We just watched a DVR’d episode of “Cold Case,” which hinged around a black family moving into a white suburban neighborhood in the 1970’s. The neighbors stood across the street from the moving truck chanting “leave.” The black family was told that “their kind” wasn’t welcome. They were called “critters” because they “weren’t really human.” White families sold their houses to get out of the “spoiled” neighborhood.
My question: were there really suburbs like this in the 1970s? I’m not talking about the 1870’s here! This wasn’t your subtle “don’t invite the Robinsons for dinner because they’re ‘different’” kind of racism. This was inner-city Los Angeles gang member racism. This was antebellum Atlanta, Georgia racism.
In the 1970s, I was going to high school in Colorado, and then to college in California. I never saw such a thing. To this day, I’ve never met a person who would overtly treat people this way. I’ve never lived in a big city, so maybe I’ve just led a sheltered life. Was this really an accurate portrayal of east cost suburban life in the 70’s?
I lived in suburban Washington, D.C. in the late 70’s and my neighborhood was completely integrated, pretty much 50/50 white and black. Interestingly, most blacks lived on one end of the street and most whites on the other, although the family directly across the street was black (I’m white).
I couldn’t imagine anthing like that happening anywhere near me, but I could see it happening maybe 75 miles south or west. Rural Virginia towns were either “white” or “black” back then, except for the poorest Appalachian towns, which were mixed.
The U.S. was much less integrated in the 1970’s than it was now. If you don’t care for heavy history, just watch old re-runs of All in the Family, Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, and many others. They reflect a pretty accurate view of the things that went on even if in a comedic way. Many would find it surprising that I went to racially segregated public schools up until first grade - in 1981. My parents taught at the black school. White suburbians didn’t necessarily have that much prejudice individually but they didn’t want their neighborhood to “turn black” if one black famly primed the pump by moving in and later destroyed property values.
Not the suburbs, but I grew up in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s. When the first black family moved into my Irish-Italian neighborhood in the 1970s their house was firebombed. The neighborhood is probably 30% black now, plus a lot of other minorities.
It wouldn’t strike me as out of the question that some east coast suburbs could have been like that then.
That is a good point. Even here in notoriously liberal (but suspiciously racist) Boston, the seemingly simple act of busing poor black students to richer white schools caused all hell to break loose in many directions and some you wouldn’t expect. My wife who grew up in a more wealthy Boston suburb still mentions the ABC kids sometimes. They were the black bused students and the name is subtle but telling.
Yes, I have. But all such footage I’ve seen was from big cities in the South, and a lot of the focus seemed to be “why are you taking me out of my school and making me go elsewhere.”
This was just so overt and hostile. I’ve never been exposed to anything like that in the U.S.
The closest was getting grief from some Mexicans in California. I’ve always been treated well by Mexicans in Mexico–and by most of the Mexicans elsewhere–but there are some Mexicans in Northern California that treated me badly because I’m white.
The big blowups on busing weren’t focused in the South at all. Boston was a huge blowup but so were San Francisco, Cleveland, and many other decidedly non-Southern cities. I think your historical perspective is tainted by a stereotypical view of the South and you are building an amalgam of different things. The era that you are talking about was focused on other areas of the country.
Yes. Definitely. The 60s and 70s were a time when a lot of neighborhoods were just being integrated. In some areas it was a neighborhood by neighborhood struggle between those who wanted integration and those who felt “there goes the neighborhood.”
Once you got past a certain percentage of African-American families in the neighborhood, the remaining whites decided (almost collectively) that the neighborhood had “flipped” and all their houses went up for sale, almost overnight.
It’s rare now, but once or twice a year, I see a story about a black family in a white neighborhood having racist grafitti sprayed on the house, or a cross burned in their yard. It’s a measure of progress that nowadays, their white neighbors usually help clean up.
Not even close. In 1976, a black man named Ted Landsmark was walking in the streets of Boston. He walked through a crowd that was protesting the city’s plans to desegregate busing.
Some whites grabbed him. One of them had an American flag. They held Landsmark and speared him through the abdomen with the flag.
The Pulitzer-winning photograph remains one of the most poignant, powerful images of American racism.
edit - Oh, also - most of the complaints weren’t that whites were being forced to get bused long distances to urban schools, it was that blacks were being bused into white schools.
Such scenes, (or the even more sinister late night firebombings) occurred with depressing regularity when blacks attempted to move into white neighborhoods through the 1970s. My memory is that in Warren, MI, Waterford, MI, and Parma, OH, the first three black families in each of those cities were driven out by violence and the first successful integration of those cities did not occur until after 1980. (Each of those cities were working class white neighborhoods on the borders of larger cities that had been integrated and then started to decline. Richer towns either allowed in a token black lawyer or doctor or found sneakier ways to simply keep blacks out. However, the dynamics could be quite complex and it would be a mistake to characterize the situations as merely “poor whites hating colored people.”)
A professor I work with authored the Boston deseg plan. The stories he tells… well, I don’t think that you could imagine the kind of shit people did in the 70s when Black kids were bussed. Another prof was a principal at a school in Southie. Kids regularly had bricks thrown at them through the bus windows. Pols made all kids of Orville Faubus type speeches too. And those folks are still alive.
Boston Against Busing by Formisono is a great account. Living here, it was bizarre to read the book and not think I was reading about something that happened at the end of the Civil War.
This particular phenomenon was not merely coincidental. There is no question that the more houses are on the market in a neighborhood, the lower the prices will be. (Simple supply and demand.) Realtors, who make their money on sales, recognized that fear was an excellent way to promote sales. In a practice known as blockbusting, realtors would begin calling people in a neighborhood and ask whether “since a colored family is moving in” they wanted to get out before the price of their house got too low. Fear drove many people to do just that (even when the “colored family” was, initially, a figment of some realtor’s imagination). They would get a dozen houses listed for sale, forcing the prices down, then take those lower prices to blacks who were looking to move out of their ghettoes and when the first black family moved in, that was enough to trigger serious white flight in a sad self-fullfilling prophecy. (This was one of the reasons behind the violent response to integrating neighborhoods. Even if a couple did not mind living next to a black family, most people feared that if they let one family in, so many of their neighbors would sell in fear that their own house would lose its value and they would find themselves with high mortgages on property they could not sell for what they paid.)
(Interestingly, I recently saw a claim that blockbusting was a “black realtor” tactic. That claim was total horseshit. Black realtors were happy enough to join in and take their cuts once the movement started and they deserve as much censure as the white realtors for promoting white flight just to make a buck, but the tactic was hardly invented by blacks.)
Wow I hadn’t heard that story or seen that photo before.
On checking, I see that “speared him through the abdomen” isn’t quite accurate–he was treated for bruising, but there was no penetration–but still, an amazing photo.
Ted Lansmark was not “speared through the abdomen.” He had minor facial injuries including a broken nose and bruises on his entire body from being roughed up by a crowd.
FWIW in 1969 a black classmate of mine went into a stationary store in Glendale California the clerk came up to him as he was browsing and said “Son I don’t know what you want, but I am sure we don’t have it”. :rolleyes:
Glendale, it should be noted, was, up until just a few years before, the location of the American Nazi Party. :dubious:
I am happy to report that this store is long out of business.
Good catch. I had been told he was stabbed with it, and that seems to be the popular understanding, although Landsmark himself has said that the flag was swung at him, not stabbed at him.
Still, he recounts suddenly realizing “I was covered with blood” in “no more than 15 seconds,” which is pretty brutal.
