JIM CROW - THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY

According to Wikipedia, the phrase "Jim Crow" is attributed to "Jump Jim Crow", a song-and-dance caricature of Blacks performed by White actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface, which first surfaced in 1832. As a result, "Jim Crow" became a pejorative expression meaning "Negro" by 1838. When southern legislatures passed laws of racial segregation directed against Blacks, these became known as Jim Crow laws.

But racially discriminatory legislation began before the end of slavery. So-called "Free Blacks" were not nearly as free as Whites. In many states, a Black person could not testify in court against a White person. Virginia required freed slaves to leave the state within a year. In 1850, California's first governor, Peter Burnett, pushed hard to exclude all Blacks and Chinese from California, as well as to exterminate Native Americans, with a $25 to $50 bounty for each Indian killed. Indiana, the state in which I grew up, put a provision in its Constitution in 1851 that "No Negro or Mulatto shall come into, or settle in, the State." Free Blacks could legally live in Ohio, then a much more liberal state, but even there they feared southern Whites coming into the state and falsely claiming them as escaped slaves.

In 1865, a year after the end of the Civil War, the United States completed the Emancipation Proclamation by adopting the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting slavery everywhere in the nation.

An instructive comparison can be made between the freeing of slaves in the United States, and the freeing of serfs in Russia, which was proclaimed by Czar Alexander II in 1861, the very year the U.S. Civil War began. Each serf was allocated land. While the land so allocated was generally smaller and less desirable than the land retained by the landlords, and had to be paid for over a period of time, it was much more than American slaves received, namely nothing. So began the vicious cycle of poverty from generation to generation.

Worse, the reaction of many southern states to the abolition of slavery was to amend their slavery laws by substituting the word "Negro" for the word "slave". This had the effect of continuing the condition of slavery without using the word "slave", and also of reducing any free Blacks to the level of de facto slave.

The national response was the adoption, three years later, in 1868, of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing citizenship to everyone born in the United States, and prohibiting states from adopting discriminatory legislation.

Of course, this was also promptly subverted. Southern states began adopting laws which separated Blacks and Whites in many circumstances. Southern and northern states adopted laws which allowed private citizens and businesses to discriminate and use the legal system to enforce this discrimination. Among the most important of these laws were vagrancy laws, which allowed the arrest and imprisonment of unemployed and underemployed Blacks, and then the contracting out of prisoner labor; and also especially, restrictions on voting rights, such as literacy tests and poll taxes. These latter laws often had grandfather clauses, allowing Whites to register on the basis of the registration of their parents or other relatives. When a Black succeeded at voting anyway, there was the danger of lynching. In my own life, in the 1960s, Blacks who registered and those who worked to register them were lynched, including Unitarian Universalists Viola Liuzzo and Reverend James Reeb.

This system of segregation, de jure in most of the South, and de facto in most of the North, was found by the U.S. Supreme Court to be consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment in the case Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in 1896. This decision sanctioned the concept called "Separate but Equal" which, in the words of author James Loewen, "keeps the oppressed group separate from the oppressor when both are doing equal tasks, like learning the multiplication tables, but allows intimate closeness when the tasks are hierarchical, like cooking or cleaning for white employers."

Thankfully, the Supreme Court reversed itself, though not until 1954, in the case Brown v. Board of Education. This ended de jure segregation in schools, but not de facto segregation, which continues to this day in many places. When I was attending high school in the early 1960s in Indianapolis, my school was integrated because of shifting residential patterns. Basketball is the national sport of Indiana, and we went crazy each year with the state high school championships. My school lost early, and I told my father I would now root for the team which had defeated us, as then I could still claim we were second best. My father was disappointed, saying "not them". The school in question was Crispus Attucks, named after a Black hero of the U.S. War of Independence, and intended as the city's Black high school.

A use of the legal system to enforce segregation, of which I became aware as a young person in Indiana, is restrictive covenants in property deeds. These are clauses prohibiting selling the property to Blacks, Jews or Orientals. These were considered to be perpetually valid, and even a White who purchased the property agreed, as a precondition, to perpetuate the covenant. In 1948 the Supreme Court had declared these unenforceable, but surveys have found that they still exist in a large number of deeds, and often have an effect on property sales despite having been declared unenforceable.

In 1964 I served as a poll watcher, to verify fair treatment of Black voters in a precinct in downtown Indianapolis. This served as an example to me of how apparently neutral laws can have significant discriminatory effects. Various miscellaneous laws and regulations concerning voting were being enforced only in the Black sections of town. Conservatives were attempting to use ambiguities about voters who moved shortly before an election, or who were in line to vote when the polls closed, etc., to intimidate Black voters. Today we still see states attempting to enact and enforce various laws, supposedly to keep the voting process honest, but which I believe are actually intended to selectively intimidate ethnic minorities, especially Black and Latino.

In summary, much progress was made from the onset of the U.S. Civil War through the Civil Rights Movement, but much more remains to be accomplished. In the second part of this morning's message Allysson will talk more about one aspect of the present situation.

I find these issues compelling, because of events in my personal experience, of which I have mentioned a few, and because so many of our Unitarian Universalist principles are involved: the inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity, and compassion in human relations; the use of the democratic process in society at large; the goal of liberty and just for all.