Pieces of Rope,  Drops of Blood, and Separate Bibles

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer
The Dallas County Records Building was built during Jim Crow days in the old South so toilets, water fountains, and other facilities were labeled “White Only” or “Colored Only.”  Some of the labels were designed to be quite permanent. The signs over the water fountains were engraved and etched in the marble walls. The signs have become a real bone of contention between blacks and whites. 

Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, authorities have occasionally-rather passively-tried to erase the racial signs by buffing them. Buffing marble doesn’t work.  Recently they covered the labels with metal plates. The metal plates have now become permanent labels of what message is behind them. At the Dallas County Commission meeting last Tuesday blacks again demanded that all “signs” of any signs be removed from the walls even if the walls have to be removed.

Corky and I lived in North Carolina for over two years in tiny segregated Surf City on New Topsail Island. In nearby Jacksonville blacks were not allowed to walk on the sidewalks with whites. They had to walk in the street. “White” and “Colored” signs were everywhere. This was about a dozen years before any major civil rights legislation was passed.

Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson, although raised in the segregated South, played and worked with blacks when he was a young boy. He eventually became the power behind the passage of the 1964 act, perhaps because of the actions of the black cook he employed during his time in the Senate as majority leader. LBJ and Ladybird treated Sammy and Zephyr Wright as family.

While he was majority leader, he told Sammy and Zephyr to pack up and drive to the LBJ ranch in Texas and prepare the home for a vacation stay. Zephyr refused to do it. She explained to LBJ that on the two or three day trip she would have to pee behind bushes because there were no black restrooms on the route. They would have to “brownbag” the whole trip because restaurants would not serve them. She added that Sammy would have to sleep in the back seat and she in the front seat under the steering wheel because no hotel would accept them. Her story convinced LBJ something had to be done about race and public accommodations. When he finally signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as president, he gave the first pen he used to Zephyr Wright.
Does One Drop of White Blood Make You White?
Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, who often exhibited more brains and commonsense in her legal opinions than the eight men she served with, believes we need to concentrate on teaching civics and government at all levels of education. It’s her pet project now that she has retired from the bench.  After listening to a wide range of idiots on the Ground Zero mosque construction project, I can only agree. The Constitution states we have freedom from religion and freedom to “religion,” but 70 percent of the population is opposed to the mosque at “Ground Zero.”  Even their GPS is off by two blocks. Our courts have determined a church can be built legally anywhere as long as it follows zoning laws and building codes. Ignorance about how our three branches of government operate is appalling. And the ignorance about our own history is doubly appalling.

A book about one of the greatest migrations in history has just been published. No, it’s not about the one in Egypt thousands of years ago or the Trail of Tears by the Plains Indians a little over a century ago. The book is “The Warmth Of Other Suns: The Epic Story Of America’s Great Migration” by Isabel Wilkerson, a black who teaches at Boston University. She calls it “the biggest underreported story of the 20th century.” I think she is right–and it is particularly important that our citizens know about this story now that we have a white-black president. Six million people were involved in this migration that started in 1915 and continued until about 1970. The Southern white drove the Southern “niggers,” “coloreds,” “African-Americans,” and “blacks” out of the old slave states.

Between 1915 and 1918 over 500,000 left the old South. Between 1920 and 1930 over 1,300,000 left. The “WHY” is a terrible example of man’s inhumanity to man. I think we have failed to teach it. After the “Reconstruction” came Jim Crow. Georgia passed laws in 1891 requiring separate seating for whites and blacks in streetcars. By 1905 every Southern state had passed the same law. If the two races had to use buildings, separate facilities were established to serve each “public.” If whites and blacks were being sworn in as witnesses in a legal case, separate Bibles were used. Post offices had separate windows. Some of us know about separate toilets, water fountains, swimming pools, libraries and separate sections in theaters and bars. There were also separate racial sections in every city and town in the South.

My favorite story about the “separate” idiocy involves Lena Horne, the great black singer-entertainer who always fought for her rights. She couldn’t stay in a “white” Chicago hotel where she was entertaining. To “get even” she passed through the swimming pool area as she was leaving to go home to a “black” hotel, she stuck a big toe in the water. The pool was drained immediately after a guest saw her commit such a filthy, despicable, dastardly act.
A Black Mississippian: “Killing a Nigger Was Like Killing a Chicken or a Snake”
Blacks migrated to Detroit, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and dozens of large cities by driving, hiking, and by train. The main motivation was lynching by whites on the average of one black every four days for about a century. We have to remember that in the 1930’s there were still over a 100,000 blacks alive who had been slaves in the South.

The lynching of Sam Hose in Newman, Georgia was typical. Sam killed his employer Alfred Cranford by throwing an axe at him when Cranford threatened Sam with a pistol. Sam had the temerity to ask him for a day off so he could visit his sick mother. Two days after Cranford’s death the story had mushroomed to the “fact” that Sam had killed Cranford while he was sitting at the dining room table. Sam had then “pillaged” the house, pulled Cranford’s wife into the dining room and raped her while her husband lay dying on the floor with an axe in his head.

Without a trial, notices were sent out that Sam Hose would be executed by lynching on Sunday April 23, 1899. Over 2,000 white Georgians attended the lynching, some taking excursion trains from Atlanta to see the show.

Sam was stripped of his clothes and chained to a tree. The executioners-without masks- stacked kerosene-soaked wood around Sam and then cut off his ears, fingers, genitals, and skinned his face. Only then did they soak him down with oil and light him up. Sam was burned alive while whites surrounded him and plunged knives into him.

Before his body cooled, Sam’s heart and liver were removed and cut into pieces as souvenirs of the lynching. His bones were crushed into small pieces and distributed to the crowd, often starting fights over the pieces. After the lynching this placard appeared on the tree: “WE MUST PROTECT OUR SOUTHERN WOMEN.”

Atlanta’s leading newspaper published this editorial after the lynching: “The people of Georgia are orderly and conservative, the descendants of ancestors who have been trained in America for 150 years. They are a people intensively religious, home-loving, and just. There is among them no foreign or lawless element.”  Law-abiding? A black Southerner responded later: “They had to have a license to kill anything but a nigger. We was always in season.” (From “America’s Shameful Pastime.”)

Large lynch mobs were common because lynchings were often held on Sundays, the day of rest and prayer-and entertainment. Sometimes “religious” services were held prior to the lynching, with families with small children in attendance. Between 1882 and 1968 an estimated 4,742 “niggers” were lynched by mobs.  Many were burned during the lynching, such an action called a “Negro Barbecue.”

For some whites a “nigger killing” became a sport. A newspaper called it “The National Pastime.”  Some even suggested it provided whites with “a welcome escape from the endless routine of drab working hours and more drab home life.”  Postcards with graphic pictures of lynchings often sold for as much as two dollars and were sent to relatives and friends. One postcard showed the charred corpse of Jesse Washington hanging from a light pole. A son sent a picture of Jesse’s corpse to his parents with the notation: “This is the barbecue we went to last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your Son, Joe.”
Playing Checkers and Mississippi Appendectomies
 
The landmark Supreme Court case of Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896 made it possible for the white Southerner to hang his hat on the idea of “Separate but Equal” for over 50 years. Corky and I saw firsthand the white Southerner’s idea of that: tar paper shacks for “nigger” schools, bricks for white schools. Plessy justified the whole idea of Jim Crow laws that declared Negroes second-class citizens.  Birmingham, Alabama even had a law that made it illegal for blacks and whites to play checkers together!

Southern doctors routinely performed hysterectomies on blacks when they came to clinics for other care. They were known as “Mississippi appendectomies.”  The man who is now director of the Southern Poverty Law Center grew up as a young white on a small cotton farm owned by his parents. His parents had many black friends they often hired to help with the picking. It was his job as a small boy to supply cold water for the workers to drink. One day a black lady was the first to drink from the dipper. His father grabbed the dipper and was the second to drink. His father was called a “nigger lover” when others found out he had drunk from the same dipper as a black. He was also attacked for driving blacks and whites together for a swim in a nearby river.

Larry Doby of the Cleveland Indians was the first black baseball player to hit a winning homerun in a World Series game. After the game the winning pitcher Steve Gromek was photographed hugging Doby to thank him for winning the game. It was the first time a picture of a white hugging a black was seen in a national publication. Gromek received hate mail for weeks following the game and was chastised by his neighbors. Doby said: “When you have that kind of thing it makes you feel better….there is someone who had feelings inside for you as a person and not based on color.” 

This incident occurred during the time Senator Strom Thurmond was ranting against the blacks (and even after he fathered a child by his family’s black maid): “There’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theater, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.”  This was after Governor James K. Vardaman of Mississippi said: “If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched.”

When Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s homerun record of 715 in 1974, cannons were fired beyond the outfield fence to celebrate the occasion as he ran the bases.  Hank’s mother raced from the stands and embraced her son as he ran around third base. People thought she was celebrating. Actually she was protecting him because she thought people were shooting at him. Hank had been receiving death threats and hate mail for months, with many saying he would be shot and killed if he broke the record.

Another very important book on race, “The History of White People” by Nell Irvin Painter, was just published. The book concentrates on legal questions surrounding race in the United States from about 1850 on. Fascinating stuff. It will go a long way toward answering the question why a white woman can give birth to a black child but a black woman cannot give birth to a white child. That’s your question for the week.

A cartoon in the Green Bay Press-Gazette portraying whether our black-white, white black president is actually a Muslim also fits the race question. The moderator says: “Tonight we have gathered a distinguished panel of experts to discuss their belief that Obama is a Muslim.”  The panel is made up of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, an alien from Roswell, New Mexico, and Elvis. We know that Elvis, the alien, and Bigfoot are white–and I doubt if there is a black fish in Loch Ness.                                                       

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