The post directly above your shows one incident of social pressure to conform. Also, there was a real threat of violence that enforced the status quo.
What do you suppose would happen w/ such a retort? Would the bigot say, “Holy moly, you’re right! I will change my ways immediately as I have seen their error!”? People w/ hate in their hearts **knew **they had hate in their hearts, it wouldn’t have been news to them. We’re not talking about a scientific fact being immutably presented - bigots act out of irrational ideas. Reason doesn’t enter the picture.
Of course people tried to fight bigotry. Some died fighting bigotry.
Just to build on this theme. Born in Houston, lived here the majority of my life. There was a BBQ joint on Pinemont that I first went to in the late 70’s, family run and very good. There was no sign or posting of the rules but the rules were clear, Whites in the dining room, Blacks out back at the picnic tables. There was a separate window for ordering from the back. The interesting thing, the family that owned it was black.
This type of self segregation is dying out but was normal for way too long.
Capt
I once had an interesting talk with Rudy Isley of the Isley Brothers about his touring England with the Beatles in 1962 (when he introduced Twist & Shout to John Lennon). He told me flat out that going to Europe was the only way they could reach “white audiences.”
The Isley Brothers are from Teaneck, New Jersey.
Yes, keep in mind that the people who adhered to a certain point of view had no problem with nighttime sabotage. It might work for some activists, but for teh average member of the community, there was serious risk to “bucking the trend”. Rocks through the window, tires slashed, odd fires that start in your outbuildings or house, children harassed at school, etc. there’s a reason why the majority typically go along with the vocal minority. The average person will avoid confrontation, and the average person does not necessarily outmuscle or fight better than the average cabbie or instigator.
When a group of kids, mostly in the next grade up, swarm around you on the (hard) asphalt playground, and one of them tells you he’s heard your mom and dad are nigger-lovers with a demeanor as if he’s won a contest whose prize was to be able to taunt you with this (and he probably had) and the other kids are slobbering to see a fight explode; some standing behind you to push you into your main tormentor, no: it isn’t a “teaching moment.”
When you’re playing in your front yard and a couple of greasy white rockabilly-style toughs drive by slowly in an early 60’s muscle car, and glare at you, and one of them can be heard saying “there’s his kids,” you don’t take a noble stance.
When phone calls come in to the house, after which your mom dashes to pull all the curtains, you can assume the caller didn’t linger on the line to be engaged in further conversation.
When they come in the back door after dark and put a shotgun under your dad’s chin, and drop him off, barefoot and in his pajamas, as a warning out in the country, you’re glad he kept his mouth shut and didn’t antagonize them by initiating a conscience-raising session.
All this happened to us in Illinois (not the South), and there will always be a part of me that hates the human race’s guts because of it.
What years are you referring to? 1950’s, or 1970’s?
Not that it matters from the point of morality and basic human decency.
But I’m curious about the historical timeline.
- They did straw-purchases in redlined neighborhoods, which was “cheating,” and processed legal paperwork for Black guys who’d been busted for little or nothing. It went against people’s understanding of how things should be.
I say yes to the OP, but the glaring example I had come across recently was one I negelcted to take note of source from.
It seems that sometime prior to Rosa Parks there was this white woman that thought that bus segregation was just wrong, or at least that no consequences would fall upon her for mixing with the AA folks in the back of one. She was sorely mistaken. That is, about the safety of such behavior.
One bus driver would have none of the breaking of taboo (probably one of his favorites) and ***closed the door ***on the lady upon her exit! She was injured.
Perhaps the worst thing about this incident was the mixed reaction of most of the witnesses. On the one hand, deliberately closing the door on a passenger is just not done. However, the majority made a point of telling as well what led up to the incident. And not just to make the story complete. There was a current of thought that maybe what the bus driver did was not all that bad. He had, after all, been provoked by something that was also not acceptable. 
:rolleyes:
the thing that makes “educational moments” work is the impartial fairness of the law enforcement, other powers that be, schhool administration, bureacrats behind the counter, bus company executives, etc.
Oddly enough, a number of these types would be apathetic or worse, antagonistic. If someone threatens you with a shotgun and the sheriff or police don’t seem to care, then maybe the laws say one thing but reality is something else. It takes a serious attitude in the entire police department, for example, for the police to catch and charge these trouble-makers. Then the system has to deal with them. A failure anywhere along the way simply means the trouble will not stop. Semi-organized intimidation tactics are nothing new and have worked in plenty of different settings.
Moe Howard (Three Stooges) tells a story in his autobiography. They were touring in the South and Moe went out for a walk (I can’t recall the town). A older black man was on the sidewalk approaching from the opposite direction. As they got close the black man jumped into the street. Moe then jumped in the street too. They talked and the man explained he couldn’t share the sidewalk. Moe walked with the guy anyway for a block or so.
Later that day the theater got threats and they had to cancel the Stooge’s live performance.
I live in Nashville, a Southern liberal city in the South. The only time I found myself feeling singled out for being with a person of color was when I took one of my female students to a movie. People stared, but didn’t say anything. There weren’t any other African-Americans present. I taught in a desegregated school and it never entered my mind that anyone would find that mixed company was unusual enough to be so rude. That was in the early 1970’s.
There had been a time in the 1960’s when I used the phone booth in the “colored” section of the bus station in Jackson, TN. There I was stared at by those nearby. I never did understand if I had angered them by intruding or if I could I have gotten them into trouble somehow.
Even close friends in the small town where I grew up did not make their racial feelings known. Forty years later, one of those friends who had also moved to Nashville, used the word “nigger” in reference to Denzel. (We were watching the Academy Awards.) We didn’t speak again for three years. And since then she has never used that word around me.
I have never been directly criticized for my friendships or courtesy with people of color. That’s after 70 years in the South.
Until recent years, I hadn’t realized that so many people still have the kind of deep-seated bigotry that was prevalent before about 1970. But I don’t kid myself that it is only in the Southern states.
I got my first Nat King Cole album in 1957. His music had endeared him to a lot of people. Most of my friends and I listened to music on the radio so we often didn’t know who was of one race or the other. I particularly liked the Diamonds, the Platters, Chuck Berry. (Hey, it was the Fifties…) I think all of them were people of color. Sammy Davis, Jr. was a popular entertainer. We didn’t have concerts in our tiny town unless someone was giving an organ concert. So I don’t know if whites were attending black singer’s concerts. Was Jackie Wilson an African-American? I know that Brenda Lee, a white celebrity (about my age) met her husband at a Jackie Wilson concert.
You just can’t lump all Americans, including Southerners, together and brand them as anything in particular.
Just thought that I would mention that the only Rockabilly fan that I know well is white and lives in a multi-million dollar house and moved here from a Northern state. We might do well not to think of lovers of Rockabilly music as being stereotypical either.
1969, St. Louis, Mo. I gave a ride to a black girl in my class. People on the street yelled at us. It’s not that I was so naive I wasn’t aware that some people didn’t like seeing a white boy and a black girl riding together, but geez, we were in a full-size, 1960’s Chrysler. She was at least four feet away from me!
Brought perhaps randomly to mind, a brief episode from Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey / Maturin novels. I don’t have the relevant volume to hand, and have to rely on memory.
In 1812, the joint heroes are in Boston (Mass.), prisoners of war held under fairly lenient conditions, and scheming to get away. Stephen Maturin is abroad in the city, and encounters a black man, who kindly does him a favour. Stephen: “I see a tavern up ahead. May I treat you to a drink in there?”
Other guy: “But, sir, I’m, black.”
Stephen: “I have not heard that that is in any way a crime, or something otherwise unforgivable.”
Other guy: “Brother, you’re not from around here, are you?”
One is aware that in Boston even in 1812, many people (not the majority) held liberal and anti-racist opinions; also, that for much of the time, Stephen is off in his own funny world, and oblivious to real life. Nonetheless – a very sad little scene.
Perhaps this is a good time to introduce the young’uns to Janis Ian’s Society’s Child from 1965. Granted, she wrote the song when she was 13, and it’s every bit as overwrought and melodramatic as you’d expect from a 13-year old, but there’s also a lot that’s accurate in it.
Maybe this is a dumb question, but wouldn’t it just have been easier to tip the lady less?
Oh here, this is even easier than the long rant I typed up - YES, that’s an extremely dumb question.
Sure, if you didn’t mind living in a place where being Jewish was only tolerated because of your husband’s rank, and where people had no qualms about making threats – and, you can be sure, seeing them through – over your treating others too well.
It’s dumb question because it ignores post after post in this thread which make it quite clear that there’s a whole lot more to the issue than the amount of a tip.
Just yesterday, in a completely unrelated conversation, my mom happened to mention to me that she once had a student whose parents pulled him out of her class. No reason was given, but she’s pretty sure it’s because she was a “nigger lover”. And this was in Cleveland, OH, in the early 60s.