Jim Crow Beverage

 Many of us have no idea how close the newly freed slaves were to their (our) birthright and equal participation in charting the course of America.  In the introduction to his book “Native Son,” Richard Wright captures the essence of this pivotal moment in time with the following excerpt:

“This separation was accomplished after the Civil War by the terror of the Ku Klux Klan, which swept the newly freed Negro through arson, pillage, and death out of the United States Senate, the House of Representatives, the many state legislatures, and out of the public, social, and economic life of the South. The motive for this assault was simple and urgent.  The imperialistic tug of history had torn the Negro from his African home and had placed him ironically upon the most fertile plantation areas of the South; and, when the Negro was freed, he outnumbered the whites in many of these fertile areas. Hence, a fierce and bitter struggle took place to keep the ballot from the Negro, for had he had a chance to vote, he would have automatically controlled the richest lands of the South and with them the social, political, and economic destiny of a third of the republic.”

FAST FORWARD

Have you ever seen young children playing in a sand pit or at pre‑school? Black, White, Hispanic and Asian kids sharing toys, helping one another and having endless fun.  Untainted is the word that comes to mind, accompanied by the belief that, if left to themselves, they’d interact this way all the days of their lives.  In comes their loving parents or grandparents and this Kodak moment abruptly ends.  Many children have this experience for a good six or so years of their lives, then move on to more regimented ranks, often against their natural instincts.  Mommy, daddy, grandmother or grandpa says it’s time to live in the real world.  Twelve years later in 2003 it’s time to attend the annual segregated prom.  Thanks mom, thanks dad, thanks grammy, thanks gramps; thank you all for immersing me in our proud and unyielding traditions.

MLK LEGACY IGNORED

Years after Brown vs. Board of Education Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. found himself fighting harder than ever against the vestiges of Jim Crow, which had been the day to day reality he’d lived all his life.  He died, having experienced some concrete changes in American life and left us with his dream of more to come.  He knew, however, that a cornered and dying Jim Crow was as dangerous as ever.  He was well aware that Jim Crow was born out of a sentiment that said “if I can’t have you as my slave you’ll live a miserable existence under my feet.”  Dr. King, along with JFK, Malcolm and Bobby Kennedy became casualties and martyrs as each in his own way contemplated the dismantling of this insidious monster, yet more than 20 years after the last assassination we find Jim Crow still doing his dance.

YUSEF HAWKINS

What struck me most about the Yusef Hawkins murder in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn was the year in which it happened (1989) and the average age (20) of the wolfpack that caused his death.  Twenty‑one years after Dr. King’s passing this incident and others gave clear evidence that Jim Crow was still alive and well in many a household.  To think that these kids were being conceived and carried in pregnancy at the time right up to Dr. King’s assassination is mind‑blowing, for as members of the first generation of his dream they deserved to be weaned on something better than Jim Crow Beverage.  Now, 47 years later some, if not all of these kids, have raised children.  Wouldn’t you just love to have been a fly on the wall of those households? I would. Believe me, Trent Lott wasn’t the only one yearning for the good ‘ole days.

RESIDUAL HAUNTING

Nowadays the ghost of Jim Crow haunts both black and white.  For about 50 years now it’s been open season on white folks in black neighborhoods and, on occasion, in their own neighborhoods.  At the height of the Black Power movement of the sixties and seventies we see something unthinkable occurring in America: black folks beatin’ down white folks in public ‑ and gettin’ away with it.  That opened the floodgates. While 99% of this may have been the result of years and years of pent‑up anger and frustration it gradually gave way to mob mentality and outright criminality.  Blacks began to victimize whites in some of the same ways whites victimized blacks and for the same reason ‑ skin color.  If you got a flat tire in a black neighborhood that was your ass.  If you came in to cop drugs unescorted consider yourself beat, robbed or even killed.  If you rode the subway in New York City you weren’t safe until the train passed through all the stations in black neighborhoods.  To many blacks this was just payback.  They thanked Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Jehovah and any other deity they could think of that they’d lived to see the day when white folks walked in their shoes to any extent; that they experienced debilitating fear.  We saw a mass exodus of whites out of urban centers; those who remained generally were just as poor as blacks and shared varying levels of kinship with blacks.  Consequently, they weren’t necessarily victimized, but still caught a little hell now and then.  Those who stood their ground were respected, sometimes feared.

So what do we have in 2021?  We’ve got both black and white interacting more on every level, which lends itself to the dream.  We’ve also got that instinctive awareness of places in this country we still wouldn’t be caught dead in.  Upon superficial observation it seems that America is very racially harmonious and in some respects it is.  Then you have those events that bring the venom to the surface so quick that it forces us to acknowledge how fractured and poisonous race relations really are in America.  Currently it is George Floyd, but code words for these emotions abound: O.J., Reginald Denny, Abner Louima, James Byrd, Rodney King, Forsyth, Ga., Amadou Diallo, Cincinnati, L.A.P.D., Michael Griffith, Reparations, Rosedale, NY,  Willie Turks, Gravesend, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Freddy Gray, Laquan McDonald, Sean Bell, Ahmaud Arbery, Walter Scott, Philando Castile, Breonna Tayler and on and on.  As a nation in recovery from racial hatred and all that it has wrought the best advice for America at this stage is “keep on fakin’ it ’till you truly make it.”  As for my people, in particular, I’ll just remind us that becoming like our worst oppressor is one of the biggest set‑backs we’ve suffered in our quest for dignity and the respect of the world.  A black man, woman or child, after what our people have endured, should be the last one on earth to victimize, violate or mistreat someone because of the color of their skin.