Am I a Racist?
I recently moved from New York City to the town upstate where my children and grandchildren live. It will likely be the last of my many moves, and I gathered a lifetime’s worth of books, writings, photos, mementos, souvenirs, and other accumulated stuff. As I began to sort through it all, hoping to pre-empt my children’s Dumpster, I came upon my college graduation book. Friends and fond memories returned, including a humorous history of our class, which began, “Nothing happened sophomore year.”
While mocking sophomores is classic college humor — “Even freshmen look down on sophomores,” my cousin quipped — in our case, I now realize, the witticism missed badly. Something extraordinary did happen in 1954. On May 17, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” education for blacks, a common practice protected by law for half a century, was unconstitutional.
None of the serious historians of our college years mentioned Brown either, although among reminiscences of football, girls, favorite professors, and movies of the day, they did describe social and political events. They wrote of Joseph McCarthy (“We debated the McCarthy censure issue”), Billy Graham (“The campus was, for a week, a hotbed of religious inquiry”), and uprisings in Poland and Hungary (“We pledged money in large quantities for the immediate relief of Hungarian refugees”).
Nor were we unaware of racial conflict. When Eugene Cook, the attorney general of Georgia, defended segregation in a visiting lecture, “We discussed segregation and the problems involved.” Reports of Emmett Till’s brutal murder in Mississippi in August 1955, and of white students “our own age” assaulting blacks at the University of Alabama, produced in us a “willingness to discuss the problem frankly, in a troubled spirit of moderation.” And after graduation we expected to face “crises” — “in public education, in solving the problems of biracial existence, and in all areas of foreign affairs.”
I’m sure this all seemed reasonable to me. And yet, how did we miss the Brown decision?
The answer, I’m afraid, knowing what I know today, lies in what we meant by racial “problems.” In the eyes of privileged white boys in the 1950s, blacks had their roles in society — as baseball players, shoeshine boys, jazz musicians, waiters and maids, singers, actors, and soldiers — and filled them without problem. Nor was it a problem when Marian Anderson, with a voice that Toscanini said appears once in a hundred years, became the first black singer in the Metropolitan Opera in 1955.
I’m not sure we were aware that in 1939 the Daughters of the American Revolution had barred her from singing in Washington’s Constitution Hall, where seating was segregated, or that Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for her to sing outdoors at the Lincoln Memorial to 75,000 fans. But if we were aware, I believe we would have accepted it all — the segregated seating in our nation’s capital and the respect shown to a great black singer — as simply the way our society functioned. We might have applauded Mrs. Roosevelt’s resigning from the D.A.R., but for a Constitution Hall recital in 1955 we would have occupied our designated section, devoid of any black faces, without shame.
No, the problem for us was not the struggle between freed blacks and white society — a struggle that began in 1865 and was still engaged during our college years 90 years later. We were as blithely ignorant of that long history as of the Brown decision. The problems we recognized arose, rather, when the status quo was challenged, or, in the belligerent phrase still heard today, when “troublemakers” began to stir things up.
I don’t know whether such a view defined us as racists 60 years ago. For myself, what I’ve since learned about racial struggles has broadened my understanding of our nation’s history.
Most important, it’s clear to me that slavery itself has marked race relations, not only when Southern states fought to preserve it in law, but when, having lost the fight, they attempted to maintain at least its social structure. The claim that the South rebelled against an oppressive central government to defend “states’ rights” — a claim that many Northerners accepted at the time and still believe — is belied by the evidence.
The government that 11 “Confederate States of America” formed in Richmond, Va., in 1861 was a mirror image of the government in Washington, with precisely the same legislative, executive, and judicial structures, and their Constitution was virtually identical to the 1787 Constitution, except for its protection of slavery. The same restrictions on the Confederate Congress are enumerated, except: “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves [my italics], shall be passed.”
Likewise, in planning for new “territory” and new states, the Confederate Constitution copied the 1787 Constitution whole, with one addition: “In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery [my italics] as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government.”
As for states’ rights, it is worth quoting in full the “supreme law” section of the Confederate Constitution, which repeated word for word the same section in the 1787 Constitution: “This Constitution, and the laws of the Confederate States, made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the Confederate States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”
In short, the vaunted “way of life” that some Southerners still claim they were defending, and what their Confederate flags supposedly “represent” — what in fact their way of life would have continued to be had they won the Civil War — turns out to be constitutionally pretty much the Northern way of life, but with slavery.
So it is not surprising that after the Confederate Army surrendered in April 1865, and the 13th Amendment ending legal slavery was ratified that December, Southerners began to consider how to maintain their way of life. The 90-year struggle was engaged.
It is impossible in a few words to describe the ebbs and flows of the long racial conflict that culminated in the landmark Brown decision. To anyone with limited knowledge of it, I recommend the following: “Simple Justice,” an indispensable 1975 book by Richard Kluger; “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” 1973, by C. Vann Woodward; the writings and the life story of W.E.B. DuBois, first black Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895, and the life of Thurgood Marshall, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Brown decision. Here are only a few highlights, and lowlights, of those 90 years.
Education came first. The Freedmen’s Bureau, created by Congress to help four million slaves transition to freedom, built hospitals and provided medical care and food, but its major efforts went to building more than 1,000 schools for black children and to establishing colleges: Fisk University in Nashville in 1866, named for the general who provided space in a former Union Army barracks, Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1867, named for another Union general, and in 1868, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Va. Booker T. Washington, born a slave in 1856, graduated from Hampton in 1875 and in 1881 went to Tuskegee, Ala., to head the new college there. These institutions trained generations of professional black men and women and all remain flourishing universities today.
However, as critical as black schools and colleges were to improving many black lives, the Southern way of life continued to constrain most of the millions of freed blacks. And while the 14th Amendment (1868) extended the “equal protection of the laws” to blacks, and the 15th Amendment (1870) extended voting rights, they also marked the end of most federal efforts to impact race relations. There were no further constitutional amendments until 1913 (allowing income taxes), and the Freedmen’s Bureau was closed in 1872.
Over the following decades, blacks in the South did manage to vote in sufficient numbers to elect hundreds of local black officials, and between 1869 and 1901, 20 black representatives and two black senators sat in the U.S. Congress. Still, Southern states continued to press for laws limiting black rights, and in 1896, with the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision, they triumphed. Plessy ruled that the “equal protection of the laws” clause of the 14th Amendment did not apply to segregation, which left Southern whites free to pass laws further constricting black participation in politics. The intended effect was immediate: Whereas 130,000 blacks were registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896, by 1904 the number was 1,342.
In the aftermath of Plessy, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1909 by a coalition of whites and blacks, and it succeeded in restoring some voting rights. In 1936 Thurgood Marshall, a law graduate of Howard University, joined its legal staff to focus on educational equality for blacks. The decision he won in Brown overturned Plessy and established the constitutional requirement for equal protection of the laws as the basis for legal challenges to segregation.
Sixty years later, the gross mistreatment of our black citizens continues, in grade schools, legal defense, prison sentences, social services, and municipal infrastructure. I can only view it still as a privileged white, because that’s what I am. But knowing what I know, I would urge a new generation of Thurgood Marshalls to continue the fight for equal protection of the laws. I will applaud their successes.
Malcolm Mitchell, who until recently lived part time in East Hampton, is editor and publisher of Investment Policy magazine.