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I am a bit too young to provide such a definitive first hand recollection as some have provided. My own knowledge is derived from stories told to me as a young child about my parents life before I was born and their childhood and school days stories. I have a few personal memories of places and people I met as a very young child, but they predate my understanding of segregation and discrimination and thus the events of the time were not viewed with that type of scrutiny.
Based on that and the extreme differences in the family and friend recollections told me and those posted here, I can only surmise that even across the south there were great differences in how race relations were perceived and acted upon. I did not see the extreme segregation in my area at all. Blacks were at least tolerated in public even by those who harbored racial bigotry and hatred. Perhaps things had already changed by the time I was born in 62, but I suspect not that much so soon.
I grew up in San Antonio, TX and sure there were racial tensions in the early 60s and 70s. Some exist today. The concerns in those days were racial gangs and thugs more than concern of a black family moving into the neighborhood, although that was surely of some concern too. I can recall seeing black servers in a some of the few restaurants we went to in those days. There were not many, but we did not eat out much so my exposure was very limited.
I recall my father having black workers in the construction crews. Again, not many as the predominant worker was hispanic in the building trade even then. Hispanics did not get along well with blacks, even less so than whites, so it was a rare event to have them working side by side on the same crew. it was more common to have a black subcontractor or a black crew on a job rather than as part of a mixed race crew. I never got the idea in those days that it was because the blacks were any different than anyone else, just that the older hispanics would not work with them for some reason. I am sure now that many whites were probably objecting as well, but there was no institutionalized ostrization that I was made aware. I never heard "You just don't do that" like I hear in the movies.
Church was mixed with all races in attendance. The mix tended to reflect the neighborhood, but we would have some people that would travel out of their home neighborhood to attend.
There was lots of what would be today considered unacceptable racial slurs used by everyone. The N word was common, as well as cracker, whitey, *******, spick, greaser, *****, taco, oreo, ***** and lots of other words. At my age I never felt these were bad words, but I was surely aware when someone used them and was being hateful. It was not the word that conveyed that, it was the tone or context in how it was used.
Much the same way today that ***** can be a benign term or a hateful term simply by adjusting the tone and accent of th e pronounciation. I can remember hearing the difference in the term Mexican. There was a lot more animous toward hispanics in my childhood than there was toward blacks. Probably just because of the population ratios in my area.
I know my grandmother used some of the most dreadful hate speach ever villified in popular media today when she spoke of her best friends in childhood. She did not mean anything mean or disrespectful about them. Growing up in the Indian territory of Oklahoma she had many words for her childhood playmates that were out of vogue 60 years later. She grew up with them and they were just part of the vocabulary. Many years ago "gay" had a very different connotation than it does today. My grandmother, today if she were still with us, would likely talk about the gay man she saw laughing with the children at the parade. You know, the one with all the makeup and funny hair and nose. He made those silly ballon animals. He was so gay and cheery.
I think there was and is real discrimination. I don't think it was a pervasive everywhere as it was in some places in the south. I think even in the south it varied in intensity and application. Not every white person alive in 1950 had the same opinion or acted the same way in relation to racial relations. To paint an entire culture with the same brush is almost as bad and painting an entire race with the same stereotypical belief system.
I have experience in my adult life much more intense racial hatred in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Washington DC than I have in modern Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, Lousianna or Texas. I will grant you that Lousianna and Eastern Texas are the worst racially of any of the southern states I have been to, but Pennsylvania and New Jersy have them both beat easily in my personal experience.
My point is that history is clear that racial discrimination occurred, it is just not clear on exactly where it happened and did NOT happen or to what degree it occurred in every locale. It focuses on the extreme and worst cases, not the everyday and mundane experiences.
To my experience there were certainly people who disliked blacks and most other races other than their own. White, Hispanic, Vietnamese, whatever. It did not matter. They did not run around with flaming crosses or walking across the street to avoid being close (unless the person really smelled bad I do remember one vagrant people were avoiding one day). Given a choice on who to associate with, many would be picky. Sitting next to in a restaurant or in church? Not so much.
I do know that attitudes today are still very different in Huntsville and Birmingham Alabama than they are in San Antonio Texas. I have seen firsthand the preserved history in Birmingham and the physical hurt left over from the 50-60s. It is not a stretch for me to believe that things were worse then than my memory can supply, but given how far Birmingham and San Antonio are apart today it is difficult to believe things were ever that bad in San Antonio.
I rarely hear anyone say openly that they want to return to segregation.
What they do say is that they do not think that segregation should be prohibited by law. They also suggest that the economics of the situation are such that no segregated business would be able to attract enough customers to survive, so that the economics and social pressure would accomplish what we don't need the Civil Rights Act to do.
One questions the sincerity of their claims that they abhor racial discrimination in light of the fact that in living memory segregated businesses apparently paid no price for their discriminatory practices.
Current story about a restaurant in Enid, OK, where I spent some of my elementary school years circa 1959:
Quote:
Inside the restaurant, James proudly displays a Confederate flag.
“I’ve been in business 44 years, I think I can spot a freak or a f----t,” he added.
The restaurant’s logo says the eatery is where “great whites gather,” and promotes violence against Muslims and minorites.
Gard said that his clientele is “condoning” his views and behavior and views by continuing to patronize the eatery.
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Read more: Oklahoma restaurant owner comes under fire because he doesn't 'want gays around[/LEFT]
In 1963, my family took a car trip from Lawton, OK, through Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia to Jacksonville, FL. Whenever we stopped for gas or a bathroom break or a meal, my father had to first get out and check to see if we'd be admitted through the front door. We usually weren't (because as an Army senior NCO, he refused to go first to the dives).
Interestingly, I distinctly remember him saying in the larger cities that he was on the watch for a Howard Johnson's. It was many years later that I learned Howard Johnson's was a chain that had begun admitting blacks early on. I don't know when they began their policy of integration in the South, but it was common knowledge among blacks by 1963--HoJo was the place to go.
As late as the early 70s in Oklahoma, there were still "sundown towns" where no black person dared be within the city limits after sundown. My integrated high school sometimes played basketball or football in such towns. The firm rule: Go to those games only in the school buses, walk directly into the school from the bus, walk directly out of the school to the bus.
The last time I sat in segregated seating was in the movie theater of Sapulpa OK on July 20, 1969 (a date ironically famous for another reason--a great leap for mankind contrasted with one foot still mired in the past).
Sapulpa found itself in the national news in 2008 when the local newspaper refused to run the story that Obama had won the presidential election--it only reported that McCain had won the county vote.
Well traditionally Europeans had enslaved whites and all other races. But slavery has existed in most human cultures at one time or another.
About 99% of the Africans bought by the European slave traders were already slaves. About half of the African populace was slaves to the other half. When the Europeans came to the scene the African rulers and merchants sold off their slave stocks to the Europeans and realizing they needed more stock decided instead of killing their enemies or sacrificing them in religious rituals as traditional practice sold them to the Europeans.
The reason the Europeans came to the African kings and merchants was because the Arabs were charging too much for their slaves.
During the middle ages over a million white Europeans were taken as slaves by Arab raiders. A number of these were bought by the European churches freeing them. Of course whether you got your freedom back depended upon whether you were a Catholic or a Protestant and the church raised the money for you.
See the thing in the series Roots about the slave traders going inland is mostly fiction. Only about 1% of African slaves taken by European ships were done this. It just wasn't cost effective. It was way cheaper to go to a port and trade for slaves from the Africans directly. You could buy people with tobacco, clothes, guns.
Guns especially were popular since the Africans would use the guns to get more slaves to trade for more things like fine clothes.
Arabs and Africans sold other Africans with regularity, long before Europeans began the Trans-Atlantic trade in earnest.
However, when people bring up African slavery as a way to absolve (slightly) European imperialism, one most remember that the concept of slavery in African society was not the multi-generational variety that Euro's later imposed. Africans assumed that Europeans viewed slavery the same way they did: freeing slaves was not unheard of, and the condition was not passed down from parent to child.
It's similar to the Jews in Europe. They were treated poorly by all nations (Spain, England etc.) but Nazi Germany went for the gusto.
Lets not use Arab and African slavery as a way to excuse Europeans for their exploitative role in enslaving Africans and later colonizing those homelands.
" Africans assumed that Europeans viewed slavery the same way they did: freeing slaves was not unheard of, and the condition was not passed down from parent to child."
Not true. Many African slaves were used as sacrifices or used as slave soldiers. Slaves sold for money had the children be slaves as well. Sorry but slavery still exists in Africa today with several countries having 20% or more of the populace being slaves such as Mauritania. Arabs used female slaves in ways that made the Europeans disgusted because no female slave over the age of ten remained a virgin.
You still had Arab ships doing raids on African villages at the start of the 20th century to capture slaves. It was the US and UK navies who often had to intercept these ships and free the people who had been taken into slavery.
"Approximately 18 million Africans were delivered into the Islamic trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades between 650 and 1905. In the second half of the 15th century Europeans began to trade along the west coast of Africa, and by 1867 between 7 million and 10 million Africans had been shipped as slaves to the New World. "
" African slave owners demanded primarily women and children for labour and lineage incorporation and tended to kill males because they were troublesome and likely to flee. The transatlantic trade, on the other hand, demanded primarily adult males for labour and thus saved from certain death many adult males who otherwise would have been slaughtered outright by their African captors. After the end of the transatlantic trade, a few African societies at the end of the 19th century put captured males to productive work as slaves, but this usually was not the case before that time."
In the movies that depict the segregation era, we always see white workers telling black patrons that they would not be served. Were blacks ever hired for these positions to serve white customers?
Yes, they were. They were allowed to work, but not allowed in a customers. That even applied to black entertainers. One of the reasons a lot of black American jazz musicians moved to Paris during the first half of the 20th century is because they weren't allowed to sit at the places they worked in the US. They had to perform and get out.
I have experience in my adult life much more intense racial hatred in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Washington DC than I have in modern Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, Lousianna or Texas. I will grant you that Lousianna and Eastern Texas are the worst racially of any of the southern states I have been to, but Pennsylvania and New Jersy have them both beat easily in my personal experience.
I think it a little unfair to compare racist talk among some of the general population in the north with virulent hatred and discrimination practices throughout southern society and government. How many lynchings were carried out in the North? Jim Crow laws? Have you any idea of the kind of politicians southerners elected to our national govt in the 30's to 60's?
Here are a couple of US Senators from the South: Senator Theodore Bilbo, "Cotton Ed" Smith, and James Eastland.
Have any of you southerners heard of Jonathan Daniels? Daniels was a white northern protestant seminarian gunned down by a redneck racist "special deputy".
On August 14, 1965, Daniels, in a group of 29 protesters, went to picket whites-only stores in the small town of Fort Deposit, Alabama. All of the protesters were arrested and taken to jail in the nearby town of Hayneville. Five juvenile protesters were released the next day. The rest of the group were held for six days; they refused to accept bail unless everyone was bailed. Finally, on August 20, the prisoners were released without transport back to Fort Deposit. After release, the group waited by a road near the jail. Daniels with three others—a white Catholic priest and two female black protesters—went down the street to get a cold soft drink at Varner's Cash Store, one of the few local stores that would serve nonwhites. They were met at the front by Tom L. Coleman, an engineer for the state highway department and unpaid special deputy, who wielded a shotgun. The man threatened the group, and finally leveled his gun at seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed Sales down to the ground and caught the full blast of the gun. He was killed instantly. The priest, Richard F. Morrisroe, grabbed Joyce Bailey, the other protester, and ran. Coleman shot Morrisroe, wounding him in the lower back. Coleman was subsequently acquitted of manslaughter charges by an all-white jury. Richmond Flowers, Sr., the then Attorney General of Alabama, described the verdict as representing the "democratic process going down the drain of irrationality, bigotry and improper law enforcement." Coleman died at age 86 on June 13, 1997, without having faced any further prosecution.
The diff is in the South the whole society was in on it and agreed with it for the most part. Not so in the North. The South was an utter embarrassment to the rest of the USA in those days. Europe felt the same way about the South. In the 1960's my father worked with black guys that had moved up here from South Carolina. Based on stories he told they were very glad to be up here and not down there.
Here it is in a nutshell. Some people are just plain evil. That being said there are more good people than bad. For those who want to hear some stories of the past just do a search on you tube. Just understand US history has some bad people who did or allowed some bad things to go on while they were in power.
Native Americans were almost wiped off the planet. The family structure of the Blacks was devastated. The Asians of the West coast and around the US during the world war were sent off to camps. The Mexicans used to own California. Not to forget the trail of tears and other broken treaties. History is a mutha. It does get better but today it's the haves against the have nots.
The thing is at some point it all comes down to the love of money is the root to all evil.
Bill Cosby has a comedy bit about when he was playing sports and traveling in the south. The first time they were told they had to eat in kitchen they were upset and mad until they got in the kitchen and all the cooks were black. The cooks always heaped their plates full and fed them more than the white players were going to get.
Then once they went to a southern cafe to eat while on the road and they gladly headed to the kitchen only to be told every thing has changed and you don't have to eat in the kitchen anymore. He said they began to bawl and protest "we want to eat in the kitchen."
Also you might remember the book recently published by a black man who went under cover as a bus boy in an all White country club. I believe he was a lawyer. He said all the Whites spoke disparagingly about black people in his presence as if he was not even standing there.
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