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Summary
Summary
Remembering Jim Crow, the groundbreaking sequel to Remembering Slavery, is an extraordinary opportunity to read and hear the voices of black southerners who were firsthand witnesses to one of the most heartbreaking and troubling chapters in America's history. 50 photos.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"Old people knew things that we'll probably never know," confides one interview subject in this viscerally powerful book and compact disc compilation of firsthand accounts of the Jim Crow era. Drawing on the 1,200 interviews with African-Americans that make up the Duke University collection called Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South, this sequel to the book-and-audio compilation Remembering Slavery offers testimonies by people from 25 communities in 10 states, representing diverse economic, social and cultural lifestyles urban and rural, industrial and agricultural, Piedmont and Delta. Readers and listeners will confront "the dailiness of the terror blacks experienced at the hands of capricious whites" and of "the capacity of the black community to come to each other's aid and invent means of sustaining the collective will to survive." The editors provide lucid historical context for recollections of family, work, school and church. "[S]tories of rapes and beatings, of houses burned to the ground and land stolen, of harrowing escapes in the middle of the night" appear alongside accounts of "the extraordinary and multiple ways in which resistance to Jim Crow occurred and was nourished." Some of the stories are so extreme as to seem absurd white singers mistakenly sent to a black club conceal themselves under pancake makeup; a county's average expenditure for white students is $40.68 per student, and for black students, $5.95. This moving, deeply instructive book reveals how "African Americans developed their own life, hidden and estranged from the lives of white people." Two one-hour compact discs, 50 b&w photos. Appendixes not seen by PW. (Nov.) Forecast: The award-winning Remembering Slavery attracted countless readers and listeners, partly because public radio stations broadcast the tapes. Expect a similar reception for this volume. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Black Americans living in the South during its virulent segregation era render powerful eyewitness accounts of the brutal and demeaning American apartheid in this sequel to the groundbreaking work Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom (1998). The book and accompanying CD present interviews with black southerners vividly recalling the everyday indignities of Jim Crow practices: separate drinking fountains, backdoor entries, separate seating, and grossly inferior treatment that sought to condemn blacks to second-class citizenship. Submission was expected and demanded, but many practices were egregious reminders of slavery. Black sharecroppers recall being forced to work white plantations with no pay. But the collection also recalls efforts--large and small--to resist Jim Crow, maintain personal dignity, and build strong communities in the midst of the oppressive system. Black businesses flourished as patrons sought to avoid contact with whites. The interviews were garnered from an archive of 1,300 oral histories collected by the Behind the Veil project at Duke University. One shocking revelation for many readers is the fact that some of these appalling practices continued well into the 1970s. This powerful recollection will be avidly sought by readers interested in America's racial history. --Vernon Ford
Choice Review
Every academic library in the country should own this wonderful volume and the two accompanying audio CDs, a "greatest hits" collection of over 1,200 interviews of African Americans who lived in the Jim Crow South. The interviews were conducted over a period of several years in the 1990s, under the auspices of the "Behind the Veil" project. The tapes have been deposited in various libraries, and over 120 of the interviews have been transcribed. This volume compiles selected portions of some of the interviews, divided by themes such as "work," "heritage and memory," "lessons well learned," and others. The editors, prominent historians at Duke University well versed in the scholarship of the era, explain how the interviews constitute a "compelling body of evidence" that fleshes out "the incredible variety, richness, and ingenuity of black Americans' responses to one of the cruelest, least yielding social and economic systems ever created." The CDs of the recorded interviews (from the National Public Radio production) give yet more aural life to these ordinary yet remarkable individuals. Ideal for classroom use; enriching reading for all. Buy it--now. Highly recommended for all libraries. P. Harvey University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Library Journal Review
This sequel to Remembering Slavery (LJ 9/1/98) is another effort to recover the history of black life in the American South, with interviews this time focusing on the era of segregation. It is a rare opportunity to read and hear the voices of black Southerners who experienced one of the most hideous periods in America's history, "a time of severe legal, economic, political, and social oppression, all reinforced by the pervasive threat of extralegal violence, especially lynching." Based on about 1200 interviews and in-depth research in 25 communities and ten different states undertaken by the Behind the Veil project at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, this remarkable book-and-CD set offers intimate views into the thoughts, activities, and anxieties of black Americans and at the same time strengthens our understanding of the Jim Crow era. Included are two one-hour CDs of the radio documentary produced by American Radio Works, a transcript of the audio program, 50 rare segregation-era photographs, biographical information, and suggestions for further reading. This superb primary source will appeal to public and academic libraries. Edward G. McCormack, Univ. of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Lib., Long Beach (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One BITTER TRUTHS Jim Crow was not merely about the physical separation of blacks and whites. Nor was segregation strictly about laws, despite historians tendency to fix upon such legal landmarks as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In order to maintain dominance, whites needed more than the statutes and signs that specified "whites" and "blacks" only; they had to assert and reiterate black inferiority with every word and gesture, in every aspect of both public and private life. Noted theologian Howard Thurman dissected the "anatomy" of segregation with chilling precision in his classic 1965 book, The Luminous Darkness . A white supremacist society must not only "array all the forces of legislation and law enforcement," he wrote; "it must falsify the facts of history, tamper with the insights of religion and religious doctrine, editorialize and slant news and the printed word. On top of that it must keep separate schools, separate churches, separate graveyards, and separate public accommodations--all this in order to freeze the place of the Negro in society and guarantee his basic immobility." Yet this was "but a partial indication of the high estimate" that the white South placed upon African Americans. "Once again, to state it categorically," Thurman concludes, "the measure of a man's estimate of your strength is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place." As the interviews in this chapter--and indeed most of the interviews in this volume--suggest, the arsenal of weapons white southerners felt it necessary to use against black southerners was truly prodigious. In firsthand recollections stretching back to the early twentieth century, Behind the Veil informants tell stories of rapes and beatings, of houses burned to the ground and land stolen, of harrowing escapes in the middle of the night to evade lynch mobs or to avoid the slower, grinding death of perpetual poverty and indebtedness on southern tenant farms. Even informant Arthur Searles's offhand comment about needing a pass to travel in Baker County, Georgia, is revealing. Passes had been common in the slave South and were used extensively in South Africa during apartheid, but the idea that an American citizen might need one to travel in his own home state in the post--World War II era seems outrageous, and in fact passes were not typical after slavery ended. Yet, Searles had been given one. He had seen the mutilated body of a Baker County lynching victim, and he knew how desperately white southerners wanted not only to keep blacks in a fixed position socially, but also to control their movements. Above all, he, like others of his generation, knew at some level that white control over black bodies and therefore black labor was key to southern agriculture and to the region's slowly industrializing economy. Thus, whites rarely hesitated to use force against African Americans who threatened to destabilize labor arrangements or who tried to "steal away," escaping from debt and abuse on tenant farms in much the same way that slaves had escaped from bondage a generation or two earlier. The legacy of whites' drive for social stability and control includes both the broken bodies of lynching victims and the grim wariness of men and women like Arthur Searles. While a number of the stories in this chapter are about lynching and other forms of racial violence, informants also tell of moments that were less dramatic but nonetheless humiliating. "You could shop," Theresa Lyons of Durham, North Carolina, suggests, "but if you walked up and a white person walked up later, they waited on the white person first. I mean, it was just a known that you weren't going to get waited on. Even when I knew that [something] was it , no matter how bad I wanted it, I wouldn't buy it. I would leave." For African Americans such as Lyons and Searles, life in the Jim Crow South was a process of navigating treacherous waters. Just as any stretch of ocean might offer smooth sailing on any given day, individual white southerners might be friendly and even helpful at times. However, they might also be unaccountably hostile and prejudiced. Thus, blacks had to remain ever vigilant in case storms of white fury should suddenly begin to blow. Because they had to fight racist people as well as institutions the struggle of blacks against racial oppression was never so impersonal as a seaman's struggle against the elements. Instead, living Jim Crow meant confronting bitter truths about human nature, including the arbitrary unpredictability of alleged white "friends" suddenly becoming mortal enemies. Among the most poignant of these realities emerged when African American children came to understand that blacks and whites were different in the eyes of their society. Often, the circumstances that led up to this realization were mundane, but the realization itself could be devastating. Walking to school, going to the store, playing on rural farms and city sidewalks, black children confronted racial differences in the taunts of white children, in the degrading treatment of black adults, and in their own observations of who was better off than whom. Under such circumstances, "you just automatically grow up inferior," as Charles Gratton of Birmingham, Alabama, laments, "and you had the feeling that white people were better than you." Yet, parents and other black adults worked hard to counteract such lessons. Employing a variety of child-rearing strategies, they encouraged black youths to maintain their self-respect regardless of white attitudes. Children's experiences also varied. Those who lived in or near cities often remember the physical signs of segregation--placards above water fountains, separate platforms at the train station, the often-shifting terrain of racial separation on the street car or bus. In the rural South, children's memories of learning about racial difference are sometimes more subtle (rural children played together) and sometimes brutally stark (in the countryside, white violence tended to be even less restrained). The stories of boys and girls also differ. Ferdie Walker's memories of white policemen exposing themselves to her at a Fort Worth bus stop are but one case in point. Even after age and experience had taught them the roles Jim Crow required them to perform, adult blacks regularly encountered new limitations on their freedom. Every visit to the doctor, every effort to get a job or buy land, much less register to vote, could result in a further restriction, an additional humiliation arbitrarily imposed. African Americans' efforts to meet even basic needs such as health care could take them into minefields of white recalcitrance, as the testimonies of Milton Quigless and G. K. Butterfield suggest. Henry Hooten found that white southerners' prejudices went with them even across the Atlantic during World War II. And, in 1958, Walter Cavers uncovered the bitter truth that a seemingly straightforward car accident, for which he was not at fault, could result in terrible consequences. For many Behind the Veil informants, a deep personal knowledge of American race relations at their worst has resulted in a sense of obligation to pass on an understanding of Jim Crow's bitter truths to subsequent generations. Chapter One ends with long narratives by Willie Harrell and Ann Pointer, both of whom describe African American life in the plantation South in the pre--World War II era and both of whom clearly feel they have important stories to tell. As these final two excerpts suggest, the history that Behind the Veil informants self-consciously narrate is a history with a purpose. "I'm telling you," Ann Pointer insists to the young man conducting her 1994 interview, "it sound funny to you because you never have been subject to nothing like this, but that's what I want to tell you: how horrible it is when everything you do, the [white] man's got to approve it." RALPH THOMPSON Young children in every era interrogate the world around them as they come of age. During the years of segregation, African American children, encountering the puzzling realities of Jim Crow, looked to their parents and elders for answers to questions such as: "Why can't I drink out of the water fountain?" "Why can't we try on clothes at this store?" Or: "Why do we have to move out of the way when white folks come walking down the street?" Explaining the laws of segregation and the practices of racial "etiquette" was a constant and extraordinarily difficult task for African American parents. How could they teach children the rules they had to follow in order to survive without damaging their self-esteem? Ralph Thompson, who grew up on a tenant farm in the Memphis area in the late 1930s and early 1940s, describes his parents' efforts to explain segregation and racism to him and his siblings. They talked to us a little bit about that, but as [things] happened. They might respond to things. I can remember the insurance man coming over there one day and called my mother "Auntie." And she looked at him and said, "Don't you call me `Auntie.' I'm not your `Auntie.'" I can remember that. His name was Mr. Watson, and this was back in the forties. You could just see little things like that and how they responded, how they would respond to embarrassing things. They tried to keep you away from things that would be embarrassing when they couldn't fight back. For instance, going in a grocery store or something like that. If we went downtown and they had the colored drinking fountain and white drinking fountain--in looking back, my sister [and I] talk about it now--my mother would always tell us to drink water before we left home. So we didn't get caught into drinking water out. Little things like that. Things like going in a store and you can't try the clothes on. When I got up to about 12, 14, 15 years old, and I'd go to Thom McAn to buy shoes, if I had a $20 bill, they would check that $20 bill like it was counterfeit. I couldn't walk in a Thom McAn shoe store and buy a pair of shoes because they didn't want to take my money. They would treat me like this is counterfeit, and they'd look at it. I'm serious. You don't know how that hurt to do that. You go to a store, and you're standing there and a white person walks up, and they'll wait on that white person and just make you stand. So my parents kind of kept us away from that and they wouldn't let us do certain things. When you look back at it, you can tell why--because they couldn't defend [us]. So they tried to shield us from it by sending us or taking us in a different direction, and whatever was going on, they tried to keep it away from us, so to speak. My daddy, if it was a white person around talking to him in some kind of business format, he would move away from us or tell us to go play or something. I guess that was to protect us from something that might be said to him that he wasn't able to defend. If they were talking about planting or settling up or something like that. He very seldom would do anything like that around us. He would go outside or somewhere else. But just being called a "nigger," I can't remember no adult person calling him one. I remember kids did it, but I don't remember any adults doing us like that. I can remember at the drugstore, some evenings we would stop in there and get ice cream, and the pharmacist was real nice to us. He could scoop the ice cream up. He'd scoop it up and he could throw it up in the air and catch it with the cone, and that was kind of entertaining. We'd come through there in the afternoon. If we bought ice cream, he'd do that for us. In this particular drugstore he didn't put any stools at his counter. When you look back I guess he said I'll treat you as fair as I can and if I don't put the stools here, I don't have to worry about nobody sitting down. You get your ice cream. You have to move on. And looking back at it now that's what it seemed like. I can remember that guy. LILLIAN SMITH A few years older than Ralph Thompson, Lillian Smith grew up in a predominately black neighborhood in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the 1930s. She, too, describes how her elders approached the task of instructing children in the laws and practices of Jim Crow. The main thing, the theme throughout, was that we're living in a segregated society. I didn't understand segregation until I was maybe nine or ten years old, when I was reading and I could see the signs saying "colored" and "white." You couldn't drink at a water fountain even though you were shopping in the same store that people of any other nationality were shopping in. We would ask questions about that and [my parents and grandparents] said: "You would get arrested." So, when that word was used, any time you saw "white" and "colored," unless you wanted to be arrested and be in jail, you didn't dare. So that was the dividing line, and that lesson was really laid down solidly when we were, I would say, between seven and nine. Naturally, you would ask, "Why?" The question would always come back that we were living in a country that had segregated laws, and [we were] called "colored" people at that time. See, the signs said "colored." You were not looked upon as having full rights that all other citizens should have. We should be treated differently. That was what the sign was. And then, of course, they started talking about slavery. So from about age seven on, they started giving us information about slavery--before I even read about it in a book. Because in our culture, [which] was our racial group, what most of us knew about slavery was handed down from word of mouth, from family members or friends or neighbors or whatever, and maybe a lot of it never was written. Most of that was black storytelling, but with a message to let you know what to avoid and how to respond and behave. Because, see, the working word there was "behavior." You have to watch your behavior. CHARLES GRATTON Charles Gratton was born in 1932 and grew up in the Norwood neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama. Asked when he first became aware of segregation, he describes how he was "programmed" in the bitter truths of Jim Crow. Actually, when I got old enough to know myself, to really know I existed. I mean, I was born into this thing and raised in it. I can remember very close in my mind [times] when my mother would send me to this grocery store that was approximately a mile away, which was the only grocery store in Norwood. She would give me instructions before I'd leave home and tell me, "Son, now you go on up to this store and get this or that for me. If you pass any white people on your way, you get off the sidewalk. Give them the sidewalk. You move over. Don't challenge white people." So I was just brought up in that environment. They also had a park. It was about a block from where I was born and raised and where I lived, and it was known as the white people's park. They had a tennis court there and nice park trees, and blacks wasn't allowed in that park. I mean we just couldn't go there. You know, it's just one of those things. Some days I would be sick, and I could hear the schoolchildren playing during their lunch hour down at Norwood Elementary School, which was all white, and that's what really stuck in my mind. I'd say, "It's a shame that I have to walk so far to school every day." When I'd hear those schoolchildren playing, I'd say, "Here I am a block and a half from the elementary school, and I've got to walk six or seven miles to school every day." Even now, I can almost hear those kids, those white kids down at this elementary school playing, and the noise and laughing and playing, and I'm at home sick basically from the exposure of walking those six and seven miles to school every day. Whether it was raining or not, I had to go. So those are some of the memories that I have of my childhood growing up over at Norwood. I don't know if I ever just specifically came out and asked that question [of why things were the way they were], but it was one of those things where you had been programmed all along, ever since you got old enough to know right from wrong. To challenge white people just was the wrong thing to do. You just automatically grow up inferior, and you had the feeling that white people were better than you. It just really wasn't any question asked then about why. I mean, that was white people things. That was a white people school, and I just didn't feel that I had any right to go there. It basically never entered my mind. Most blacks in the South felt that way, until the late fifties and sixties, when Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] come along with his philosophy, and it started giving black people some hope that the way we were being treated wasn't right and this thing can change. Just some hope that we were waiting on. Whenever I would hear Dr. King talk, it seemed like he was touching me from the inside. He could touch your feeling from the inside, things that you would want to say but you just didn't know how, things that were right and wrong but you kept it inside of you because you didn't know how to express it. So he was really a great leader and a great man, and I think he done a wonderful job in what he done for our people as a whole. FERDIE WALKER Ferdie Walker was born in 1928 and grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. She describes a stage in African American children's growing awareness of Jim Crow, when children encountered racist stereotypes about black men and women's sexuality. From the days of slavery on, whites justified the sexual exploitation of black women by describing them as lustful "Jezebels" who supposedly wanted the sexual attentions white men forced upon them. Meanwhile, black men's efforts to advance politically and economically after the Civil War encouraged white southerners to create a new black male character-type to go along with the "Uncle Tom" and "Sambo" of the old plantation: that of the black beast rapist. The rape or attempted rape of a white woman became the standard explanation for why thousands of black men were lynched in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite the fact that rape was not even a charge in the vast majority of cases. Just as lynching persisted into the post--World War II era, degrading sexual stereotypes continued to affect individual black men and women's lives in myriad ways. In Ferdie Walker's case, two white police officers clearly felt they could get away with sexually harassing an 11-year-old child simply because she was black. As Walker explains, her terrifying childhood experiences resulted in a lifelong distrust of the police, shaping her own child-rearing practices and her work as a public health nurse in the 1950s. I tell you this one thing that really sticks in my mind, one really harassing kind of thing that I went through at that time. I was 11 years old, and I will never forget it. I used to go back and forth to church on Sunday afternoons to the United Methodist youth group, and I always rode the bus. You had to stand on the corner, which was about two blocks from my house, to catch the bus. In those days, all police people were white, and all bus drivers were white, and these policemen would harass me as I was standing on this corner waiting for the bus to come. Sometimes the two of them would drive up. The bus stop was up high and the street was down low. They'd drive up under there and then they'd expose themselves while I was standing there, and it just really scared me to death. And the only reason I did not go home at that time was because if I had gone home, my mother would have made me stay. So I just stepped back from the corner, and because I rode that way all the time, the bus driver didn't [have to] see me standing there at the corner. He'd always stop and I'd get on the bus. But it was these same cops . So I had a morbid fear of policemen all of my life and it has not completely gone away. This was in the broad open daylight with the sun shining. But I will never forget it, and it always comes back to me every time I get into a really tight experience. That was really bad and it was bad for all black girls , you know. It was really hard for me to tell my children that [policemen] were helping people. It was really hard. I really prayed a lot over that, and I said, "Well, this is something that you got to do." I had a job as public health nurse at Topeka, Kansas, and we had a lot of child abuse even then and that was in the fifties. My supervisor gave me a situation. She said, "Now when you go to a house and a man is beating his wife, what are you going to do?" I said, "Call the minister." And she said, "Ferdie, you're an intelligent person. You know that's not right." I told her. She's a wonderful person. I said, "Alice Jensen, I know that's not the right answer. I should call the police, but I don't believe in the police." And that was after my third child was born. So it has taken a long time for me to have any kind of trust in policemen as a group even when I tried to say to myself, "It's one person and everybody is not like everybody else." But it's really very difficult for me. That has stayed with me. STINE GEORGE When blacks in the Jim Crow South aspired to economic and social equality with whites, their white neighbors often met them with disapproval or even violence. Such was the case when Seine George's father William bought a piece of coveted real estate at the urging of his white boss, Jesse Morgan, who also helped him negotiate a loan from the Federal Homing Authority (FHA). Morgan believed that William George had earned the right to the land since he had always been a "good nigger." Morgan's sons disagreed, and the George family soon saw their house burned to the ground. Seine George's younger brother and sister died in the flames. [Mr. Morgan] said [to my father], "You've been a good nigger, so I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to sell you this farm." Dad said, "Sell me a farm, Mr. Morgan? I can't buy no farm." He said, "The government will buy it for you. In fact, we already started buying it. You just go over there and talk with Brown"--that was the FHA man--"and he'll let you sign the papers. I've already got them made up. We're the government." [Laughter.] That was it. Talk to my daddy, he'll tell you the same. "We're the government," [Morgan] said. "Just go over there and sign the papers." That's what happened. [Morgan] didn't tell his sons about what he had done. He didn't want to tell [them] until after my dad signed the papers. [That farm was] on the main road at that time, see, and nothing but white folks [there], and good land on a hill, too. See, black folks would always get in the bottom, but this was on a hill, nice hill land, because that was one of his choice farms. But anyway, them sons had a fit. It was two of them. Boy, they had a fit, and they went over there and they were going to stop it because they said [their] daddy was senile, he didn't know what he was doing. The people at the FHA office said, "Well, he's done signed the papers. We can't withdraw it now." So then they came out to the house mad. See, [one of Morgan's sons] had a fence put all the way around the farm. In fact, my dad did all the work, but he bought the fence and the posts and everything. It was new wire. It had just been up about a year. So they came out there and told my dad, "That's our wire." Said, "You've got to take all that wire down and roll it up and give it back to us." Around that whole farm, see, take up the posts. That's what they wanted. (Continues...) Excerpted from REMEMBERING JIM CROW by . Copyright © 2001 by Center for Documentary Studies for the Behind the Veil Project. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.