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Racial segregation

separation of humans based on race

Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life. Racial segregation is generally outlawed, but may exist de facto through social norms, even when there is no strong individual preference for it. Segregation may be maintained by means ranging from discrimination in hiring and in the rental and sale of housing to certain races to vigilante violence (such as lynchings). Generally, a situation that arises when members of different races mutually prefer to associate and do business with members of their own race would usually be described as separation or de facto separation of the races rather than segregation. In the United States, segregation was mandated by law in some states and came with anti-miscegenation laws (prohibitions against interracial marriage). Segregation, however, often allowed close contact in hierarchical situations, such as allowing a person of one race to work as a servant for a member of another race. Segregation can involve spatial separation of the races, and mandatory use of different institutions, such as schools and hospitals by people of different races.

Quotes

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This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilising drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
So there's no question about it: by the mid-fifties, America was definitely in a Golden Era, an era of excitement and opportunity for all citizens, regardless of race or creed or color, unless the person happened to be black. Then there was a problem. ~ Dave Barry
 
The South of humanity and goodness is slowly rising out of the fallen temple of hatred and white man's nationalism... The religion of the Confederacy and apartheid will one day be subdued by the passage of years. The land will be the final arbiter of human conflict; no matter how intense the conflict, the victory of earth and grave will be complete. ~ Pat Conroy
 
The economic cost of segregation is of course preposterous and staggering. It is a cardinal reason why the South is so poor. In effect, it means that two sets of everything from schools to insane asylums to penitentiaries to playgrounds have to be maintained. ~ John Gunther
 
Not long ago, but before World War II was over, a young Negro girl was asked how she would punish Hitler. Answer: "Paint him black and bring him over here." ~ John Gunther
 
But I never let any of those things make me prejudiced right back. Especially in combat. Especially in Vietnam. I am the sergeant major. I take care of all my men, black and white. ~ Edgar Huff
  • For many years now, the rest of the nation has been saying to the South that it's morally wrong to deprive any citizen of equal opportunity in life because of his color. I think most of us have come to agree with that. But now the time has come for the rest of the nation to live up to its own stated principles. Only now are the other regions themselves beginning to feel the effects of the movement to eliminate segregation. I say we should not let them get out of it just when the going gets tough. And I don't say this to be vindictive, I say it to be fair. The rest of the nation has tried to teach us justice in the South by mandate and court order. Now perhaps it's up to us to try to teach them the same things in a much more effective way—by example. I certainly hope we will.
    • Reubin Askew, February 21, 1972, as quoted in Historic Documents of 1972. Washington, DC: CQ Press.
  • In an under-remarked historic irony, the political party that long defended slavery and racial segregation has become the first to nominate an African-American for president. And the GOP, the Party of Lincoln, which fought for union and advanced civil rights from Reconstruction to Little Rock, has been left with a troubling lack of diversity on its political bench. The Republican Party was right on civil rights for the first one-hundred years of its existence. It was right when the Democratic Party was wrong. Its future strength and survival will depend on rediscovering that legacy of individual freedom amid America's essential diversity. To win in the 21st century, the 'Party of Lincoln' needs to start looking like the 'Party of Lincoln' again.
  • So there's no question about it: by the mid-fifties, America was definitely in a Golden Era, an era of excitement and opportunity for all citizens, regardless of race or creed or color, unless the person happened to be black. Then there was a problem.
    • Dave Barry, Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort-Of History of the United States (1989), p. 137-138
  • It was so easy before. Segregation was such an easy thing. The dichotomy of color in the schools made administration so pleasant... It was once so much nicer. They controlled black principals who shuffled properly, who played the role of downcast eyes and easy niggers, and who sold their own children and brothers on the trading block of their own security. These men helped grease the path of the South's Benningtons and Piedmonts as they slid through the years. The important things were order, control, obedience, and smooth sailing. As long as a school looked good and children behaved properly and troublemakers were rooted out, the system held up and perpetuated itself. As long as blacks and whites remained apart- with the whites singing "Dixie" and the blacks singing "Lift Every Voice and Sing," with the whites getting scholarships and the blacks getting jobs picking cotton and tomatoes, with the whites going to college and the blacks eating moon pies and drinking Doctor Pepper- the Piedmonts and Benningtons could weather any storm or surmount any threat. All of this ended with the coming of integration to the South.
  • During the entire period of my banishment and trial, I wanted to tell Piedmont and Bennington that what was happening between us was not confined to Beaufort, South Carolina. I wanted to tell them about the river that was rising quickly, flooding the marshes and threatening the dry land. I wanted them to know that their day was ending. When I saw them at the trial, I knew that they were the soldiers of the rear guard, captains of a doomed army retreating through the snow and praying that the quick, dark wolves, waiting in the cold, would come no closer. They were old men and could not accept the new sun rising out of the strange waters. The world was very different now.
  • The South of humanity and goodness is slowly rising out of the fallen temple of hatred and white man's nationalism. The town retains her die-hards and nigger-haters and always will. Yet they grow older and crankier with each passing day. When Beaufort digs another four hundred holes in her plentiful grave-yards, deposits there the rouged and elderly corpses, and covers them with the sandy, lowcountry soil, then another whole army of the Old South will be silenced and not heard from again. The religion of the Confederacy and apartheid will one day be subdued by the passage of years. The land will be the final arbiter of human conflict; no matter how intense the conflict, the victory of earth and grave will be complete.
  • In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes... in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches- one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and street cars.
  • It only took me a few hours to get over the "surprise" of being in a Black Marine unit. My problems came from my fellow white non-coms who couldn't tolerate the notion that we should treat the Blacks as equal, except for those instances where there were flat out official rules and regulations that not only stressed segregation and discrimination, but severely punished violations of such official sanctions of prejudice and bigotry. But for survival, I had to enforce such rules. I hope I served as a buffer for many of my Black comrades in such cases. They deserved much better. I always felt the irony of the fact that Blacks tried for years to serve their country, actually had to fight to be allowed entry into the Marine Corps, fought their way through discrimination prevalent officially in the Marine Corps during World War II, died or were wounded in many cases on the battlefield, to protect the freedoms and democracy that was denied them. They were even denied the right to vote, yet the system gave them no relief from the artificial barriers established between them and their civil rights.
    • Perry E. Fischer, as quoted in First Black Marines: Vanguard of a Legacy (1995) by Fred deClouet, p. 66
  • More than two million people in the United States are behind bars, a higher rate of incarceration than any other country in the world, constituting a new Jim Crow. The total population in prison is nearly equal to the number of people in Houston, Texas, the fourth largest U.S. city. African Americans and Latinos make up 56 percent of those incarcerated, while constituting only about 32 percent of the U.S. population. Nearly 50 percent of American adults, and a much higher percentage among African Americans and Native Americans, have an immediate family member who has spent or is currently spending time behind bars. Both black men and Native American men in the United States are nearly three times, Hispanic men nearly two times, more likely to die of police shootings than white men. Racial divides are now widening across the entire planet.
  • That the United States is very nearly 10 per cent a black nation is known to everybody and ignored by almost everybody- except maybe the 10 per cent. There are more than 13 million Negroes in this country; roughly every tenth American man, woman, and child is a Negro. I had heard this often enough but until I reached the South I had no real perception of what it means. I had heard words like "discrimination" and "prejudice" all my life, but I had no concrete knowledge, no fingertip realization, of what lies behind them. I knew that "segregation" was a problem; I had no conception at all of the grim enormousness of the problem. The phrase is trite, but I know no other: the Negro in the South has to be seen to be believed.
  • To compress into a chapter any attempt to describe the Negro in the South is like trying to squeeze a sponge into a matchbox.
  • Atlanta is supposed to rank fairly high among southern cities in its attitude toward Negroes, but it out-ghettoes anything I saw in a European ghetto, even in Warsaw. What I looked at was caste and untouchability- half the time I blinked remembering that this was not India. Consider the case of Professor X, who is any Negro professor at Atlanta University. He works in close conjunction with several whites; but meeting him on the street after hours, they will not be likely to recognize or greet him. In a hotel, he must take the freight elevator, and under no circumstances can he eat in any but a quarantined restaurant or lunchroom. He is too proud to go to a Jim Crow theater; therefore he can scarcely ever see a first-run movie, or go to a concert. If he travels in a day coach he is herded like an animal into a villainously decrepit wooden car. If he visits a friend in a suburb, he will find that the water, electricity, and gas may literally stop where the segregated quarter begins. He cannot as a rule try on a hat or a pair of gloves at a white store. Not conceivably will a true southern white shake hands with him, and at a bus terminal or similar point he will, of course, have to use the "colored" toilet, and drink from a separate water fountain. He is expected to give the right of way to whites on the sidewalk, and he will almost never see the picture of a fellow Negro in a newspaper, unless of a criminal. His children must attend a segregated school; they could not possibly go to a white swimming pool, bowling alley, dance hall or other place of recreation. When they grow up, no state university in the entire South will receive them.
  • Turn to the white side briefly. I asked a young, intelligent, and quite "liberal" politician to explain some aspects of all this on a strictly personal basis; I tried to get from him exactly what he would and would not do. Eat with a Negro? Good God, no! Go to a Negro's house? Not under any circumstances. ("Ah couldn't afford it; might get known.") Go to a reception for, say, Paul Robeson? ("Couldn't happen here; if it was in New York Ah might go if it was a big crowd and Ah wasn't known.") Shake hands with a Negro? ("Ah shook hands with one in Pohtland, Oregon, last year; fust time in mah whole life!") Sleep with a pretty Negro girl? Answer confused.
  • The basic pattern of segregation in the South is unwavering and absolute, though minor modifications come from time to time. Technically segregation is simply a term to denote the various strictures separating Negroes from whites, and it has manifestations all the way from the laws prohibiting intermarriage to such taboos as that which commonly forbids a Negro to argue with a white man. It has existed since the first Negroes arrived at Jamestown in 1619; slavery was simply the first form of segregation. It not only includes Jim Crowism in schools and places of amusement, but such items in "etiquette" as the principle that a southern Negro must go into a white man's house by the back door. Return to such a matter as transportation. In Atlanta, taxicabs driven by whites serve whites only. As to busses Negroes are of course obliged to squeeze into the back seats everywhere in the South; in Mississippi they may actually be separated from whites by a curtain. The analogy to India- purdah!- comes to mind again.
  • The economic cost of segregation is of course preposterous and staggering. It is a cardinal reason why the South is so poor. In effect, it means that two sets of everything from schools to insane asylums to penitentiaries to playgrounds have to be maintained.
  • There are 55,000 Negro college graduates in the United States. Most Southern whites have never seen one.
  • Not long ago, but before World War II was over, a young Negro girl was asked how she would punish Hitler. Answer: "Paint him black and bring him over here."
  • To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. As black Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. Across those tracks were paved streets, stores we could not enter, restaurants we could not eat in, and people we could not look directly in the face. Across those tracks was a world we could work in as maids, as janitors, as prostitutes, as long as it was in a service capacity. We could enter that world but we could not live there. We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town. There were laws to ensure our return. To not return was to risk being punished. Living as we did-on the edge-we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole.
  • So I got on the bus, and when it pulled into Atlanta, I got off and went into the station. It was two Marine MPs. They walked up to me. One said, "Hey, boy, C'mere." I started out with my little bag. I say, "I'm a Marine." They say, "There ain't no damn nigger Marines. You going to jail." I give them my furlough papers. They tore 'em up right in my face. Said I was impersonating a Marine. They started to turn me loose. Say, "You go in there and pull that damn uniform off. You ain't got no clothes to wear, you go to the relief." I say, "I'm not impersonating a Marine. I am a Marine." "You going to get it." They took me down to the city jail and had me locked up. That night a Marine captain came into get some white Marines who've been locked up for bein' drunk. I knew a captain when I see a captain, so I ask him to get me out, too. "Ain't no nigger Marines. We heard about you." I was there the twenty-third, the twenty-fourth. And they took us out to pick up trash and garbage. And there I was in jail on my first Christmas in the Marine Corps. When the Navy chaplain came in for Christmas prayers, he wouldn't even talk to me. Finally, a Marine major came in. It must have been the twenty-eighth. And I convinced him to call Colonel Woods, even though he thought I was making up a bunch of lies. He didn't even know about Montford Point, being as it was a brand new camp. Colonel Woods told the major to get me out now, and he told me to go home and don't worry about any papers. Colonel Woods is dead now. But I got his picture. Colonel Samuel S. Wood Jr. The first commanding officer ever commanded black Marines.
    • Edgar Huff, as quoted in First Black Marines: Vanguard of a Legacy (1995) by Fred deClouet, p. 29-30
  • General Larsen was somethin' else. He was the commanding general of Camp Lejeune. One day he came over to speak to us at this smoker. No Negro was allowed to be on LeJeune unless he was accompanied by a white Marine to go to a specific place with a chit stating what he was going to do there. I'll never forget when he walked in. It was the first general we had ever seen. Here I am, a hard charger, thinking I want to be a general. I want to be like him. Well he started talking about the war. He said, "I just came back from Guadalcanal. I've been fighting through the jungles. Fighting day and night. But I didn't realize there was a war going on until I came back to the United States. And especially tonight. When I come back and I find out that we have now got women Marines, we have got dog Marines, and now when I see you people wearing our uniforms, then I know there's a war going on." Goddamn. You never saw so many Coke bottles fly. Knocked him down. And there was a riot that night. The first black riot in Marine Corps history.
    • Edgar Huff, as quoted in First Black Marines: Vanguard of a Legacy (1995) by Fred deClouet, p. 30
  • I says, "Is that right?" "Yes, sir, Sergeant Major. And I'd rather sleep on the parade ground under a flagpole than to sleep with a goddamn black nigger." So, I says, "Well, I can take care of you tonight. Tomorrow, I'll assign you to your permanent quarters. I make it a practice to do everything I can especially for my staff NCOs." So I arranged for this gunny to have the VIP quarters that night in the staff NCO club. The next morning I told my driver to go down to supply and draw out half a tent, five tent pegs, and one pole. I said, "You know one Marine don't rate but half a tent." So I'm sitting there in my office with about twenty-five yard of campaign ribbons, a bucket of battle stars, and each one of my sleeves look like a zebra. Ain't no way in hell a man could not know I was the sergeant major. When the gunny walked in, he stopped and looked at me as though he saw a ghost. He said, "Are you the sergeant major?" I said, "Well, Gunny, you are familiar with the rank structure, aren't you?" He said, "You not the one I talked to last night, are you?" "Why sure I am. Sit down." I made him drink some coffee, and the cup was rattlin' like it was a rattlesnake. Then I drove him out to the parade grounds up to the flagpole, and said, "Here is your quarters. Now you pitch your lean-to on the flagpole like you requested." And it was raining like hell. When I came back, the tent was running full of water. I said, "Get this tent trenched out like it's supposed to be. You're ruining government property." Then he said, "I'll stay with that fella." I told him he would have to get this black sergeant to agree and bring him to my office. Well, it was all right with the sergeant, and the gunny moved in. In about three weeks, I went down to the club and this black sergeant had a white woman, and the gunny had a black woman. Having the best time you ever saw. And a few months later, the gunny and the black woman was married. They live up here near me now and got two children. Doing real fine.
    • Edgar Huff, as quoted in First Black Marines: Vanguard of a Legacy (1995) by Fred deClouet, p. 32-33
  • But I never let any of those things make me prejudiced right back. Especially in combat. Especially in Vietnam. I am the sergeant major. I take care of all my men, black and white.
    • Edgar Huff, as quoted in First Black Marines: Vanguard of a Legacy (1995) by Fred deClouet, p. 33
  • Whenever the Ku Kluxers would come, I would be terrified. It was the damnedest thing. And I thought about that many times when I was overseas, and I had those beautiful machine guns. I would just wish to hell I had somethin' like that back in Alabama when those sonofabitches came through there. I would have laid them out like I did those damn Congs. The same way. I just don't see how black people survived down there in those days. I just don't see it.
    • Edgar Huff, as quoted in First Black Marines: Vanguard of a Legacy (1995) by Fred deClouet, p. 37
  • I feel that segregation is totally unchristian, and that it is against everything the Christian religion stands for.
    • Martin Luther King, Jr., in his letter to Sally Canada (19 September 1956), as quoted in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr (1992), by Carson & Holloran, Volumes 2-3, p. 373
  • Segregation is a cancer in the body politic which must be removed before our democratic health can be realized. The underlying philosophy of segregation is diametrically opposed to the underlying philosophy of democracy and Christianity and all the sophisms of the logicians cannot make them lie down together. We must make it clear that in our struggle to end this thing called segregation, we are not struggling for ourselves alone. We are not struggling only to free seventeen million Negroes. The festering sore of segregation debilitates the white man as well as the Negro. We are struggling to save the soul of America. We are struggling to save America in this very important decisive hour of her history
    • Martin Luther King, Jr., Keep Moving from this Mountain – Founders Day Address at the Sisters Chapel, Spelman College (11 April 1960)
  • We must continue to break down the barrier of segregation. We must resist all forms of racial injustice. This resistance must always be on the highest level of dignity and discipline. It must never degenerate to the crippling level of violence.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousnes (1960) Address at the Golden Anniversary Conference of the National Urban League, 6 September 1960, New York, N.Y [1]
  • As a preacher... I must admit that I have gone through those moments when I was greatly disappointed with the church and what it has done in this period of social change. We must face the fact that in America, the church is still the most segregated major institution in America. At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing and Christ has no east or west, we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation. This is tragic. Nobody of honesty can overlook this. Now, I'm sure that if the church had taken a stronger stand all along, we wouldn't have many of the problems that we have. The first way that the church can repent, the first way that it can move out into the arena of social reform is to remove the yoke of segregation from its own body. Now, I'm not saying that society must sit down and wait on a spiritual and moribund church as we've so often seen. I think it should have started in the church, but since it didn't start in the church, our society needed to move on. The church, itself, will stand under the judgement of God. Now that the mistake of the past has been made, I think that the opportunity of the future is to really go out and to transform American society, and where else is there a better place than in the institution that should serve as the moral guardian of the community. The institution that should preach brotherhood and make it a reality within its own body.
    • Martin Luther King, Jr., "Social Justice and the Emerging New Age" address at the Herman W. Read Fieldhouse, Western Michigan University (18 December 1963)
  • Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.
  • West Virginia State had been a well-respected, all-African-American school preceding integration. When I enrolled, the student body had been racially mixed for just three years. The racial balance at that time made me a part of the white-guy minority on campus, a distinction most Caucasian college students could not claim. My racial identity also made me the only non-African American in the men's glee club. Due to my being the only white face among the blacks, one of the members dubbed the choir with a rather humorous but accurate label. The informal title was taken up by the other guys and Dr. Williams got a lot of laughs from audiences when he introduced the choir as "the twenty-three soul brothers and the kid."
    • Dan Light, West - By God - Virginia: Appalachia Reflections (2019), p. 30
  • One night during the concert tour, we were traveling through Maryland, searching for a roadside restaurant. The group was already long overdue for some grub. The bus pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant and our driver went in to check to see if the place had room to accommodate our group. He returned to inform us that they would not permit Negroes inside the dining area. In 1959 civil rights had not made much of a foray into certain areas of certain states. That section of Maryland fell into such a category. The restaurant did, however, have a policy by which a white person was permitted to purchase meals which could be bagged and taken out to "colored people" on a bus. Under those circumstances, having little or no choice if we expected to be fed, the suggestion was made that the "kid" would go into the joint, buy the food, and bring it back, to satisfy the hunger which was now nearing critical mass. When I was asked to fulfill my mission, I became overwhelmed with a personal sense of racial justice and righteous resentment at the prejudicial policy of the management of a chop house that would subject my friends to such bigotry. "I'm not going in that place and pay them money and condone their racism just because I'm white and considered acceptable when they think you guys are not. No sir, if they won't feed you they won't be doing any business with me."
    • Dan Light, West - By God - Virginia: Appalachia Reflections (2019), p. 30-31
  • I expected a positive reaction from my soul brothers; maybe even praise and approval for standing up for their human rights. This was not the case. After I expressed my noble little speech a total silence fell over the brothers as well as unanimous facial expressions that definitely did not convey approval or agreement. The silence was broken when one of the brothers responded: "Look, man, this ain't no time for you to get righteous. We're not strangers to this. We know how you love us, and all that, but we've all been through this kind of treatment before. We're starving to death here, man. You go on in and get us some food and cokes and let's eat!" A chorus of "Amen" rocked the bus, and I got the point. Twenty minutes later we were toolin' down the highway lovin' the taste of burgers and fries. That experience may not be the best lesson I ever learned on race relations and civil rights, but it was one of the most enlightening.
    • Dan Light, West - By God - Virginia: Appalachia Reflections (2019), p. 31-32
  • I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all, I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
    • J.R.R. Tolkien, "Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford," June 5, 1959, reprinted in Christopher Tolkien (ed.), The Monsters and the Critics, London: Harper Collins (2006), p. 238. ISBN 026110263X A native of South Africa, Tolkien had been a professor at Oxford since 1925. Earlier in his address he explained his objection to what he considered the "false" separation of "Language" and "Literature" in the study of English.
  • While the books created an imaginary past, the legislature set its firmly on present difficulties. In 1954, while the authors wrote, the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing school segregation. The Democratic Byrd machine's reaction was to lead not only Virginia but the entire white South in a "Massive Resistance" campaign against integration. The textbook's treatment of the Civil War offered contemporary lessons to all Virginia's children- black and white. In the antebellum era, they argued, slavery was positive for both master and slave. In the 1950s, segregation was also a net positive for both races. From the commission's point of view, during "the War Between the States," Virginia fought bravely against federal overreach and for states' rights even after the cause was lost. In the 1950s, Virginians should also fight against the imposition of federal overreach on the state's rights and institutions. The United States hoped to nullify the Virginia way of life. Virginia should fight and fight to the bitter end even if the cause was lost.
    • Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2020), p. 64
  • As mob violence became more widespread and effective in enforcing racial subjugation, lynchings became more public and more macabre. Huge crowds would gather for the planned events. Hanging proved too quick and efficient a means of death. Instead, lynch mobs turned to genital mutilation, dismemberment, and burning, like something from the medieval era. Crowds would clamor to take souvenirs of the hanging tree, rope, and even the fingers and skins of the victims. I remember the first time I saw postcards depicting a lynching. A young white boy smiled at the feet of a hanging victim. Lynchings became violent public spectacles that united the white community while ensuring the subservience of African Americans.
    • Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2020), p. 84
  • The sustained legal campaign of subjugation, called Jim Crow, plus targeted law enforcement, lack of education resources, and limited economic opportunity, resulted in "the Great Migration." Starting in the first decade of the twentieth century, more than a million African Americans left the racial violence and poverty of the South for the industrial cities of the North and West. In 1900, Georgia's Black population was over 47 percent of the total. By 1970, the figure had dropped to just over 25 percent. In the 1910 census, Walton County recorded 25,393 people. The next time it would reach that level was in the 1980 census, the year I graduated from high school. By then, Walton County benefited from its proximity to a booming Atlanta. The racial terror and Jim Crow laws decreased Georgia's population and retarded its economic potential for generations. Racism isn't just morally wrong; it's economically stupid.
    • Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2020), p. 90-91
  • I know both political parties and white citizens in the North and South brought the country back together after the tremendous bloodletting and destruction of the Civil War. The posts named for Confederate officers during World War I also served to knit America back together as it fought a common foe. And it worked, but we must recognize that reconciliation came at a steep and horrifying cost. African Americans paid the price with lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and the loss of the franchise. The price for reconciliation remains far too high.
    • Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2020), p. 162
  • We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one's associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one's living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights.
  • In his book The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy, J. Russell Hawkins tells the story of a June 1963 gathering of more than 200 religious leaders in the White House. President John F. Kennedy was trying to rally their support for civil-rights legislation.
    Among those in attendance was Albert Garner, a Baptist minister from Florida, who told Kennedy that many southern white Christians held “strong moral convictions” on racial integration. It was, according to Garner, “against the will of their Creator.”
    “Segregation is a principle of the Old Testament,” Garner said, adding, “Prior to this century neither Christianity nor any denomination of it ever accepted the integration philosophy.”
    Two months later, in Hanahan, South Carolina, members of a Southern Baptist church—they described themselves as “Christ centered” and “Bible believing”—voted to take a firm stand against civil-rights legislation.
    “The Hanahan Baptists were not alone,” according to Hawkins. “Across the South, white Christians thought the president was flaunting Christian orthodoxy in pursuing his civil rights agenda.” Kennedy “simply could not comprehend the truth Garner was communicating: based on their religious beliefs, southern white Christians thought integration was evil.”
    A decade earlier, the Reverend Carey Daniel, pastor of First Baptist Church in West Dallas, Texas, had delivered a sermon titled “God the Original Segregationist,” in response to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. It became influential within pro-segregationist southern states. Daniel later became president of the Central Texas Division of the Citizens Council of America for Segregation, which asked for a boycott of all businesses, lunch counters included, that served Black patrons. In 1960, Daniel attacked those “trying to destroy the white South by breaking the color line, thus giving aid and comfort to our Communist enemies.”
    Now ask yourself this: Did the fierce advocacy on behalf of segregation, and the dehumanization of Black Americans, reflect in any meaningful way on the character of those who advanced such views, even if, say, they volunteered once a month at a homeless shelter and wrote a popular commentary on the Book of Romans?
  • There was a mass lynching in the town of Shubuta where the highway and the railroad cross the Chickasawhay River. Some parts of the incident were written up in the northern newspapers. No one was ever charged with the crime, although the local members of the Ku Klux Klan were well known. Five men and four women were hung, their feet dangling just inches above the river's muddy waters. Such was Mississippi in those times. The only thing a Black man or woman had to do to get lynched was not move off the sidewalk for "Miss Ann" or "Mr. Charlie." A Black must never be caught drinking from a "White Only" fountain, or making the mistake of using the front door instead of the back door. Stealing a chicken or a pig was very dangerous. Being caught at this could get you twenty years on the chain gang. If you were Black in Mississippi, lightning would surely strike sooner or later.
    • James Yates, Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (1989), p. 20
  • It was about this time that I quit school. It seemed useless somehow to keep on going. At best, I would end up with a third-rate education, qualifying me for only the worst kinds of jobs, that is, if I didn't cross the wrong white man at the wrong time and get myself killed. After the incidents at Shubuta I had only one obsession. That was to get up North to magic places where I'd heard there was some freedom, and where white folks didn't shoot you, lynch you, and insult you every day. Most of the young fellows I knew felt the same way. We picked and chopped cotton and fed the hogs and cows, and dreamed of that wonderful day when we'd head North.
    • James Yates, Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (1989), p. 22-23
  • The Bilbo family's roots go far back in the history of Mississippi. With the end of slavery, they emerged on the political scene as the strong arm of the plantation owners. Theodore Gilmore Bilbo moved up the latter in political circles and became a United States Senator from the Senate of Mississippi. He became notorious in his filibustering against any bill in the Senate which would make life better for the millions of Blacks who lived in the South. Thousands of Blacks left the plantations and emigrated north hoping for a better life. When the southern establishment could not keep the Blacks down on the farm, their political arm in Congress, Senator Bilbo, proposed that we deport sixteen million Blacks back to Africa. I lived in a state ruled by Bilbo and by Ku Klux Klanners, who committed against Back people some of the most vicious acts imaginable. During my last five years in Mississippi, 1917 to 1922, more than fifty Blacks were lynched. This number would be doubled if the great waters of the Mississippi River could reveal the bodies hidden there. I was a witness to some of these lynchings. Thousands of Black men escaped being lynched but were given life sentences on the Mississippi chain gang. They died a slow death of torture, due to people like Bilbo. Black soldiers returning home from World War I were imprisoned for disobeying orders by not discarding their uniforms within the three-day limit set by the local authorities.
    • James Yates, Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (1989), p. 27-28
  • The lieutenant tried to stay awake. He rolled around in his seat and asked, "And America, is it true they hang Blacks from trees there?" For some reason this question embarrassed me, but I had to reply, "Yes." I could have told him about the National Guardsman in Springfield who tried to kick my eye out, or of the detective on the freight train who stomped on my hand, but I didn't. I would have explained that my family was in a kind of concentration camp, too, although they were not restrained by barbed wire. Our wire was invisible except where it manifested itself in signs like "White Only," and where it erupted into a lynching. I could have said that, but I didn't.
    • James Yates, Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (1989), p. 133
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