Five years ago, I wrote a column about a couple of young white guys I overheard in a bookstore as they smugly griped about Black History Month. One of the guys summed up their complaints this way: “I mean, slavery was banned, people! What else have they had to gripe about?” Other guy: “No shit — give me a White History Month.”
As I wrote then, I was stunned, but I can almost understand where those 20-somethings were coming from: raised in the 1980s and ’90s, in a culture that thrives on historical amnesia. I’m sure they have no idea why Black History Month was started, as a counter to how black Americans’ millions of stories were once utterly ignored or suppressed by mainstream culture. Those were the days when every month was White History Month. Even more disturbing is how many 30-something, or younger, Americans know very little about Southern life before the civil rights movement. So, once again, let this Southern-bred baby boomer tell you what it was like.
My hometown of Gaffney, S.C., where I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, was like thousands of other Southern burgs at the time. I remember all the things associated with the region during that era: homemade ice cream on a summer afternoon, wisteria’s perfume wafting into the living room, the dammed-up creek near our house that was just right for swimming. But I also remember the Ku Klux Klan. They had a mysterious but palpable presence in our town, and now and then you’d hear family members or neighbors mention that a black person had been “found down at the river, beaten half to death,” or other such horrors. The Klan’s victims were often treated by one of the town’s white doctors, most of whom provided separate entrances and examination rooms for black patients. One of the white physicians, Dr. James Sanders, was a favorite of Gaffney’s black community and, because of that, many whites hated him.
In 1957, the year of widely publicized, violence-plagued school integration in Little Rock, Ark., a group of S.C. pastors decided to publish a small book of essays titled South Carolinians Speak: A Moderate Approach To Race Relations. One of the essays was by Dr. Sanders’ wife, Claudia, a member of a venerable Charleston family and chairwoman of our county library board. Not long after her essay was published, a Klan bomb blew up one side of the Sanders’ house, located on the town’s nicest residential street. Luckily, no one was home at the time. Three local Klansmen were soon arrested. The evidence was indisputable, but charges were dismissed by a judge who hinted broadly that Mrs. Sanders had brought her troubles on herself.
Cut to decades later, 1998. In a used bookstore in the N.C. mountains, I ran across South Carolinians Speak, the first and only copy of the pastors’ book I’ve ever seen, and it rekindled my childhood memory of the bombing. I had never read Claudia Sanders’ essay, so I eagerly flipped through the pages, searching for it, assuming I’d find a hotheaded, pro-civil rights tirade. After all, she must have been pretty inflammatory to rile some people enough to make them want to kill her, right?
Then I read the “inflammatory” essay, and the depressing realities of life in the South’s “good old days” came rushing back. I discovered that Mrs. Sanders had made a heartfelt, but very mild, case for a gradual integration of schools, argued from a Christian viewpoint that “all men are my brothers.” She chastised Southerners for ignoring the “scandalously inadequate” schools for black children, but also suggested that each community find its own way to integration, without federal interference. For that, her house was bombed.
So, for those two bookstore 20-somethings, and anyone else who doesn’t already know it, that is what the pre-civil rights movement South was like: so repressive that even a respected, prosperous, Christian white woman risked having her life taken for merely saying in public that perhaps racial segregation should be gradually phased out.
Feel free to cut out this story and keep it for White History Month.
A longer version of this essay is included in Deliver Us From Weasels, a collection of the writer’s feature stories and columns, available at Park Road Books and Paper Skyscraper.
This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2011.
Nothing like another self hating white man. Groomy ignores how the tables have turned thanks to liberals suffering from the same self hate that groomy suffers from. In NC black people can kill white folks and get away with it. The judge can say yes this black many killed your whole family but since blacks are over represented as killers in this state the law assumes that some sort of racial injustice is happening so we cannot sentence this poor black man to death. Of course this means that he will someday be free and walking the streets but liberals are not concerned with justice, they are concerned with feeling good inside, no matter the cost to others.
Feel free to cut out this comment and keep it for black history month.
I think it is time to move on from all this silly I am black so pitty me crap. Everyone is essentially treated equal now but minorities are trying to scam the system for as much as they can get away with.
I’ll have to find the source but I believe it was in Birmingham, AL where MOST of the black folks there did not believe in forced integration.
Contrary to the popular stories peddled by our State-run media there was a strong anti-forced integration among black folks during the Civil Rights Era. There were black schools and towns around during that time that were doing well.
Alot of the violence directed towards black folks of that era by the State was when the State was enforcing stupid regulations or collecting taxes. Also to abort any instance where blacks and whites were engaged in mutual transactions.
Segregation laws were meant to stop the freedom of blacks AND whites.
How about stories of the successful black entrepreneurs of that era? Like S.B. Fuller and A.G. Gaston? They thought that entrepreneurship was the best avenue to success and disagreed with most of the political activism going on in that day.
Also, alot of the vestiges of racism have been nationalized today. Chattel slavery has been replaced with the income tax. The IRS today is similar to those bounty hunters who enforced the Fugitive Slave Acts of yesteryear. State licensing of medical schools were at first aimed to keep blacks and women from becoming physicians. Layers and layers of medical fascism since then have led to Obamacare today. The first drug laws were passed due to irrational fear of white women being seduced by black men or other minorities gaining too much influence. Today the War on Drugs is probably the most draconian program in history, imprisoning millions of non-violent people and causing unending cycles of violence everywhere.
First of all we don’t need Black History Month. We need Black History century but that will never happen because whites minimize the contribution that blacks have made to civilization after they stole most of what they learned from Africans and Asians.
Second you are not a self-hating person when you speak the truth. No one has killed more blacks than whites over the past 6000 years of white existence. Whites have killed 600 million blacks since they left the caves of Europe. 600 million is the entire population of the world now. That is how many blacks whites have killed.
The reason we don’t need black history month is because blacks need our own land away from whites so it’s always black history month just like it’s always white history month in American. In fact there is no real white history except for genocide, lies and historical revisionism. Whites are frauds and now their own people, the fake Jews, are destroying them. I applaud it.
Just give black people what you owe us from the evil committed by your ancestors and God may spare you or at least go easy on you. If not you will suffer the full penalty of your wickedness. It may be too late already because I know whites will never as a whole admit to being wrong so the bloodshed will begin soon. Nature is turning on the whites and will consume them. Blacks are the alpha and the omega. We will be here after all others are gone.
Blacks have their own countries in places like Africa and they are not a very good place to call home. I think 99% of the black folks here in the states would rather put up with imaginary oppression than to struggle to survive on a daily basis off the ivory coast.
Races tend to kill their own in higher numbers so I bet the biggest killer of black people is at the hand of fellow black people.
Barely half of America is white and most Americans came here long after slavery ended in the USA. Good luck getting reparations out of latinos too hehe.
Lafayette The Abolitionist
I happened to be in Savannah with an artist friend and we toured the three building complex that makes up th Telfair museum. This tour of the Owens Thomas House coincided with Black History month, an event that is well commemorated in this city. During the tour I inquired of the tour guide as to the nature and content of The Marquis de Lafayette’s address to the people of Savannah in 1825! He assured me that the Marquis May well have made remarks that spoke of his abolitionist policy stance. As a precaution slaves were not allowed to be present on the streets and would be therefore totally be out of earshot of the man who spoke so eloquently of the Rights Of Man!
link:http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/lafayette/exhibition/english/abolitionist/index.html
Lafayette always expressed paternalistic sympathies for “the black part of mankind.” His first encounter with slaves was with oystermen in South Carolina in 1777. He suggested using black troops in the American conflict and employed a former slave, James Armistead “Lafayette,” as a spy and trusted valet. By 1783, after reading Condorcet’s Réflexions sur l’Esclavage des Nègres (1781), he asked Washington to consider a joint venture for gradual emancipation; but he would conduct the experiment alone in the French colony of Cayenne. From then on, he became part of an international network of activists. His last known letter was addressed to an abolitionist society in Glasgow (May 1834). Such convictions passed to his family, and his grandson Gustave de Beaumont published a novel about racism and a (tragic) interracial union in the United States: Marie, ou l’Esclavage aux Etats-Unis (1836).