Segregation faded away.  I read that phrase in an article a couple of weeks ago, and I could only laugh at the denial that must be present, to choose that wording.  It was an article about local beaches, telling a short history of a particular beach (a mere 3 miles away from a black university founded for escaped slaves in Virginia), how it used to have a white section and a colored section, but after segregation faded away…..

Faded away.  Imagine that.

*****

I learned this year that (some? most? all?) black people don’t really celebrate the 4^th of July.  I never knew that.  Even if I had known it years before, it wouldn’t have made sense to me.  You’re American, aren’t you?  You get your welfare checks from America, don’t you?  Insert appropriate amount of disdain, superiority, and ignorance.

We sang a few patriotic songs last week at church for the holiday.  Singing in honor of America in a very WASPy church with these thoughts tumbling in my head only served to make me acutely aware, again, of my skin color.

One of the songs we sang was ‘God of our Fathers’.  God of our white fathers, I whispered to my husband, aware of the speech by Frederick Douglass being sent around on social media.

“I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting…”

Now I was viewing the lyrics through non-white eyes.  “In this free land by Thee our lot is cast.”  Visions of the surrounding cotton fields, still present legacies from being part of the ‘Black Belt’ filled my mind.

As we sang the opening song, My Country ‘Tis of Thee, I thought about how I had watched The Butler on the 4^th.  The fireworks had been cancelled due to a hurricane, and it just felt appropriate, somehow.  We sang, and I thought it would be kind of great to make a video with clips from the civil rights era – the hosings and the beatings, the violence done to the sitter-ins and the bus riders, the cross burnings and the bombings, the white anger and the colored only signs, all the while people cheerfully, ignorantly sing, ‘land where my fathers died…land of the noble free…sweet freedom’s song’ in the background.

*****

I met a woman at church yesterday.  An older black woman, who in the late 70s went from Virginia to the University of Michigan for grad school.  Her first winter there brought a blizzard and she hated it.  She wanted to leave immediately, but was in a 3 year program, and they wouldn’t allow her any time off.

So, determined to leave winter as soon as possible, she took 10 classes in one semester, and finished that 3 year program in 12 months.

I just finished reading The Warmth of Other Suns and in addition to the fascinating, compelling history, it also debunked the old, commonly held beliefs that blacks who moved north were lazy and ruined the inner-cities.

“…social scientists all but concluded…that the Migration had led to the troubles of the urban North and West, most scholars blaming the dysfunction of the inner cities on the migrants themselves.  The migrants were cast as poor illiterates who imported out-of-wedlock births, joblessness, and welfare dependency wherever they went.”

But actually, new research is discovering something else.

“Compared with northern-born blacks…southern migrants had higher rates of participation in the labor force, lower levels of unemployment, higher incomes, lower levels of poverty and welfare dependency.”

I had never heard of the Great Migration before.  I thought that was the prevailing attitude towards all blacks, towards all inner-city dwellers.  It is definitely what I had been taught, and according to an article I read over the weekend, has been a common thread ever since the Civil Rights Act was passed.

“The contemporary version of this thesis is the “post-racial” narrative in which America has largely transcended its racial divides. The narrative of grand racial progress is coupled with the claim that whatever racial disparities remain are overwhelmingly the result of actions (or inactions) on the part of subaltern groups themselves. If blacks… simply would reverse their self-sabotaging attitudes and behaviors, this argument goes, full equality could be achieved.”

10 college classes at one time.  I can’t even imagine that.

*****

The Warmth of Other Suns also touched on a question that I’ve been wondering about since we moved down to Virginia in the fall, during the cotton harvest.  I’ve noticed that machines do all the work.  I remember visiting my grandpa’s farm back in Michigan, climbing on the over-my-head sized tires of the green John Deere tractors.  He hated horses his entire life because he plowed his first fields with them, and as soon as he was able, in the late 30s or early 40s, he got machines.

I had wondered why people were still sharecropping in the 60s.  Did farmers switch to machines out of a newly formed conscience, and so sharecroppers left the farms for something better, or did the farmers only switch to machines after their laborers left and had no choice?

I should have known.

*****

Segregation faded away, even as my local school district is the last district in the state under federal jurisdiction for integration, and a new plan for bussing is in place for the fall.  I feel like I shouldn’t have an opinion on this, since we’ve opted out of the school system altogether, but that news is unsurprising to me.  Most white kids around here, if they can afford it, go to academies, and their parents proudly display the schools’ initials in oval-shaped bumper stickers in the various school colors.

It’s a good bet, as far as I can tell, my 9 months of residence turning me into a southern school expert, that if you go to a private school down here, it was probably founded as a direct response to Brown vs. Board of Education.

The heads of the schools declare the past has no bearing on who they are in the present, and their history section of their websites are whitewashed, making it sound like forming a college prep school in the late 60s, early 70s in the South was really about academics, and they even hand out in-house scholarships in honor of the founders of the schools.  And then they wonder why they have such a hard time lowering their 95%, 96%, 89% white demographic rate.

And now, 40+ years into it, the public schools have deteriorated because generations of resources have pulled out, and we all know how that goes.

*****

So now people write books and articles in the hopes of shattering the pink sunglasses we wear, trying to bring perceptions of history more in line with the truth of it.  They make a concerted effort to describe racism as a system and not an individual belief, and hope people learn and believe it.

Because until that reality takes hold, people will continue to say unironically that segregation faded away, and sing with no self-awareness about the land of liberty.  And the words that Frederick Douglass said 162 years ago, will continue to ring true.

“…America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”