I’m white and formerly lived in North Carolina. The kind of thing that you describe is far too common in NC, and not a small part of why I don’t live there now.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. And I don’t think that the socio-economic status really applies (though many people in this area would be considered dirt poor by any economic standard). There are MANY black and white people that succeed and don’t fit any of the racist stereotypes despite being dirt poor.
And when I said majority, I wasn’t referring to 98%, or even 70% (in truth, I have no way of knowing what the exact percentage would be).
Funny, I don’t **feel **humiliated. And if you’d read the remainder of my post as well, you’d see that I agree with you about not knowing every black person in the south.
Look, I grew up in a black neighborhood. Spent nights with friends who were black. Had black girlfriends. Was educated by as many black teachers as white. It should be obvious that I don’t believe that all black people are flawed in some way.
I almost added that very line to my post in this thread, but I thought it wouldn’t be necessary. Perhaps I was wrong.
Well, I condensed the Waffle House story some. It was, in fact, in Durham of 54. We had been in there a while, about 30 minutes, sitting 5 (3 white guys, 2 black girls, coming from a debate meeting, for Godness’ sakes) at a booth, talking and waiting for someone to take or order and noticing over time that we were being studiously ignored. I was not asked to leave. Almost worst, actually. It was implied, by an officer of the law at the restaurant at the time, that it would be best if my friends and I left because it was “apparent that our kind was not being served right now.” One of my lawyer-type “friends” implied in return that this was illegal and the owners of Waffle House would not like the letter that they would be getting or the news vans outside their doors.
The other black person and I were rewarded with a free meal card each , as an apology for our inconvenience. I call it our race cards; I still have mine. I use it when I am losing a race-based argument. I actually found the whole thing kind of funny. I wanted to go to IHOP, anyway.
The irony in the whole situation is that I was with one of the most bigoted people I have ever met. We were only acquaintances because we were in a club together and I am sure he if he had his way, people of my complexion would not have been members. He did not want to be there eating with me anymore than any other person at that Waffle House may have, but he was going to be darned if someone was going to insult *his *black person.
No. We have plenty of both black and white people here who are lazy, though none of them are more lazy than I am.
Are you saying the incident happened in 1954?
This may seem like a ‘what’s that got to do with the sheet music for the Hee-Haw All Jug Band’, but bear with me your honor and I promise I’ll show relevance-
I was reading a book recently that contains some of the letters to and from Jefferson Davis. (The letters are possibly online as well but I’m literally about half blind tonight so forgive me if I don’t look for it.) Some of the letters to Davis were by his former slaves. (How did they learn to read and write you ask? Well that in itself is kind of interesting; Davis, in complete nose thumbing to the laws of Mississippi, established a school on his plantation to teach them, and promoted some of his slaves to levels of high responsibility (overseers and even clerk positions in his business interests.)
One of the former slaves who wrote to him was a man named Burgess Montgomery. The world, to Davis especially, must have seemed upside down at this point: it’s in the late 1870s and Davis, though freed from prison, had lost everything including his right to vote. Once a very rich and powerful man, he didn’t have a penny to his name that wasn’t from someone’s charity; he lived pretty comfortably but in a house that was borrowed from a female admirer whose admiration had pretty much destroyed Davis’s marriage (it would recover somewhat after the admirer died and left him the deed to the house [more complicated than that, but anyway]). In addition to his marital problems he had buried most of his children (who I should perhaps add were dead when he did this), including his son Jeff Jr. who was estranged from him and on his deathbed called only for his mother and for one of their former slaves, not his father, which hurt him mightily.
Davis was by this time old and suffering from the regular geriatric infirmities (including, of particular note to me at the moment, blindness in one eye due to abuse in prison). Add that he was also one of the most hated men in the nation- probably less hated in the north than in the south (for he would not be lionized until much later- many southerners at this time blamed the war’s loss on him) but far more popular in Italy and Ireland than in Georgia or in Mississippi or in NYC.
where he lives. So, this is the ruined and depressed old man to whom the former slave was writing.
Now the former slave, Burgess Montgomery, was meanwhile doing quite well. He was a minister, a store owner, and farmer who had his own sharecroppers, and his children were doing well besides, very upwardly mobile. He wasn’t rich like the robber barons certainly, but as black men in the 1870s south did he was doing spectacularly and was far better off than most white farmers. He was writing to a man who once owned him and his entire family.
Did he gloat in his letters? Or say “bottom rail’s on top now you old bastard!” It wouldn’t have been very Christian for a minister, but for almost any human it would have seemed quite understandable. But no, his writing had another very evident purpose. He was writing…
to cheer the old man up.
The letters read more like an exchange between two old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while, who share great memories of better days, far more than former property and former owner. One of the things he discussed in particular was quite moving. I don’t have the book close at hand or I’d give an exact report, but the jist is this:
Burgess recalls a memory he has from many years before, when he was a slave and he and Davis were both in their prime of life, years before the war. A hurricane, or at least a particularly violent storm, had done substantial damage to one of Davis’s plantations (he owned the large Brierfield plantation and several smaller properties and in some years he leased others). Davis and Burgess were riding together inspecting the damage, and in the middle of a flooded rice field and devastated cabins and outbuildings they came across a slave child screaming and crying because he’d been separated from his mother during the storm. Davis stopped his horse, picked up the the little boy, kissed him, cood to him, assured him that ‘everything’s alright’, took him on his horse and held him in the crook of his arm until they found his mother, who was so frantic and so grateful she kissed Davis’s hand, embarassing him.
Montgomery wrote something to the effect of “that wasn’t master and slave or owner and owned, it was a man who saw a child who needed to be comforted and gave him comfort”. It’s something that clearly moved him.
Now, keep in mind that Montgomery is writing this, and there’s no way he can’t know he’s writing this, to the same Jefferson Davis who was sworn in as first and only president of perhaps the most racist government ever to have a constitution. The CSA’s constitution and legal codes left absolutely no doubt whatever that the white man is the master and the black man is at best a lower form of human to whom slavery was not only natural but a kindness; there’s no pretension and no exception to the rule of white supremacy in any Confederate document that addresses the racial issue (which a surprising minority of them did, but that’s another story).
Burgess was writing to the same Jefferson Davis who signed an official proclamation that literally ordered his officers to “take no prisoners” when it came to black men in Federal uniforms. Kill them, kill their white officers, bury them in mass graves if you bury them at all- the only exception being that if one is recognized as a slave, beat him good and return him to his owner. (This policy contributed to the necessary and the unnecessary horrors of Andersonville when Lincoln used it as an excuse to stop prisoner exchange; Andersonville corralled more than a few black PoWs, incidentally, who were sent there by Confederate officers who absolutely refused to obey Davis’s permission and direct order to commit legalized racist murder.)
The point in just a second…
I wait with baited breath.
The Jefferson Davis-Burgess Montgomery story above has nothing to do with an attempt to revise history. Slavery was a malignancy on the body of America, it was if anything more evil (if probably differently so) than its popular reputation. (It seems staggering to recall that more than a century from now it will still be true that North America had legalized slavery for a longer period of its recorded history than it didn’t.)
It’s not an attempt to say the CSA or Davis weren’t racists: both were. Davis in fact is a man I particularly despise: he was arrogant, foolhardy, would not hear reason when it was at all in contrast to his opinion, and really was responsible for a lot of the prolonging of the war. Further, I know the OP has nothing to do with “the good ol’ days” but rather today.
But the point is that even reversing to the worst of times in southern race relations (the generation after the Civil War) and the most extreme of examples (“the man” himself and a former slave), there’s nothing remotely simple or superficial or all true or all good or all bad about race relations in the south. In fact, it’s one of the most complex, multilayered within multilayers, jigsawed, ingrained, and yet solipsistic things on earth, and today as in 1880 as in 1680 as probably in 2080, on the individual level, all bets are off and each seems to make up his or her own rules. What’s true in one community may not be 10 miles down the road and what’s true of one person may not be for his identical twin brother.
Blacks and whites have lived together in the south non-stop and in large numbers for almost 400 years. (Blacks are, in fact, the oldest ethnic group in the southeast other than indigenous peoples; a 1526 abortive mission to colonize what’s now South Carolina by Spaniards who brought African slaves with them resulted in, dependent on the source, the escape by/revolt by/or abandoning of the slaves, who intermarried with Indians and whose descendants had decidedly black features when they came into contact with Virginians a century later. (A few pics of some Carolina LumbeeIndians today.) Of course for almost all of that blacks were the underclass, first as indentured servants (which the first blacks to come to Virginia in chains were treated as, even to providing them land at the end of their ‘indenture’) to the out-and-out slavery that began a few years later to the constantly revolving and evolving institution of slavery for the next 200 years (always staggering to remember that North America had black slavery for far more of its recorded history than it didn’t, and that will be true for another century) then through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, etc… Older people, black and white, many of them still young enough to be in the work force, can remember well when segregation was the law of the land.
What there’s never been is true equality of course. So, as David Sedaris says inSix to Eight Black Men,
And we had ours.
But, and I don’t think this is naivety, we really are passed most of it now. There are still hate crimes here- just as there are in NYC and LA- but most people are live and let live. There’s a lot of separatism here- 11:00 a.m. on Sunday mornings will find most white southerners going to all white (or at least 90 plus percent white) churches and most black southerners going to all black (or at least 90 plus percent black) churches, the same being true with nightclubs on Friday nights, funeral homes when loved ones die, and in Montgomery- high schools. (There are several high schools in Montgomery that are very close to 100% black, largely because anybody who can afford it, white or black, even if it means working multiple jobs and borrowing money from any relatives who can spare it, sends their kids to private school.)
But there’s also the familiarity and comfort level that’s hard to describe. Part of it is perhaps provincialism: We share heritage, values (I’m not talking “family values” campaign commercial crap but the real thing), tastes in food, humor, probably genetic ancestry even, than we do with many outsiders.
Of course there’s a huge demographic component as well. How old people are makes a huge difference in the way they view others of a different race. Older southerners, both w & b, tend to be way more separatist, but at the same time more civil somehow. Anecdotal I know, but you wouldn’t believe how many old white people I have known (and sometimes loved) who you’d think would one day use the word nigger enough that you’ll stop cringing (but you never do) but who absolutely would do anything on Earth to help their black friends. (My mother was like this; she’d make terribly racist comments, and she almost got arrested for cursing a Montgomery police officer up one side/down the other/through the middle [and when my mother cussed you out you stayed cussed for at least 8 months] for confidentially saying to her “sounds like a bunch of nigger foolishness” when my mother was giving a statement about a black employee she loved dearly [who called her ‘Mama’, who my mother loaned large amounts of money to with a ‘pay me back when you can, if that’s never then I understand’ understanding, who lived with her briefly during a domestic crisis and was devastated at her funeral] being harassed by an ex-husband; I also remember my mother, dressed in her nicest outfit returning from a wedding, doing a U Turn while going 70 mph down a highway to go back, get out of the car and onto her knees to help two elderly black ladies change a flat tire on their car- not because they were black or because she knew them [she didn’t] but because they were two fellow humans who clearly needed help. She hated the people she knew who’d cheated black people in business and then went to church, because even in the 1970s/1980s black people didn’t have the same recourse with the law as white people (just as poor people didn’t and don’t), and she really and truly didn’t think about color when it came to deciding who she liked or who she loved or who was good or bad or intelligent or stupid, but at the same time, she’d tell me “I really don’t ever want you to date a black girl… in fact promise me you won’t” (and she got her wish… in The Twilight Zone).
I’m very sorry- this is more rambling than usual because I’m one-eyed at the moment and the other eye not doing great, but the point is southerners are all over the freaking map. I know guys who make Larry the Cable Guy look like Noel Coward who’d hit you with a lug wrench if you said ‘nigger’ and I know 6 figure per year small town lawyers and church deacons who think that anything is hysterical if said in a black accent (or a gay accent- if I ever did my black gay accent I guess they’d have a heart attack with mirth) and will say viciously racist things without ever using the ‘n’ word.
A weird aside is that there’s an odd alliance between gay white guys and black women in my experience. I’m bother gayer and whiter than a Julie Andrews Christmas Carol (so white and gay in fact that I own multiple recordings of Julie Andrews singing Christmas carols), and a disproportionate number of my close friends are black women. I feel FAR more at ease with them than I do even with most other gay white guys. (I hope I don’t sound like Ignatius Reilly “I think I should have been a large imposing Negro”, but I think being gay- and this is something I’ve discussed with other gay southerners, white and black, male and female, gives a sort of winking extra familiarity with black people than it does to a lot of white people because of the “outsider looking in” “Jesus what hypocrites those churches house” perspectives, and also the whole “I have to put up with shit from [the establishment] and then come home and get it from my family- I’ve got to vent”.
Sorry, I’m officially babbling.
Point again: there are good southerners and bad southerners just as there are good New Yorkers and bad New Yorkers. Systemic racism is illegal, saying ‘nigger’ will get you fired from damned near any job down here, there’s still a lot of undercover racism of course but I think that’s everywhere. As the south is becoming so much more homogenized due to TV and geographic migrations away and into it we’re losing a lot of our identity and that’s both good and bad. Once the Civil Rights era is something only the VERY old can remember (like the Depression is now) and the Civil War passes from living memory (here defined as “what the oldest people now alive can remember the oldest people from their childhood telling about firsthand”) I expect it to change even more. But southerners ain’t now and ain’t never been all one thing or the other (including white or black, racist or egalitarian).
And with the millions of Spanish speakers moving in I think white and black southerners are moving closer together. Not say it’s right, just that it is.
Something more coherent latre perhaps. And apologies. But I’ll hit Submit Reply in hopes there’s something salvageable.
I thought I smelled bait. (Word of advice: this time of year catawba worms are really a lot better than minnows- at least imho.)
This is a bit of a hijack but, what are you drinking? I’m guessing single malt…
Reminds me of something I read just recently:
The Slave Narrativesof the Federal Writers Project (reminiscences of former slaves taken when they were very old in the 1930s) are also like that. Some remembered the day they learned they were free as the happiest of their lives as if they’d been delivered out of the gates of hell. Some said that their lives went downhill fast and never recovered after freedom, that they’d never known hunger and want before and only thought they knew what hard work was before. Some recall rape and arbitrary beatings by their masters and overseers and guests of the master, other recall the nights their mistress sat by their bedside nursing them and a master who treated them like family. Even when you break it down into groups- those who lived on huge plantations with hundreds of slaves or those who lived on farms with only one or two other slaves, constant variation.
On an episode of AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES, a PBS show about African American genealogy that usually focuses on famous people, Morgan Freeman was stunned to discover that his white ancestry didn’t come about the way he’d always assumed. He knew his great-grandmother had children by the overseer on the plantation she lived on, and he figured it was at best a union of convenience (she got perhaps some preferential treatment and he got sex), but was shocked to discover that she and the overseer remained together after the war for the rest of their lives, are buried next to each other, he “sold” his property to her children (it would have been illegal for him to give it, but it’s clear from the documents no money actually changed hands) and essentially they lived as man and wife in all but legality. I’m not saying this was the rule, but that it was- again- not a simplistic time or society.
An interesting thing with the Hemings family of Monticello (I haven’t read that book yet but I’ve read others on them) is that several legally married white people. By Virginia law you ceased being black (legally) when you could prove more than 3/4 white ancestry, and several of Sally Hemings’s nephews and nieces could do this. An interesting thing: you ceased being black, but you did not cease being a slave, you just became a white slave.
Two of her nieces married- actually married- white men in Charlottesville who bought and married them. (One was named Colbert; I’ve wondered if Stephen derives from this line.) Many others less officially crossed over and married white people. One of Sally’s own grandsons (and almost certainly TJ’s as well) was John Wayles Jefferson, a Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army during the Civil War (when no black man could be an officer- the name Jefferson was adopted by J.W.'s father, Eston, long after leaving Monticello.)
The family of Sally’s son Madison Hemings chose to identify as black. One of Madison’s grandsons, Frederick Madison Roberts, was the first black man elected to office in California. Perhaps it’s because you’re looking for it, but to me there’s a strong resemblance twixt him and TJ.
Not the South, but an example of fairly contemporary racist behavior…
Alicia, a college friend of mine, is black, grew up in Oakland, and lived for a time in Colorado Springs. She left about ten years ago for various reasons, one of which was that door-to-door salesmen kept asking to speak to the lady of the house.
Well, let’s see. I moved back home to a small town in MS after living in Birmingham for 16 years. I did not know just how racially tolerant *Birmingham Alabama *was until I moved back.
When I moved back I enrolled my son in the same private school because (1) it’s where I went (2) my parents paid for it and (3) everyone else I know was sending their kid there and said the school was great. Turns out the biggest selling point is that “there’s not hardly any blacks there.”
My son came home from school yesterday and wanted to know why I was voting for someone that was going to kill the white man.
I tend bar so I overhear a lot. I hear jokes that would make you not just cringe, but die a little inside. My biggest victory is when they start telling them they make a show of stopping and saying “oh we’re not supposed to use the N word in front of ShelliBean” with a ‘let’s not offend her delicate sensibilites’ tone. Luckily they like me so I like to think I make them think at least every once in a while but really, I’ve never thrown anyone out over it, and never would. Why? Because at the end of the day my tips and paycheck speak louder than my ideals.
Finally - a black business owner is not going to have bricks with the N word thrown through his window. A white doctor is not going to refuse to treat a black person. That’s not the kind of racism there is here. But it goes like this: Joe is white and Ned is black. Joe’s parents and Ned’s parents are pretty much the same, but Joe’s parents belong to a different social circles. Eventually they graduate, but Joe has grown up around judges and doctors and is way more likely to get that recommendation letter to Ole Miss law school from family legends and people keeping an eye out for open jobs, while Ned is working just the same but probably didn’t have the same breaks because his family was working just the same as Joe’s but didn’t have the same connections. Why? Well, cause this scenario has been playing out for generations. Anyway, Joe will probably get a few career nudges that Ned won’t and eventually the effect will show exponentially and Joe will be sitting around one day talking about the lazy you-know-whats and he doesn’t understand because he and Ned had the same schooling and he managed to do it so why didn’t Ned (who by this time has either fallen into small town mentality of “this crap heap has been good enough for generations so you’ll like it too” or moved to a big city to improve his education or career outlook. And Joe’s never gonna get it because he can’t see outside the blinders he has on.
I was in Baton Rouge, LA on a business trip about 7 months ago. I asked one of the desk clerks at the hotel about running routes, parks, or anything like that in the vicinity, and whether it was safe to go out running by myself. (FWIW, I’m a relatively small woman.)
He regretted to tell me that there weren’t any parks or trails in the immediate vicinity, but showed me a direction to go in if I cared to run on the street. He cautioned me against running in the opposite direction because “that’s mostly a Black neighborhood.”
I’ve spoken about this with other female friends, three of whom also related getting the “Now, you be careful among all those Black folks, little lady” speech while traveling in the south.
Racism in the south is a lot more subtle than it used to be, but it’s still here. And actually, depending on where you are, blacks might not be the group most discriminated against/resented and feared. (Mexicans (yeah, I know, not a race) are VERY unpopular in rural areas because of the [largely uneducated] migrant population that comes in to pick the crops.)
It’s more jokes, comments, etc. when NOT in the presence of the group. It’s making things easier for one of YOUR group than of the other (bend a rule for a white person, refuse to bend the same rule for a person of color.) It’s encouraging your kids to play with kids in your group rather than the others. And it’s an internal thought process you might not even be aware of to prefer the company of those of your group, even if you’re perfectly courteous to those not of your group.
Those of us brought up in a racist environment have to fight the last one tooth and nail, because it’s ingrained in us early, whether deliberately or not. For example, my mom told us that racism and bigotry were wrong, but otherwise, in word and deed, my parents and grandparents undermined that teaching. I’m not a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do person, so I took to heart that it was WRONG, but still have to fight the living example that was provided to me. (And damn, the older they get, the worse they are.)
Native Mississippian here.
Racism is very old. That sort of thing doesn’t die off in a few decades, not with the history we have. You might see more overt racism in MS, but before the non-Southerners get all puffed up and start self-congratulating, let me say that I’ve been all over this country, and I’ve seen as much or more racism in CA and NY and CO, and the only difference is that sometimes it’s focused more against Mexicans or other brown-skinned peoples instead of blacks. Whites living in all-white neighborhoods or in gated communities and sending their kids to 99% all-white schools and never having to deal with anyone who doesn’t look or talk like them. There’s a certain white priviledge in that, too.
MS is about 40% black, and the whites and the blacks kinda have to be around each other; there’s no avoiding it. That being said, it’s far from some racial utopia. I like to say that whites often have ‘double-think’; they can hold two contrary opinions at once and believe them both. They may have a deep-rooted belief that blacks are dirty and thieving – but not Nancy who works at the store with me, she’s a good lady, and that Smith boy my son runs around with, he’s just too funny and always so polite. That kinda thing. Hell, back in the day you’d be hard-pressed to find a Klucker who didn’t have a black girlfriend and six or seven half-black babies hidden away somewhere. If you’re white, you might hear racist jokes told at a family reunion, or know that your great-grandfather was in the Klan, that kinda thing. But it’d be very unusual for someone to shout profanities at a black businessman on his way to work, or throw a brick through someone’s window.
Now, I’ve met blacks who wouldn’t drive through MS if their life depended on it, and blacks who moved to MS and wouldn’t leave if you paid them. One of my mother’s friends is like that. She came to Biloxi on vacation and fell in love with the place. She sold her home in Atlanta and moved down here. She told us all her relatives think she’s lost her damn mind. “You moved to Mississippi?! Girl, everyone tried to get *out *of Mississippi, and you go and move there!” Another lady who used to live next door to us was from California, and moved here to work with a non-profit group after Katrina. She told us that she likes living in MS because at least here she knows if you’re racist right away. She said living out West, if you’re black, means living in a constant state of paranoia: Did I not get the apartment because I’m black, or did I not get the apartment just because I didn’t get the apartment? Now, that doesn’t mean that the racism in MS is good, just that’s her opinion.
I am about 99% sure that boofuu left an f out of his post, and he means it was off Highway 54, which runs through Durham and has several Waffle Houses on it.
In my limited experience as a white person living in Atlanta from 1991-1993, the racism was certainly there, but hidden. I found the south in general to have a veneer of politeness, but a bitter reality underneath, and not just with race relations.
There was a certain amount of prejudice that was easily expressed between whites, but in private, or only when no blacks were present. I am from New Jersey, and was friends with several other students from the north, and we all noticed it and felt uncomfortable in those situations.
ETA : Not to say that I never encountered racism up north - someone once wished me a happy “Martin Lucifer Coon day” when I lived in NJ.
Joe