I have 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, lynchings, harassment, false imprisonment, and 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 unsung heroes who lost their lives in inhumane 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. Jimmy Carter's eldest son was beaten by students at his high school in a small town in Southwest Georgia because his family supported integrated schools and refused to toe the line on segregation. The abuse 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.
Could I have also survived the segregated public 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. On the other hand, white students attended well-equipped schools and had access to shiny buses that dropped them off for class. It challenged the doctrine of separate but equal!
The biased school system impacted black boys particularly hard. Many African American boys lived on farms and spent the Fall semester harvesting crops or were 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 that of black females. Only years later did it narrow, but it widened again for other reasons.
Aside from receiving a substandard education, many African Americans who were determined to stick it out in the South or fight for their rights did not get 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.
This 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" was poverty. In some areas, 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.
Blighted communities also existed in urban areas like Atlanta's Buttermilk Bottom. Like many neglected black neighborhoods of that time, it suffered from poor infrastructure, with dilapidated homes on unpaved streets, outhouses in the back, and in some instances, a lack of electricity. (1) By the 1970s, the homes were demolished to make way for a new civic center and other developments. Today, a city marker bears its name in remembrance of the hardworking African Americans who called it home.
Surviving Jim Crow not only involved finding ways to deal with a one-sided healthcare system or systematic poverty, but also 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 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 slaves. 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 slaves, 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 also 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 an unequal society 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 dehumanized blacks in other ways, too. 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 that he 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 run 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.
Black women also endured acts of terror. They were fired from teaching jobs, intimidated, physically harmed, murdered, and banished from their communities, like Fannie Lou Hamer, 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 decided to stay in the South or forgo life elsewhere forged a path in education, economics, and Civil Rights that allows 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 strides 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.
