I've often wondered what those who stayed behind in the South or fought for Civil Rights went through despite the books I have read, the films I have seen, or the private conversations I have had with those who lived through the struggle.
Could I have endured the beatings, harassment, lynchings, false imprisonment, or the likelihood of being ostracized by friends or those too fearful to fight? I think about my father, who walked a fine line, and the many unsung heroes who lost their lives in the most inhumane of ways. I think about the young World War Two African American soldier who returned home only to be denied the full benefits of the G.I. Bill and even assaulted at rest stops.
Even whites sympathetic to the plight of blacks received backlash. President Carter's eldest son, whose parents supported intergraded schools, received beatings every day at his high school in a small town in Southwest Georgia for refusing to toe the line on segregation. The daily abuse, criticism, and scolding handed down by his classmates did not break his will, his mother's will, or that of his father, the future governor, and president, who would one day declare an end to racial discrimination in the South.
Moreover, could I have withstood the segregated school system that Carter and others fought against? Many of my relatives, neighbors, and fellow Georgians had no choice. Although the teachers were great, the system crippled us educationally and helped perpetuate an inferiority complex. The dilapidated buildings, shortages of books, playgrounds, and buses to transport black kids to and from school safely typified black education well into the '60s in the South. White students, in most instances, enjoyed schools equipped with libraries, laboratories, numerous classrooms, band equipment, and gymnasiums once a shiny, new bus dropped them off for class. It cast doubt on the doctrine of separate but equal!
The biased school system impacted black boys particularly hard. Many who lived on farms spent the Fall semester harvesting crops. They were also required to sit out during planting season instead of in the classroom. As a result, the number of black males graduating from high school or attending historically black colleges lagged far behind black females. Only years later did the gap narrow but widen again for other reasons.
Aside from receiving a substandard education, most African Americans who sought to stick it out in the South or fight for their rights did not receive the best medical care. Before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which revolutionized healthcare for blacks across the Southern U.S, black Americans received medical care primarily in colored hospitals, segregated wards in white-run facilities, or were denied service altogether, which does not take into account the abuse of the black female reproductive system or other acts of medical malpractice heaped on people of color for generations.
It is not to say that black doctors and their clinics did not play a vital role in delivering babies, fighting high blood pressure, or simply saving the lives of everyday black citizens. However, access to the nation's overall healthcare system is a fundamental right that should not be denied to anyone based on color, gender, sexual orientation, or ability to pay. It has led to health disparities such as infant mortality that exist today.
Another devastating consequence of living in the apartheid South that weighed heavily on the "souls of black folks" dealt with poverty. In many ways, it resembled life in so-called Third World countries though not all blacks in the South or other parts of the country lived below the poverty line. It was driven by low wages paid to black workers, especially in agriculture which led to substandard housing and hunger. For instance, when Senator Robert Kennedy visited the Mississippi Delta in the mid-1960s, he encountered African Americans living in homes unfit for human habitation on former plantations with children suffering from malnutrition and too weak to stand. The Delta and Appalachia regions became the basis for the Great Society and War on Poverty initiated by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Similarly, in urban areas, blighted communities for blacks existed, such as Atlanta's Buttermilk Bottom. It consisted of shacks on unpaved streets with outhouses in the back for many years and a lack of electricity. (1) By the 1970s, the homes were demolished to make way for a new civic center and other development. Today, a city marker bears its name in remembrance of hardworking African Americans who called it home.
Surviving Jim Crow not only meant finding ways to deal with a one-sided healthcare system or systematic poverty but crooked law enforcement. The slave catcher gave rise to the Southern sheriff, an imposing figure, who stood in the way of voting, arrested black protesters without due process, and caused the death of hundreds of black men, women, and children from Virginia to Texas that remains unsolved. It interfered with the free travel of blacks, who had to be off the roads by sundown in isolated communities.
Local police, like their counterpart in the Sheriff's Office, preyed on blacks, especially black men, resulting in their arrest or long-term incarceration on trumped-up charges. As a result, county jails, prisons, and work camps, like the Atlanta Brick Company, exploded with the bodies of the wrongfully convicted, many of whom never saw justice. It was the beginning of mass incarceration that continues today.
Along with the horrors of law enforcement in the segregated South existed immense efforts to keep blacks from voting, notably in rural areas. Poll taxes, purging of voting rolls, literacy tests, intimidation, routine violence, and other unreasonable requirements were employed to steer blacks away from the voting booth. Attempts to fight for the right to vote by showing up to register, holding voter registration projects, or marching in the streets could have meant the difference between life and death. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has since been gutted, ended voter suppression by eliminating barriers to the ballot box. It led to the election of the nation's first black president.
Above all, the worst atrocity inflicted on African Americans or freed blacks in the deep South following Reconstruction included a rigid social order that lasted well into the Twentieth Century. When the Civil War ended, Union soldiers were stationed in the South to protect the former slave. When they were pulled out due to the Compromise of 1876, Southern States introduced the Black Codes, similar to the slave codes, that remained on the books for generations. They were intended to control the lives of the former slave, such as voting, where they could attend school, or whom they could love, for instance. Local communities also enacted statutes of conduct to further intimidate blacks.
A version of the black codes existed in the North. Banks, for instance, instituted redlining to prevent blacks from moving into white neighborhoods. This created segregated communities and schools, known as de facto segregation. It was based on customs and attitudes and not written into law. It made life highly difficult for African Americans.
The black codes established two unequal societies in the South and Midwest. For instance, it forbade mixing in schools, parks, restaurants, housing, and other areas. Other statutes were enacted to "... enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes sex between members of different races" to make blacks feel less human.
The rules of racial separation sought to dehumanize blacks in other ways. My father, who spent his life in rural Southwest Georgia, revealed how as a young black man in the '40s and '50s, he had to say "yes sir" and "no sir" to juvenile white males, and along with other black men and women, were required to step off the sidewalk when whites approached as an act of further humiliation. Blacks also entered through the back door of well-to-do white homes and were confined to separate seating in clinics, hospitals, streetcars, and city buses. They also received second-class service in restaurants and stores and were denied accommodation in all hotels. A high school teacher once commented how he once stood in line in the rear of a white-owned establishment to get a hot meal in the 1950s in my small hometown in Georgia.
When blacks dared to buck the caste system, the outcome was brutal. Black men were lynched, severely beaten, or ran off their land for asserting their manhood or "stepping out of line," as it was customarily called. It robbed them of their ability to protect their women, children, or community from a chaotic way of life that hurt them deeply.
Acts of terror or utter humiliation extended to black women, too. They were fired from teaching jobs, intimidated, physically harmed, murdered, and banished from their communities like Fannie Lou Hammer, a human rights figure in the 1960s, for desiring to be treated with respect. Despite it all, black women, like black men, rose above the hate to live successful lives.
African Americans who chose to stay in the South or forgo life elsewhere forged a path in education, economics, and Civil Rights that allow us to live lives we can be proud of in a land of opportunity called America. They made it happen despite incredible odds. They farmed their land, taught in newly built segregated schools that became the center of the community, made strives in healthcare that saved lives and fought battles to uphold the Constitution. Although life in the North for blacks was not always ideal, and the South was downright cruel, Dixie has become a home to millions of black people, including those who longed to return, and a new generation of people of color who have discovered its great potential.
