As a rhetorical strategy, talking about slavery and lynching makes sense. After all, these are (mostly) southern historical realities. We Yankees can pretend that their existence at one time was limited territorially (although slavery wasn't ended in all the northern states until the early decades of the 19th century). As a group, we whites can pretend that this deeply rooted ugliness was excised by the spectacle of Bull Connors' gods besetting marching children, and his state police beating and shooting peaceful marchers as they crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge.
Except, of course, these are the comfortable fables of those who have no desire to face the ugly reality that our hatred and fear of blacks does not know of borders or historical events. While it is true that no one alive today in America has ever owned a slave, and the last surviving participants in lynchings are feeble old men and women now, Rick Perlstein reminds us that, in living memory, residents of one northern city and its environs expressed opinions regarding African-Americans that are little different from the most despicable writings of Nazis about Jews, or of the ideas of Theodore Bilbo, Richard Russell, and other die-hard segregationists.
It is conventional wisdom that the backlash against Civil Rights began when the focus of the movement shifted from the share-cropping fields of the South to the slums and ghettos of the north. One of the main obstacles to de facto integration was the practice of what became known as "red lining" - city planners and real estate companies would draw red lines on city maps limiting residency to African-Americans. One of the biggest and longest fights in our racial melodrama was the issue of "open housing". Red lining had been declared un-Constitutional by the Supreme Court before segregation in education, yet the practice persisted, unofficially, in to the early 1970's (my parents managed to buy a house in 1970 as real estate agents tried to dump houses across New York State in advance of the Rockefeller-supported open housing law; that house, sitting on a double lot, is worth far more than the original purchase price because everyone involved wanted to make sure a white family bought it).
Perlstein has unearthed, and published at the link above, letters Illinois Senator Paul Douglas received from Chicago residents during the on-going Civil Rights and open housing debates in 1965 and 1966. Here's a sample:
I am white and am praying that you vote against open housing in the consideration of Equal Rights.
Just because the negro refuses to live among his own race--that alone should give you the answer.
I was forced to sell my home in Chicago ('Lawndale') at a big loss because of the negroes taking over Lawndale--their morals are the lowest (and supported financially by Mayor Daley as you well know)--and the White Race by law.
Please don't take away our bit of peace and freedom to choose our neighbors.
What did Luther King mean when he faced the nation on TV New Year's day--announcing he will not be satisfied until the wealth of America is more evenly divided?
Sounds like Communism to Americans. 'Freedom for all'--including the white race, Please!
What was behind this and hundreds of other letters Douglas received? Here's Perlstein's own words:
You could draw a map of the boundary within which the city's seven hundred thousand Negroes were allowed to live by marking an X wherever a white mob attacked a Negro. Move beyond it, and a family had to face down a mob of one thousand, five thousand, or even (in the Englewood riot of 1949, when the presence of blacks at a union meeting sparked a rumor the house was to be "sold to niggers") ten thousand bloody-minded whites. In the late 1940s, when the postwar housing shortage was at its peak, you could find ten black families living in a basement, sharing a single stove but not a single flush toilet, in "apartments" subdivided by cardboard. One racial bombing or arson happened every three weeks.... In neighborhoods where they were allowed to "buy" houses, they couldn't actually buy them at all: banks would not write them mortgages, so unscrupulous businessmen sold them contracts that gave them no equity or title to the property, from which they could be evicted the first time they were late with a payment.
So, on the one hand, you have whites arguing that blacks demanding the freedom buy homes wherever they wished is the root of the problem. Yet, the real problem - from an objective point of view - was white violence against African-Americans who thought that, as citizens of America and residents of the city, they had the freedom to do just that, and were stopped by mob violence. In Chicago. In 1966.
As a further note on all this, it should be remembered that Nixon's call for "law and order" in 1968 was interpreted by African-Americans as racist. People wondered how that could be.
As a Gage park resident & that of my in-laws & my parents, & their familes we are living as decent, hard-working people, you should consider martial law to prevent a peaceful community from getting harassed. That you should consider re-establishing law &order & change laws to protect the people and not criminals & people who openly voice their opinions against the majority as well as the government. Our children don't get sprinklers, day courts, new schools, elevators, cheap rent, yet they will be asked shortly to go fight on foreign shores. I think its time to defend our country from within. I have 3 sons & I will gladly have them defend this country here.
Yet, who was breaking the law? All the evidence points to white mobs. Who demanded law and order? Members of white mobs, demanding that blacks obey the law by not living in white neighborhoods.
Unless we stare this ugliness in the face, call it what it is, and accept that it is a living reality in our social life, all the advances in the world - including Barack Obama's soon-to-be Presidency - won't mean a thing.
