1970’s? How about 1993?
I give you the lovely town of Vidor, Texas.
Overt and open racism is still widespread in the US today.
A few examples:
I’ve had several black coworkers who have been routinely discriminated against in public. One woman was taunted with racist yelling when she drove thru a small town south of us. (Her main crime seemed to be a black woman driving a new car.)
Others have been refused service at stores.
Larry Miller tells of a common type of incident in his book “Spoiled Rotten America.” (It’s a very funny book, although that incident is quite a downer.)
All around my area, when a couple of minority families move into a neighborhood, the whites move out quickly. In one school district, they went from 90% white to 99% black in less than 10 years. Currently, hispanics cause the most flight for some strange reason.
At my last “professional” position I was a double minority. I got to experience the job of being on the receiving end of discrimination on a routine basis. Lucky me.
I guess the answer is, there probably wouldn’t have been open hostility, loud racial slurs or vandalism in most Northern towns.
That’s not to say racism didn’t exist, just that it wasn’t so blatant. And a TV show like “Cold Case” prefers that racism be blatant. A brick thrown throug ha window makes a good scene on TV scene. White flight, a more gradual symptom of racism, does not.
In most Northern neighborhoods, when blacks started moving in, whites didn’t scream “Get out, niggers!” and they didn’t fire-bomb homes. Rather, they started selling their homes and moving out.
Howard Stern likes telling how, in Roosevelt, Long Island where he grew up, Jewish homeowners said all the right things, and adopted all the proper progressive stances when black families began moving in… but within a few months, Stern and his family were about the only whites left in the area.
It reminds me of a comment by Ben Stein. After the O.J. SImpson verdict, he was asked if white people would riot. He said, “Sure, they’ll riot, the way white people riot: by moving farther out into the suburbs and voting for the Republicans to cut welfare.”
I remember reading about a lot of racial angst in Chicago at the time of Mayor Harold Washington’s election in the 1980s, too. Sad. Progress on racial harmony seems to be three steps forward and two steps back, sometimes, but it has been remarkably steady overall. The U.S. is a vastly different - and better - place on that front than it was in the Sixties. Jim Crow is well and truly dead.
I lived in Warren up until a couple of years ago, and it was still mostly segregated in that only a few minorities lived on my street (that I noticed). Most of the black population is still in the “bad” part of town.
Much more recently, though, there was race violence in Eastpointe (I also lived there a spell) due to a black family having moved in. Keep in mind that this is the city that required all city workers to live in the city (policy overturned by a court due to this amounting to racial discrimination), and this is the city was was until relatively recently called “East Detroit” but changed in order to remove their association with all those “bad blacks” on the infamous east-side of Detroit.
All in all (Wikipedia probably has CDPs’ statistics) most of SE Michigan is still very much non-integrated.
I don’t mean to hijack, but why do you think this is the case?
I didn’t make that up. It is an regularly cited problem in the media including the Boston Globe. There was a series of jokes about it in the Boston Sunday Globe Sunday magazine about a year ago that I wish I could remember. The busing scandal that I noted was among the biggest blowups of that type in the country and attracted significant national attention about an oddly deep-seated problem in a city know for its liberalism. Boston is a very segregated city with many wealthy suburbs that have few blacks all the way past the New Hampshire line which is the second whitest states. Blacks are concentrated in a few areas like Dorchester and in scattered neighborhoods around the city. The city has historically had a conflict between white ethinic groups such as the Italian, Irish, and others. There just wasn’t much room for blacks to become anything more than an afterthought. The academic intelligencia talks about minority issues on an abstract level but I have read stories of blacks that have relocated to the South who reported an icy coldness and indifference from people that doesn’t happen often in areas with higher black populations.
Obviously, I’ve led a sheltered life. I’ve met racists and assholes (there’s a lot of overlap in those two groups), but I’ve never met one who would stand on a street and chant at a black family moving into a neighborhood. A lot of the people I know engage in some form of racial stereotyping, but being overtly or violently racist is beyond my experience. Not being ashamed of such feelings or actions is beyond my comprehension.
Things like that piss me off. Not just what the crowd did, but that the photographer was actually lauded for his actions. He didn’t try to help. He didn’t yell and run in. He didn’t call the cops. He stood back and took pictures, allowing the man to be injured, and was awarded for it instead of being censured. That makes me sick.
Remember the Loma Prieta earthquake during the “Bay Series” in 1989? A portion of the San Francisco Bay Bridge upper deck collapsed, and the news stations were showing video footage of a car driving off of the edge. The guy with the camera made no attempt to wave down the driver, or yell at him to stop. He just videotaped him driving by and going into the gap. I was aghast. He was interviewed like a celebrity, with his video all over the news. Luckily, the people in the other car weren’t seriously hurt. That irresponsible idiot with the video camera still should have been forced to help pay for the damage to their car.
Yes, and to add a little balance to the discussion, Stern also talks about how he got his ass kicked regularly for being one of the only white kids around.
I have friends who grew up as one of the only white kids in minority areas (one on an Indian reservation and one in Washington, D.C.) who were routinely beaten up for being white. There are racists in all races.
Fortunately it seems as though times have changed to the extent that while you may no longer be beaten up for it, you’ll still catch shit. I grew up the only white face on my block in D.C and while I was occasionally hassled at least I never got my ass kicked.
How do you know all this?
What is a single photographer going to do against a mob, except probably get himself killed? Even if the cops were called, could they have helped in time? Could a demonstration like that even have occurred without police knowing about it beforehand?
The photographer was not awarded for taking a photo that sold a lot of newspapers or magazines or what-have-you - he was awarded for exposing an injustice and that benefits society. From the victim’s point of view, had there not been a photographer present, it is certainly possible that there would have been a murder that day.
There is also, to my mind, a distinction to be made between a professional journalist reporting a story that may have a significant social impact, and random passers-by hoping to film an automobile wreck, an act which does not benefit either the victim or society at large. Sadly, professional journalists far too often stray into the latter category, but this was not one of those times.
How do I know what? That he didn’t rush in to help? The attempted impaling with the flag is imminent in that photo, and it’s rather obvious to me that the photographer was taking a picture at the time, not helping.
Looking closely at the photo, I see three people that were involved–possibly a fourth–in the attack. That’s hardly a “mob.” The rest of the folks on the street are bystanders. A loud yell and someone rushing toward them might have headed off the situation.
Please name one single way in which that photographer prevented a murder. Does the fellow with the flag look like he is modifying his behavior because of the photographer?
Yes, there’s a difference. A “professional” journalist has a greater responsibility than a random passerby. The photographer’s first thought should have been, “That dude’s in danger of getting killed. Maybe I can help.” Unfortunately, it looks more like it was, “That dude’s in danger of getting killed. Maybe I can get a great picture and win a Pulitzer price.”
I’m not saying you’ve made it up. In fact, I have heard numerous people say the same thing. That’s why I asked you why you thought that was the case. Why, for example, were the Boston Red Sox the last team to integrate their roster? It just seems weird that a “liberal”, “educated” city is so racist. Thank you for your input, but I still don’t quite get how this happened to Boston.
In the 1980’s in Southwest Philadelphia, a black family moved into an Italian/Irish neighborhood, and there were mobs of people there to protest in front of their home. There was vandalism and other old fashioned hate crimes.
For at least a decade (circa 1984 thru 1994) police officers were assigned full time to sit in front of the residence. We grew used to seeing a police cruiser there 'round the clock.
The same neighbors that went to the Catholic church on the same block would be there at the ‘rally’. Well covered in the media.
I remember the little girl who lived there, looking out the window…looking very sad. The Christian Brothers from my high school in West Philly brought some of us together to stand against the protestors.
The 70’s? Heck, try the 90’s.
To repeat: as the victim himself said (see above), the flag holder was swinging the flag at him, not trying to impale him. Beacuse this is a still photograph and not a film or video, you are misinterpreting the event.
Please pretend that I have edited my previous post to say “attempted beating” instead of “attempted impaling” (the five minute limit prevents me from actually doing this). It makes no difference to the point I was making, so I would be equally happy if you substituted “assault” or some other word that indicates the photographer was taking pictures of someone harming Landsmark instead of attempting in any way to help.
Smithsonian magazine article about the incident:
A) It was over really fast, hardly time to react.
B) Why are you focusing on the photographer in this instance? Surely you can work up some outrage towards the other 50 or so people standing around staring.
C) Perhaps the photographer took the photo for evidence’s sake, as well as posterity’s.
(On the larger issue, I agree with you, actually. I just think this is a poor example of it.)
Please don’t interpret my feelings about the photographer for ambivalence about the others. The reason I’m focused on the photographer is that Frylock’s original link was to the “Pulitzer-winning photograph,” and that set me off. Fifty people stood around and did nothing to help. The 51st was holding a camera so he got a Pulitzer prize for not helping. That is why I focused on him.