-Caveat Lector-
In a message dated 1/11/99 2:08:08 PM Eastern Standard Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Potemkin Village was a bogus stage prop erected by the Czar to show visiting
bleeding heart liberal West Europeans that the local peasants had it made.
> We'd have to consider A LOT of other evidence along with
> their personal feelings
The slave narratives are not about feelings. They are matter of fact in tone
and the descriptions of conditions are well buttressed by related events. It
is all but mind numbingly horrific to realize how these folks lived. It's
true that they were in their teens but in those conditions, work began in
earnest at age 7 or 8. The slaves were adults in their teen years. Actually,
even when i lived through the adolescent years during the 1940s, there were no
teen-agers. In white America, you were simply not a child and not yet an
adult, ambiguous to say the least. The term and concept of teen-ager didn't
come along until the late 1950s. You were expected to be a fully functioning
and responsible adult by age 18 during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Perhaps
some other old codgers can comment on this transition.
The narratives i have read were lengthy excerpts in the book Bull Whip Days, a
work that should be in every American's library. I appreciate our discussion
because the institution of slavery in the US is the most proscribed subject in
America. It is the crazy aunt in the attic. Uncle Sam is sort of like
Lazrus. The Civil War called us out from the grave and the Civil Rights
movement removed the wrap but we still need to hose ourselves down with the
cleansing truth.
> Racism has not decreased as a result of "civil rights" laws.
Well, things are a bit more complicated than that. What you say has a morsel
of truth. However, the CR laws were necessary to firmly establish the rights,
whether of voting, attending public schools or whatever. It is necessary to
see the entire flow of the civil rights movement, seemingly ending when LBJ
signed the CR Bill of 1964. Of course the CR movement was a sort of add-on to
the Civil War. The initial shot of phase 2 being the Rosa Parks thing. It
included Medgar Evers at the University of Alabama (There was another fellow
who preceded Evers except he was at Ole Miss. The kindly white students beat
him so bad, he was permanently injured and died prematurely with complication
stemming from that time.) , and other practicing integrationist such as the
Little Rock school children and the freedom bus riders who registered people
and crossed into white areas of bus stations and sat in at cafes and lunch
counters and so on.
Blood was necessary, it was shed and people went to jail. The Southern blacks
simply essentially said, "We're not taking this any longer. From now on we
will verbally correct you at the time of the infraction and by our presence
and boycotts and demonstrations and by law suit until you treat us with
dignity just as you do others." Truly a great day in America! In other
words, the signing of the civil rights bill was like the formal signing of a
peace treaty. The Southerners did not have to like blacks but they had to
obey the law or from then on it would be the white overseers who had to
explain and possibly go to jail when blacks were denied voting rights or the
use of public rest rooms.
Incidentally, if you wish to get an earful of how it was like for a Negro to
travel through the South during the 1950s, read Black Like Me. I certainly
was not surprised by the discourtesy of the bus drivers and offensive
treatment at various business establishments. What took me back was how
difficult it was for a black person to simply find a john they were allowed to
use and the resultant necessary stratagems.
Jerry
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