s and 1930s American South. In a world that abused their rights, forced them to work overtime for little pay, and showed them no respect, as in the case of Lovett Fort-Whiteman’s friend Oliver Golden, Communism was an answer. It promised to bring change to the lives of African Americans, many of whom were educated but found jobs “incommensurate with their educations.” [1]

The Lord or Lenin

Reading Richard Wright’s “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star,” I was struck by the negative portrayal of Christianity and the Church within both stories.  The picture that Wright paints in these stories seems to be a reflection of his own life experiences.  In “Bright and Morning Star” the protagonist, Sue, finds a new religion in the teachings of the communist party.  The talk of her communist sons,

ripped from her startled eyes her old vision, and image by image had given her a new one, different but great and strong enough to fling her into the light of another grace.  The wrongs, and sufferings of black men had taken the place of Him nailed to the Cross; the meager beginnings of the party had become another Resurrection, and the hate of those who would destroy her new faith had quickened in her a hunger to feel how deeply her new strength went.[1]

Sue found that the “sufferings” of life could not be fixed by the Church and turns to the message of the communist party for answers.  Her fictional experience mirrors the real life experience of Wright which he recounts in his autobiography:

Before I had been made to go to church, I had given God’s existence a sort of tacit assent, but after having seen His creatures serve Him at first hand, I had my doubts.  My faith, such as it was, was welded to the common realities of life.[2]

However, while Wright was obviously turned off by the Church and its teachings, his attitude seems out of touch with the message of the civil rights movement that would come later under Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr's church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta GA.

King recognized the power of the Church community and preached a message that was rooted in biblical principles. “God grant that ministers, and lay leaders, and civic leaders, and businessmen, and professional people all over the nation will rise up and use the talent and the finances that God has given them, and lead the people on toward the Promised Land of freedom with rational, calm, nonviolent means.”[4]  Perhaps Wright and other black communists failed to recognize the real power of the Church as was vehicle for change in Jim Crow south.  This leads me to question how much of Wright’s communist portrayal is indicative of the time, and how much of it is just an extension of his own beliefs.

[1]Richard Wright, “Bright and Morning Star,” in Uncle Tom’s Children. (New York: Harperperenial, 1991), 225

[2]Richard Wright, Black Boy. (New York: Literary Classics of America, 1991), 110.

[3]Ebenezer Baptist Chuch, http://commons.wikimedia.org

[4]Martin Luther King Jr. “A Realistic Look at the Question of Progress in the Area of Race Relations,” MLK online, http://www.mlkonline.net/progress.html

Safety in Numbers?

During this past week’s class, I asked if an overwhelming black population could dissuade whites from carrying out lynchings. Without being able to talk about any specific studies, we deferred to the age-old example of a powerful but numerically inferior elite exerting control over the masses.

I decided to look into spatial distributions of lynchings compared to population demographics.  Let’s just say the findings were not what I was hoping for. In Mississippi there was no protection in numbers. Instead, there seemed to be more targets for lynch mobs.

With 539 blacks lynched, Mississippi had the largest total number of any state from 1882-1968. Screen shot via "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow" interactive maps.