All posts tagged "jim crow"

Rep. Byron Donalds, his gigantic Jim Crow myth and a forgotten fact about Black voters

As we celebrated Juneteenth last week, a political argument is brewing about the legacy of the Jim Crow era.

It’s important, generally, to provide greater scrutiny of that era, lest we repeat, or even in some cases maintain, the legacy of that time frame in America.

But Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) ignited an acute firestorm of opposition and support at a June political event.

NBC reported that Donalds, a Trump campaign surrogate and potential vice presidential short-lister, “suggested that by embracing Democrats, circumstances have worsened for Black people. He pointed to programs enacted by President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s that included expanding federal food stamps, housing, welfare and Medicaid for low-income Americans.

“‘You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively,’ Donalds told the audience Tuesday.”

Critics listed a myriad of horrors from the Jim Crow era, from KKK violence to curtailed voting rights to unconstitutional discrimination. Donalds defended himself, saying his remarks were only limited to Black families.

I researched whether Black people really “voted conservatively” during the Jim Crow era.

Bottom line: Donalds’ assertion is not supported by the evidence.

As Daphney Douglas at Salve Regina University discovered in her thesis, African Americans overwhelmingly voted for Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936, well before the 1960s. Proquest found that 71 percent of African Americans voted Democratic in that election, according to news reports.

Douglas lists the actions that Republican Herbert Hoover engaged in that drove African Americans from the Republican Party, such as the Supreme Court nomination of John Parker.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act . (FDR Library Digital Collection.)

African Americans tended to vote for Republicans before Hoover on the basis of civil rights issues typically against the conservative Democrats who pushed for segregation.

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But for Northern liberal Democrats, African American voters clearly felt differently.

Donalds is also mistaken about the source of African American poverty. Research by scholars at the Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies in 2022 found that “although Black wealth growth outpaced that of white Americans’ between 1870 and 1930, the rate of convergence in these years lags far behind what would be expected had the two groups enjoyed equal conditions for wealth accumulation. Indeed, the historical record is rife with instances of expropriation of Black wealth, exclusion of Black Americans from the political process, and legally sanctioned segregation and discrimination in land, labor, and capital markets. All of these factors likely contributed to sluggish convergence over this period.”

Moreover, the programs Donalds blames for African American poverty aren’t responsible for that.

The Griswold Center scholars found: “During the 1960s through the 1980s, convergence regains speed, exceeding what would be predicted by our equal-conditions benchmark. The dismantling of Jim Crow through Black activism and civil rights legislation, expansions of the social safety net, and improved labor standards during this period may have boosted wealth-accumulating conditions for Black Americans.

Although the wealth gap remained sizable in these decades, it remained on track to converge. From today’s vantage point, however, these gains were short-lived. Starting in the 1980s, we document a widening of the racial gap in capital gains as well as a complete stalling of income convergence. These forces have caused the wealth gap to leave the convergence path altogether and to start increasing again.”

The economic numbers show that problems emerged when the beneficial policies of the 1960s were rolled back in the 1980s.

I agree with Donalds in his criticism of Florida education standards, which insist that there were “benefits” of slavery.

But he and I disagree about the legacy of Jim Crow. Black families were not better off economically during that dark time. The policies of the 1960s closed the racial gap in earnings but were rolled back in the 1980s. And African American support of Democrats began decades earlier than Donalds claims.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His “X” account is JohnTures2.

'White Supremacy': a poem

Some said that, with Obama, it was past —
That racism was done. It couldn’t last!
But they forgot our history’s basic twist.
Our origins are white-supremacist.

Our founders, all of European stock,
On superiority assumed a lock;
Considered all but white to be quite savage …
Theirs to control, command, confine — and ravage!

Though slavery’s the major exhibition,
Other tragedies deserve more exposition.
Schools for “Indians,” their culture to erode;
The KKK, the lynchings, and Jim Crow.

No matter what we think or how we act
White supremacy’s embedded; that’s a fact.
For our culture, institutions, and our laws
Were created and designed to serve The Cause.

To get a loan; a house to own; and voting rights
The main condition was: you must be White.
Boys of color get the lecture, “Just behave!
For to the so-called law, you may be prey!”

DeSantis and his cronies make the case:
We must not look this history in the face.
Their purpose is both obvious and cruel —
Have White supremacists regain their rule!

Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl is the former deputy inspector general for inspections at the Central Intelligence Agency and co-author of “The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze.”

How the long 'arc of the moral universe' just landed in a New York City fire hall

NEW YORK — You’re forgiven if you’ve begun to believe progress toward racial equality in America is slip-sliding backward.

In 2021, the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy flew inside the U.S. Capitol as insurrectionists attempted to derail Joe Biden’s election as president.

Two years later, the Florida State Board of Education insisted on altering that state’s social studies curriculum to include the assertion that “slaves developed skills” that were to their “personal benefit.”

And a U.S. senator from Alabama for weeks went around defending white nationalists — by definition, racists who want the United States to cast Black Americans back to the days of segregation and Jim Crow.

You’re also forgiven if you’re unaware of an event this month conducted within a working Midtown Manhattan firehouse. And what happened this month might just make you change your mind.

This story begins and ends with Gloria Washington Louis-Randall, Gwendolyn Sanders Gamble and Gwendolyn Cook Webb, three African-American women from Alabama.

They’re quite elderly now. But 60 years before, they were teenagers participating in the 1963 Children’s March in Birmingham, Ala. It was there that firehoses became implements of racial hatred and pain when Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor turned their high-powered water on the children.

Randall, 76, was just 15 years old that May in 1963.

“Let me tell you about a fire hose,” she said. “I am deaf today in my left ear because of that fire hose. Actually, it was a fire cannon…This was a cannon. When it hit it flipped you, and I didn’t weigh but 90 pounds. When it hit you, it knocked you down and turned you over …. It would rip your skin — bruise you and make you walk with a limp and that’s why it took so many children so long to speak about it because we had been traumatized. I think everybody has PTSD. They’d have to have it because this was a war, a battle.”

Randall recalled how she felt obligated to protest knowing that her parents, because of where they worked.

“My daddy couldn’t march — he was a coal miner. He would lose his job,” Randall recounted. “My mother was a teacher, and she would lose her job; but I was just a student about to go to the Tuskegee Institute and nothing was going to happen to me — so with these thoughts you got to know they were not happy about it.”

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But Randall recounted that her coming to the aid of a fellow female protestor in custody who was going to be raped resulted in her “being left in jail so long the movement could not get me out because they didn’t have any more money.”

Webb was also just 14 when she marched as part of the Children’s March.

Webb recalled that the high-pressure water from the fire hoses “made the skin come off your bones with a lot of children that were malnourished. Thank God we are here to tell the story…. I know what I am about to say is grammatically incorrect. But we used to sing, 'we ain't going to let nobody turn us around.”

They didn’t know it at the time, but the suffering they endured that day placed them on the starting point of what King described as the “arc of the moral universe” — one that is inherently long, and in this case, indeed bent toward justice.

The weeklong non-violent campaign, initiated by local civil rights leaders and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King as a response to 60 bombings in Birmingham that targeted Black homes and businesses, filled the Birmingham jails and drew almost 5,000 children.

Wave after wave of Black children, who sang as they marched, submitted themselves to the brutality with a resolve so strong that, by the next month, civil rights leaders were able to negotiate the integration of Birmingham and force the resignation of “Bull” Connor from office.

“After a week the jails had been filled several times over and the police force realized they could not stop the movement. The people were not afraid of them anymore and all of their power was dependent on the community’s fear,” recounts the Oscar-winning documentary, Mighty Times: The Children’s March.

Meanwhile, TV news images of the brutality of that unprovoked attack shocked the world, much as the video of George Floyd’s police murder did more than a half-century later.

Among those whose attention it captured: New York City’s Uniformed Fire Officers Association, then a fairly conservative white male union, and the Vulcan Society, the FDNY’s Black fraternal association.

“This shameful and deplorable conduct by the City of Birmingham... has brought discredit to the honorable status of professional firefighters,” the Uniformed Fire Officers Association said in a resolution it adopted in 1963, at the urging of the Vulcan Society. “This local union shall protest most vigorously to the City of Birmingham… for the debasement of the image of Fire Fighters by misusing them to hurt rather than to help people in danger.”

The children assaulted by fire hoses caught someone else’s attention, too: President John F. Kennedy. On June 11, 1963, Kennedy delivered a national TV address and a call-to-action for Congress to pass what would be called the Civil Right Act of 1964. He referenced the events in Birmingham.

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free,” Kennedy said. “They are not yet free from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from economic and social oppression.” Kennedy called out the racial educational, economic, and health disparities that continue to define our nation 60 years after his assassination.

ALSO READ: A deafening silence from Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s Black football players

In that address, Kennedy said that racism in America was not a regional affliction restricted to the South, but a pervasive national challenge that would require bold federal action.

Change wasn’t instantaneous. Far from it. And it proved notoriously uneven.

But change would come.

All three women survived, and then, they thrived.

Webb, for one, is now the Rev. Gwendolyn Cook Webb. She would go on to become only the second Black woman to join the Birmingham Police Department, marry a police officer and serve on the mayor’s executive protection detail.

And they blazed a trail so bold that as they sat in that New York firehouse to commemorate the 60th anniversary of New York firefighters standing up for Black children hundreds of miles away, they were joined not only by current officers of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association and Vulcan Society, but two Black women who have become leaders of today: New York State Attorney General Letitia James and New York City Council President Adrienne Adams.

New York City Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, the first woman to hold this position, also attended.

In her remarks at the firehouse, James — the first Black female New York state attorney general — praised Randall, Gamble and Webb as “sheroes of the civil rights movement,” who as “children knew at such a young age that such injustice could not stand and rose up against it.”

Randall, for her part, said the work must continue. Sixty years ago, “1963 was a time of nothing but hate and racism. It’s trying to come back in 2023, but I am asking that you don’t let that happen. Don’t go back.”

Randall singled out the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning affirmative action a “slap in the face” to aspiring and capable students of color whose parents did not go “to Harvard or Princeton and because they donated money.” She told reporters that while racists “don’t wear the little hoods anymore — they carry briefcases, and they wear shirts and ties — the struggle continues.”

Randall’s words rung throughout the firehall. But the three women weren’t content just to talk. Song was in order. They led the assembly in an equally impromptu and rousing rendition of the freedom song, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.”

It was a scene, sound and reality 60 years in the making — one that offers hope for an even brighter future no matter what darkness lurks in the moment.

'Invidious scheme': Supreme Court refuses to hear case challenging Mississippi 'Jim Crow' law

The United States Supreme Court, on Friday, decided not to hear a case against a longtime Mississippi rule denying the right to vote to persons "convicted of certain felonies," CNN reports.

Per the report, and according to critics, the state rule disproportionately impact Black voters.

According to NBC, "The court's decision not to hear the case prompted a sharp dissenting opinion from liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by fellow liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor," who "contrasted the decision on Friday with the court's ruling a day earlier that" ended affirmative action.

Furthermore, CNN notes both justices "argued that the court had made 'clear and momentous errors.'"

Jackson wrote, "If the court viewed affirmative action as race discrimination, then the Mississippi measure must be seen similarly," adding, "So at the same time that the court undertakes to slay other giants, Mississippians can only hope they will not have to wait another century for another judicial knight-errant. Constitutional wrongs do not right themselves."

CNN reports:

The challengers in the case, Roy Harness and Kamal Karriem, are Black men in the state who have been convicted of forgery and embezzlement, respectively, and have served their time. They are currently barred from voting under state law – Section 241– because of their convictions. They argued that the law is tainted with racial animus.

NBC notes, "In asking the Supreme Court to weigh in, Harness and Kariem's lawyers point to the fact that the court in 1985 struck down a similar measure that was enacted in Alabama in 1901."

Backing the plaintiffs, the Legal Defense Fund filed a brief that referred to the rule as a "Jim Crow law," according to CNN, that was put in place as a "deliberate and invidious scheme to disenfranchise Black People."

LDF's assistant counsel Patricia Okonta told the news outlet, "While the state is home to the highest percentage of Black Americans of any state in the country, it has not elected a Black person to statewide office since 1890."

The Guardian reports:

Sixteen per cent of the Black voting age population remains blocked from casting a ballot, as well as 10% of the overall voting age population, according to an estimate by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. The state is about 38% Black, but Black people make up more than half of Mississippi’s disenfranchised population.

Harness and Karriem's attorney, former United States Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., wrote, "Today, in 2022, many thousands of Mississippi's African American citizens are disfranchised by a provision that was enacted in 1890 to ensure 'a home government under the control of the white people of the State.'"

CNN's full report is available at this link. NBC's report is here. The Guardian's report is here.

All posts tagged "jim crow"

Rep. Byron Donalds, his gigantic Jim Crow myth and a forgotten fact about Black voters

'White Supremacy': a poem

How the long 'arc of the moral universe' just landed in a New York City fire hall

'Invidious scheme': Supreme Court refuses to hear case challenging Mississippi 'Jim Crow' law

Watch NAACP leader confront Koch ally about 'worst policies since Jim Crow' in North Carolina

AFL-CIO report: Alabama immigration law 'parallels to Jim Crow'