Southern Black Americans Were Angry. Historian Who Lived It Presents The Jim Crow South

why didn't people get angry there was every reason to be angry and if you look back now at the pictures of black life in the Jim Crow era South I get angry right now people weren't angry at least for two reasons first people who are severely oppressed generally do not lead slave revolts against their masters those who lead the revolts are Rarities oppression does not create Mass outrage and contempt which leads to Violent action generally what happens is that in a very repressive and oppressed Society you get docility and that doesn't mean that the people who are oppressed are unaware that they are being oppressed of course they understand that but they also understand another thing that there are terrible risks which must be run in order to challenge that system that the black man or the black woman who stands up and denounces the absence of participatory democracy at the county level will end up in a gutter or will be killed or will be run out of that County and that's a reality that every young black boy and girl who grew up in the Jim Crow era South understood the risks that were involved in standing up to oppression were enormous it also meant losing your families perhaps or moving to the north so there were just basic costs the second Factor was a factor of what I call respect that is the southern black life Southern black society was profoundly conservative I don't mean in the sense of of the televangelists of the 80s I mean in the sense that black life was conservative in that people had a profound respect for the Elders of the black community and for Authority within the Afro-American community that the Elder said one thing you listen to older people you respected them to be old meant to have acquired a body of wisdom or knowledge in the sense of the older afro-americans was that change would come about at best only through gradual means you've been watching a clip from Manning Maribel I'm David Hoffman an independent documentary filmmaker and I did that interview with Manning back in 1989 as part of a series that I was making for television on the 1960s so before I play the rest of the interview I just want you to know that I told each interviewed subject including Manning say what you experienced say how you see it just say it don't be afraid because future Generations will want to know what you think and what you saw and how you see it now in 1989. stick with us till the end and I'll tell you what my 16 year old son thought when he saw what you're about to see segregation segregation created a kind of schizophrenia on one hand you had just a totalitarian Society severe repression my wife's community of Walton County Georgia you had more than a dozen lynchings literally after 1945 through the 1980s you had severe economic and political repression aimed against people of color on the other hand you had even within the bowels of Oppression as it were you had the ability of people to carve for themselves a sense of community which inculcated a sense of mission and constructive Family Values not in the kind of narrow individualistic and materialistic sense that one saw in white middle class America but in the sense of even within the midst of of poverty even in the midst of illiteracy the people had value that you nurtured young ones and you cared for the old ones that you gave the children a sense of Pride and dignity and who they were that people set aside several weeks in February to instill in their young in their young people a sense of what Black History Month was and pride in Black Heroes and heroines within the Afro-American past segregation meant not only the hardships and it meant not only the Lost opportunity and it meant not only the the terrible anxiety when you knew you were ready or prepared for a position and you didn't get it and you had to go home and tell your wife or your children why you didn't get a position but it was also a sharing time it was also a sense of community and a sense of collective accomplishment in the face of just terrible odds children during the 1950s black kids had a clearer sense of who they were as African Americans not in a kind of didactic sense that where you learn identity from textbooks or from history lessons but rather through the culture of daily life through the patterns of resistance where there were members of your family everybody knew about who had stood up to the man and had lived to tell the tale it gave us a sense of pride in who we were and that Pride sustained us through the hard times and that was what segregation was about too and the irony is is that once that period ended after you break down the walls of Jim Crow Jim Crow was always a perverse a a kind of Jim Crow was always um an oppression that was just unfathomable for most white Americans Jim Crow was always a curse but it was always a perverse blessing and it's perversed it's perversion was that it destroyed a sense uh within the among white Americans that black Americans were actually their equals but it was also a blessing in that it created a barrier kept out a lot of negative cultural and social as well as political influences that otherwise would have affected Black America not that I find anything redeeming about Jim Crow if there is anything that could be said about this perverse blessing one could say that by creating a barrier around the black community it gave us a better sense of who we were what our culture was and developing institutions that responded across class lines to the problems and daily issues that confronted most black Americans when you talk about the south in the period of the 1950s it's difficult not to use the term totalitarian the very nature of Jim Crow the very essence of what segregation was about was a type of non-discriminatory discrimination in that it affected everyone regardless of your education regardless of your income the person who was black was the person who sat in the back of the bus and so consequently all afro-americans regardless of their background regardless of their training you know vocation regardless of their income felt the sting of segregation and felt it not only in great ways but in small ways segregation was also incredibly Petty in that it affected you in ways that are difficult for my children to Fathom today for example when I was a kid going to Tuskegee Alabama in the Summers where my parents my grandparents lived and grandmother and uh my relatives live in Tuskegee Alabama they had stores along the main Square where blacks were permitted to shop but you had to follow a bizarre ritual of what you could try on and what you couldn't try on you couldn't try on a cap but you could try on a coat if you were black in the summertime and you wanted an ice cream cone you weren't allowed to go inside the Dairy Queen and sit down with everybody else beneath the fan you had to stand outside segregation meant that for me as a kid you weren't allowed to go to the swimming pool you had to stand outside behind the fence and watch white children enjoy themselves while you sweated under a hot summer sun that was the nature of segregation it affected you in every possible way every single day the second thing that strikes me about living as a black person in the south in the 1950s was the incredible warmth and complexity of the black community in this period people who experience a kind of holistic oppression find ways to develop an enclave find ways to develop values that nurture young children so that they are not given the message and internalize the message that we are nobody they're given a message that your life has value that what you're about is respected by by us even if it's not by the outside world and they're also given one other value a sense of dignity and a sense of mission that is it is your obligation to prepare yourself to be the best that you can be probably an educational culture in the south more than ten thousand mothers and fathers said this to their children every day that you have to be not just as good as the white boy or white girl you've got to be twice as good because segregation because of racism you're not going to be given the opportunity to compete to be given the job so if you do have the possibility of a position if you do have the chance to make it then you have to be absolutely prepared so there was a seriousness toward life there was a seriousness toward responsibility which was Collective education was the secular religion of the black community people believed more in education than they believed in the than anything else education was the backbone of the community it gave us a sense of not only the mission but it also gave us a sense of possibility education was a religion in that afro-americans since the Civil War through the middle of the 20th century had been denied opportunities in white higher education for so many decades we weren't permitted to attend the best white high schools public schools our high schools and secondaries are and elementary schools got the worst materials but within the midst of this kind of uh the absence of of quality materials and within this midst afro-americans still gained a sense of learning and applied that to the Daily problems that confronted them within their communities they developed educational institutions that they that they felt uh which they control themselves such as Tuskegee and Fisk and and Howard University what message did the black kids in the in the 50s and in the South get about America were they told that America was alive we were taught that America was jaundiced faced that we were taught I remember as a kid in the second grade one of the first poems I Learned was America land of the free and home of the slave Langston Hughes wrote a poem called let America be America again it never was for me and what Langston meant by that was that America always had the potential to be a land of full opportunity full democracy and economic equality but it never lived up to its potential that it was tragically flawed and the greatest litmus test of the failure of American democracy and the failure of America's economic system to deliver any meaningful material equality was the condition of the Afro-American we judged America's lies about Itself by simply looking upon our own community and seeing the great vast Chasm that separated us from the kind of lifestyle that white middle-class America of the Leave it to Beaver era had and took it and took advantage of and took for granted the opportunity to live in material Comfort the opportunity not to worry about uh how your how your bills were going to be paid the opportunity not to worry about um the fact that you don't have any running water in your home now this was not the simply the story of afro-americans it's true there were millions of four uh whites who lived throughout the South there were millions of poor Mexican Americans who lived in the Southwest but for the Afro-American the one group of color people of color who have lived in this country since 1619. there is a long-standing grievance that they felt and that we were taught when we were in the south in the 1950s we saw the hypocrisy of America's story and the hypocrisy of American democracy was plain to us simply by looking upon our own condition what White America in the 1950s was about was a it was a kind of self-indulgent individualism where people felt good and found identity in the marketplace of mass consumerism the black South didn't have that luxury we had to find Value and meaning in the struggle to maintain pride in who we were as individuals and how we had a collective responsibility to the group to be the best that we could be that was the message that I got from my parents and my grandparents that was the message that we carried with us as we went to college as we went to church as we went to high school looking forward to the possibility of opportunities not knowing that we would ever get them but being damn sure we'd be ready if the opportunity came the leadership in the black community the elders felt that change in the Jim Crow system would come about through gradual means much of that was stemmed from the leadership of the NAACP because the activists in that organization felt very strongly that the end of Jim Crow would only come about through legislative change challenges in the court in the judicial system and also through education that that racism was somehow a type of an absence of learning or a type of sickness and that if you could re-educate white Americans they would change their behavior the problem with this approach is that it didn't look at racism as it related to the economic and political system that racism is not just bad vibes racism is fundamentally a process of exploitation that takes place in the economic system and it's also a process of subordination of people of color in the political and the cultural system civil rights struggle in the south was was based upon the belief that racism could be unlearned that there was nothing inextricable or genetic about racism anything that's learned can be unlearned and in that context the whites who were on the police force the whites who ran the political system who ran the economic order in the South they benefited from racism that's true but they were at least the ministers otherwise who did not have a vested interest in that system could be appealed to they could be changed and if their opinions could be changed then the system could be changed how do you do that you don't do it by a blanket condemnation of all the whites who lived in the South all of them were not racists many of the whites themselves were compromised by an unjust and oppressive system and they were prepared to listen to a reasonable argument which Advanced the interests of all people in the community consequently the best strategy in that context is not one where a handful of African Americans physically fight back rather it's showing the ability to take abuse the ability to stand up courageously to oppose segregation laws and the willingness to go to jail for a higher moral and political ideal that puts the political system on the spot it forces the national political system to respond to these demands and it places greater International pressure on the United States for all of these reasons the best tactic was not one of violent direct confrontation now that's not saying that African Americans didn't feel the desire to fight back they didn't feel anger or hurt they did but they also felt an overriding purpose they had been trained to operate with dignity in the face of adversity all their lives and in doing so by suffering by accepting the hot coffee thrown in your face by accepting the police dogs that were hurled at you you were able to stand up and say yes I am a man I am a woman and I have the courage and dignity not to fight back for a higher political purpose that was infinitely harder than fighting back there was a terrific sense of optimism as people fled to the north there was a kind of a push and pull people were pushed out of the South because agriculture had changed become mechanized in the 1930s and 40s there were fewer jobs available tenant farming had begun to collapse they were pushed because of the omnipresence of racist violence against black folk and the South but they were also pulled because of the terrific job prospects Henry Ford after all was offering five dollars a day up in Henry Ford's Place according to the Leadbelly song and people had a sense that by moving to the north You Not only would open that door of opportunity but more importantly you would establish the foundations for a better life for your children Not only would your children be able to vote Not only would they be able to have decent jobs but a middle-class life that all Americans aspired to so when people came to the north they didn't quite know what to expect they settle in Black communities and as the black ghettos began to grow dramatically a new type of American Jim Crow emerged people forget that Jim Crow actually is a northern not Southern invention they're very forced swarms of Jim Crow were imposed upon the very small tiny black communities in the Northern and Midwestern states prior to the Civil War Jim Crow then went to the South only after slavery was over this huge migration of afro-americans came largely from rural areas and frequently from Southern urban areas they located primarily in Eastern and Midwestern cities they expected to find jobs and expanding opportunities and to a certain extent they found them but the jobs they found were the worst the lowest paying and frequently they lost their jobs during times of economic hardship they found political freedom but only of a limited type where blacks were not permitted to run for elective office Citywide or Statewide because whites wouldn't support them so the location had changed and what they realized though is that the North had its own version of Jim Crow and so we traded different forms of Oppression the oppression in the north was of a different type less overt far more Insidious there were no signs that red white and colored on the schoolhouse door but nevertheless Urban education was inferior for blacks there were no signs that said colored cannot apply for jobs nevertheless blacks were systematically denied these positions we had simply traded one form of Oppression for another between 1940 to 50 1.6 million blacks moved from the south to the north 50 to 60 another 1.5 million moved to the north one of the largest migrations of humanity in the Western Hemisphere they were unable to get loans from Banks even if they held steady employment Banks redlined their communities so you didn't have the kind of economic development that one would have in the in many Southern cities with high concentrations of blacks they weren't able to improve their housing very very much they weren't able to move into Suburban areas even if those who had professional jobs and when they were frequently the Suburban areas were also segregated certain areas defined for blacks only so the sense of optimism faded dramatically by the 1960s people felt that the north was simply an extension of the South where Malcolm X put it the south is anything south of Canada in the South the old Story Goes whites don't care how close you get to them they just don't want you to get too high up and in the North whites don't really care how high up you get they just don't want you to get too close so in the North and South you had two different types of segregation and institutional racism the type in the South was overt it was vulgar it was direct said don't apply in the north there was equal opportunity nevertheless systemic racism far more Insidious and far more pervasive and much more difficult to tackle civil rights movements in the South made a lot of sense because the evil was so blatant and so clear-cut whites in the South didn't mind you living right next door to them but they smacked down blacks who called for civil rights or economic Mobility whites in the north didn't mine a black millionaire so long as the African-American lived nowhere near their neighborhood it was simply a different form of Oppression the Civil Rights struggle in the South its passion its Agony raised fundamental questions about the nature of American society and the absence of real democracy we began to raise the issue of what kind of American society which caused itself committed to equality can simultaneously carry out systematic oppression and deny people who are trained for positions access to these positions they have a political ideology of equal opportunity and social fairness if you're equipped for a position you can compete for it but all of us knew it was a lie and the LIE Faith was the and the LIE assumed an Institutional form within our communities and within Northern Society and so critics of America's power elite people like Malcolm X began to raise questions that were internalized and discussed by civil rights organizations which had no affiliation with the Nation of Islam or black nationalism people began to wonder well why is it that African Americans don't have any kind of institutional power here in the North how can we begin to use the tactics of the South and bring that moral Ferber to bear on the institutional oppression that we face in our daily lives in our own cities that's what the movement began to ask of the leadership of this country and the leadership wasn't prepared to buy it as civil rights were resolved the agenda of Human Rights took political form and it is and you see it most clearly in Malcolm X and in Martin Luther King Malcolm began to argue in 64 that it wasn't good enough for black Americans to call for civil rights we needed human rights and by human rights Malcolm met something very specific he meant the right the human right to a job he met the human right to decent shelter he met the human right to access to medical care for all African Americans now Malcolm's critique was snuffed out but the same kinds of questions began to be raised after his assassination by Martin Luther King Jr who ironically enough has seen somehow today as the mirror opposite of Malcolm X but he wasn't American power paraded itself as a democracy but it was only a democracy for the few not for the many I felt a great deal of anger and outrage the deaths of Martin Luther King and the death of Robert Kennedy who for me was the last white hope of changing this system in a democratic and Progressive Way and when Robert Kennedy died American innocence died at least for me I began to look in America in a very different way and I said if violence is the only thing it understands that perhaps violence will be the way of the future for black activists and I began to think about concretely what America's future would be in this kind of racial and class confrontation which would be profoundly violent that's how I felt liberalism ended when Robert Kennedy died liberalism never had real faith in itself liberalism had never delivered the goods to African Americans to Hispanics to Working Class People to poor people he had promised much and with its death came a wave of repression the counterintelligence program of the FBI the wave of repression represented by the Nixon Administration they too seemed committed to the type of violence that radicals that black activists of the 1960s had come to conclude was absolutely essential in getting fundamental change they believed Johnson when he said We Shall Overcome they believed the Attorney General and they believed the leadership of the democratic party in the Congress when they committed themselves to the implementation of a Civil Rights Act and ultimately a Voting Rights Act that would send thousands of federal registrars into the South but when they went to Atlantic City all of their beliefs collapsed like a house of cards they really believed in the Democratic party as the vehicle for the advancement of Black Folk and what they got was two seats what they got was a slap in the face and when they turned their backs from Atlantic City and they went home they realized that Malcolm X had been right on along that there was nothing that was fundamentally different between the Democrats and the Republicans Malcolm said in the summer and fall of 1964. that the difference between Johnson and Goldwater was like the difference between the fox and the Wolf Goldwater was the wolf and was very clear that he where he stood he opposed the Civil Rights Act he opposed the legislation that black activists had fought and died for but Lyndon Johnson was the fox he catered to civil rights issues only because it Advanced his own interests Johnson after all we had been reminded by activists by Malcolm had a history of being a segregationist prior to 1957. until his presidential Ambitions began to Blossom he had always been arch enemy of our interests had Johnson changed overnight of course not they felt that Malcolm X was right they felt betrayed by the Democratic Party and they said to themselves never again we need to develop our own mechanisms that will effectively Advance our own issues our own interests regardless of the party in power Nanny Maribel died in 2011 at 61 years old I'm interested to share with you what my son thought when he saw this clip he's 16 years old intelligent proudly and anti-racist and he looked at it and he said this is really sad and I said why sad and he said because the white people only had one toilet and the black people only had one toilet and the white people couldn't sit in the back of the bus and the black people couldn't sit in the front of the bus he saw this as just plain unfair that was the sadness well it's obviously something missing from that he's not really looking at Jim Crow which was against One race but not against the other and I want you to know if you're a young person watching this that I hope that this helps you to understand what that was like back then and how at least in my view it's not like that today David Hoffman independent filmmaker thanking you for watching my clip you take care

Channel: David Hoffman

Views: 92,069

Keywords: Civil rights, Jim Crow, Malcolm X biography, Manning Marable, David Hoffman filmmaker, black experience, Afro-American history, African American history, 1950s black experience, 1950s South, 1960s civil rights movement, Martin Luther King perspective, racist, Southern black experience, black history month or, black lives matter documentary, black history crash course, black history museum, george floyd, american history, jim crow laws documentary, Segregation, integration

Id: nPBttI52sPw

Length: 32min 48sec (1968 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 12 2022