“Happy Days” ... Or, The Other Side of the Coin (Part Two)

(Editor’s note: The first segment of this multi-part series begins a discussion in part on how the place of the black man is marginalized in the American experience.  …  . In Part Two, that discussion continues.)

Prior to the Civil War, in the nostalgic era of Gone With the Wind, each Southern state has enacted a “slave code,” which defines the slave owner’s power and the slave’s status as the white man’s “property” --- and designed to control the slave’s life.  Of course, the slave code has been written and enacted by the same Southern white elite group which has authored the Bill of Rights.  Thus, the slave code could be viewed, correctly, as the Bill of Rights, only upside down!

In the years before and after the Civil War, with the shadow of secession looming larger and larger over the national landscape, black Christian churches are constructed exclusively in the South, since Southern white churches refuse blacks from participation. 

By the turn of the 20^th century, states have replaced the slave code with so-called “black codes” --- also known as “Jim Crow” laws --- to legalize racial separation.  These laws have the practical effect of restricting African Americans' freedom and compelling them to work in a labor economy based on low wages or debt.  Although free, blacks become the subject of the legalized segregation of the races, “separate but equal” facilities, so the US Supreme Court decides in 1896.

Legalized segregation is meant to demonstrate once and for all the superiority of whites over blacks as evidenced by a system of control of one race over the other.  Incredibly, even the simple act of a black man whistling at a white woman, walking down a public street, is deemed illegal in the South in this context.  Black codes are enforced more strictly in and come to define the South, stifling its economy. 

Even so, a steady trickle of African Americans choose to leave the South, primarily in search of jobs in northern cities.  But the public mood is still such that when Theodore Roosevelt extends the first invitation to a black man, Booker T. Washington, to a White House dinner, T.R. is publicly lambasted for his troubles.  This is at a time when statistics show that black lynchings in the South are still at a rate of approximately 100 per year.  That comes to a lynching every 3-4 days.

By 1918, near the end of World War I, a “Great Migration” has led half a million southern African American citizens north to the “Land of Hope.”  But their hope is fleeting.

Following World War II in 1945, President Harry Truman can only watch with chagrin, as newly returning black veterans --- who have earned the right to the same sort of progress at home with their blood, too, spilled over the battlefields of Europe --- are beaten mercilessly by their white overlords as soon as their feet have left the transport vehicles and landed back on Southern soil.

The black man would be made to remember his place, such that by the end of World War II America’s greatest economic problem remains the South.  Not to be deterred, President Truman desegregates the US military in 1948, accepting the challenge to advance what is described as the “Double V” campaign.  As applied to African Americans, it is said to be a double victory over racism both in Europe’s Nazi Germany and at home in the US.

Symbolically, Truman is the first president to issue a formal invitation to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to receive a White House address.

By the early 1950s, however, it is factually determined that for every $150.00 in federal spending at “white schools,” only $50.00 is spent at their counterpart “black schools.”  And so, after a stormy, 50+ year existence, the US Supreme Court finally overrules legalized segregation in 1954, deciding that “When it comes to opportunities in education, separate but equal is inherently unequal.”

Hailed as a “Second Emancipation Proclamation,” the Supreme Court’s decision overruling separate but equal educational facilities and ordering the desegregation of the nation’s public schools is one of the most significant decisions of the 20^th century.  It is rendered unanimously, 9-0 in favor. 

Nevertheless, President Eisenhower, the former military General and hero of the World War II battlefield, is reluctant to throw his support behind the ruling and embrace the landmark change.  The president actually comes on record as saying the decision is a “mistake” and “not a great moral issue.”  The president continues: “I don’t believe you can change the hearts of men with laws or decision.”

(Editor’s note: The third and final segment of this multi-part series takes readers behind the impregnable walls of the Senate filibuster in the US Congress to the present.)

-Michael D'Angelo