See, I want to know. I was born in 1962. By the time I entered school, the ‘colored only’ and ‘white only’ signs had been removed from public water fountains. I grew up never knowing (never having or seeing a clue) about racial segregation—the ironclad Southern rules that applied in every single community large and small, urban and rural, with unspeakable brutality for 100 years after the Civil War. My parents said little to nothing about it. No other families I knew (100% white like me) said anything either. After 12 years of schooling, the impression I had was civil rights was in the 1960s, and now everything was all right. Or as the white suburban mothers might say, “Everything is fine, just fine.” So, I bought it.
It was college in East Texas that I came to realize this whole other way life was in the South, for generations. The way it was taught in American History: from Reconstruction to the Modern Age, it was like a miracle that society had changed—a complete evolution among people of an entire nation. You know how rare that is? Yes, as a kid I had watched “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” with its tear-jerking ending when the extremely old crippled little bitty Black woman, in an act of defiance, slowly stepped to an outdoor ‘white only’ water fountain on public property and bent down to take a sip of water. See, in the movie, the white onlookers didn’t do anything about it. The police just let her be. So as a kid, I didn’t get it.
1619: Not that long ago in the great scheme of things
See, none of us really knows anything about when slavery started in Early America. We who were educated in American schools were taught that it (slavery) was part of our history. Teachers sugarcoated it to avoid the ugliness (the absolute crime) of American history, U.S. history … you know, US. The educated blowhard can justify slavery was the way of the world for thousands of years. Look at the Bible. Look at the Jews in Egypt. Funny, because the Bible was used to support slavery during the Antebellum South. The Bible was quoted to insist some people are slaves and others slave masters. “You disputin’ God’s Holy Word? Get me a switch.”
The 1619 Project is an ongoing journalism project sponsored by The New York Times. Its purpose is to place slavery at the center, instead of buried or along the barely perceivable periphery, of U.S. history. The Project seeks to relate slavery of African Americans, brought in chains to the East Coast shores in 1619 to months after the Civil War, and its relevant consequences to not only former slaves and their future families but everyone who calls himself or herself an American today.
I’m an American. So, because I knew what I did not know, I came up with a features series while writing for a newspaper in 1994. Each month the newspaper mail included a list of story ideas based on history, like anniversaries of historic events. Listed under July 1964 was President Johnson’s landmark Civil Rights Act, banning nationwide racial segregation in public places and racial discrimination in housing, employment, education, etc. For six months I researched this event and the difference it made in the small East Texas town where I lived as a reporter. I started with prominent African Americans in the community. They were retired teachers and principals and a coach. They had lived in the community all their lives and recollected well their childhood during segregation. I interviewed each of them separately. They all told me the same stories: They were not allowed inside public buildings like court houses, had to stay out of certain areas and streets, had to eat ice cream in the summer outside a popular air-conditioned restaurant, were allowed inside shops one day a week for clothes or hats (anything they touched, they had to buy), and had to sit in the balcony at the movie theater.
On and on, the same stories, the same history … which made white people and white business owners of that era still living in the community look pretty damn bad if not disgusting. I didn’t know if I should pursue the story, I told my editor. He understood and thought I should drop it. Then I talked to white and Black people of the Baby Boomer generation, not the older folks of the community (who wouldn’t talk to me anyway about this story), but people who were teen-agers and young adults when the community changed in the summer of 1964. Their recollections were more upbeat, positive. They were of age in 1964 and realized racial segregation and discrimination was wrong, and change had to happen. They were young enough to welcome it. They were not bitter about the past. Old times were best forgotten.
The series was called Rites of Passage: 30 Years of Civil Rights and included the remarkably sudden integration of the public schools and new federally enforced rules in criminal justice which had to be followed by the deputies and police. I never found anyone in the community who removed the ‘white only’ and ‘colored only’ signs in places like parks and businesses. But one was my father who during the era of Civil Rights worked for a national store in a major city in Texas.
So, when a U.S. senator calls for removing the 1619 Project, a nonprofit initiative, from the federal grant program, claiming it distorts American history, all Americans should be ashamed. We’re already ashamed of our nation’s past with slavery and other wrongdoings. Let’s call it what it was: evil. But for a long time, now, we are finding that the evils were not only covered up or rewritten but also silenced. Between the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and the Baby Boomers who protested the Vietnam War is the Silent Generation. Americans by now are collectively enlightened about our shared ancestral past, having read real-life accounts and seen photographs, movies and documentaries. Once upon a time, Americans used slaves as cheap labor, and after a civil war over this issue (good soldiers killed and were killed over this rich man’s cause), African Americans continued to be treated as subhuman until the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
See, it’s the lies and silence that ignite social outrage. Knowledge is truth, which sets all of us free. America’s truth in history—the good, the bad and the ugly—is nothing to fear. We can handle the truth. But the generation gap between much older and the middle-aged to younger Americans caught me unaware. Look, the growing number of Americans will not cling to past lies such as America’s civil war was fought over a list of ideals (the inhumane institution of slavery being only one). And the progressive Southerner no longer will wax nostalgic over Jim Crow and allow suppressed voting rights while whistling Dixie and humming doo dah. Like most Americans today, we find all of it backwoods and repugnant.