James M. Redwine

Jim Crow

An Anniversary

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Just over one hundred years ago (June 1921), what historians consider one of the worst incidents of White on Black racial violence occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma. An entire Black business district and many Black owned residences were destroyed by White vigilantes. Approximately 300 Negro citizens were murdered. The matter was omitted from official historical records until 2001. As a student in Oklahoma public schools from 1950-1961, I never heard of this event. It is now being included in school curricula. I recently was doing research for this column when I referred to a book, The Oklahoma Story, by former Oklahoma University Professor of History Arrell Morgan Gibson (1921-1987). In an informative and interesting book on the history of Oklahoma published in 1978, there is no mention of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre even though Professor Gibson does include Oklahoma’s history of segregation and racial prejudice.

For example, the book points out that the first Legislature of Oklahoma formally adopted legal segregation of public schools, public transportation, public toilets, water fountains and other facilities. While I have never forgotten living in a culture steeped in Jim Crow formal and societal expected segregation, Gibson’s book sharpened my memories and caused me to return to my frequently sublimated curiosity about America’s caste systems. One of my most difficult father/son experiences I had was attempting to explain the apartheid of my youth to my son who could not comprehend the incomprehensible. It is difficult to explain what one does not understand. I approached our numerous conversations about Jim Crow by relating my personal experiences with it. Of course, my experiences remained almost as mysterious to me as they were to my young son.

I had no explanation for why White society used its majority power to keep Blacks, what we called Coloreds, at a distance and a disadvantage. Why was the water from a White’s only public fountain better than that from a Colored fountain when they were both connected to the same source only a couple of feet apart? What difference did it make if Colored waste was separated at a commode when the sewers claimed both? And why was it okay for Coloreds to pay White restaurant owners for food to go but it was illegal for Coloreds to sit at the counter? What was so vile about Colored bodies that they could not ride in the White only seats? Most puzzling of all was what was so sinful about Colored Christianity that it could not be expiated along with White sin on Sunday?

Well, Gentle Reader, if you did not live under apartheid, this probably makes no more sense to you than it did to my son, or frankly, to me. On the other hand, I do wonder if we still have far to go as a society when it comes to race, or religion or gender or…. I also wonder if such public spectacles as the Sean Diddy Combs trial would be the titillating social phenomenon it is if the participants were White. Does America still suffer from a 400-year-old need to keep Black culture in a separate category from White?

Have we progressed or have we found ways to assuage our prejudice with bemusement? Even our President appears to fear that any recognition that America has need to make reparations is somehow morally wrong. As for that conversation with my son who now has children of his own, well, his daughter’s best friend is Black. However, the better news is, I do not think either his daughter or her friend knows there is a distinction.

 

Motes and Logs

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The United States has several mottos: E Pluribus Unum [out of many one], Land of the Free, America the Beautiful, In God We Trust, United We Stand, This Land Was Made for You and Me, etc. If a national motto is meant to be a goal, perhaps we should consider adopting golf legend Jack Nicklaus’ motto when the media was urging him to pile on Tiger Woods after Woods’ consenting adult personal behavior came to light. Jack responded, “How is that any of my business?” Now, I shamefully admit to the titillation aroused by indiscretions of public figures such as Tiger, Bill Clinton or The Donald. However, my too normal weakness does nothing to assuage our national political angst nor does it comport with any of our grandiose views of ourselves, you know, our mottos.

As we struggle to mend our shredded national self-image and our decimated international reputation, a movement away from personal attacks among one another and especially by the national media might be a logical starting point. The mote that is so concerning in the eye of those we disapprove might be better left out of our serious considerations of issues such as war, inflation, unemployment and health care.

We sometimes lose sight of how good we have it. When we spend our national energy denigrating the religious views or personal behavior between consenting adults, or the differing political or sociological philosophies of our fellow Americans, or non-Americans, we might lose sight of what truly matters.

Numerous alarms have been sounded by people who may be well intended but not grounded in history. We are not, “On the eve of destruction” as sung by Barry McGuire. I remember this dire warning from 1965 and note that during the sixty years since we have been constantly in or preparing for war, but we have also virtually buried Jim Crow and eliminated polio. We have accomplished much in spite of our frailty of personal attacks. Of course, we have much more to do, but we should build on our successes, not forget why they were necessary.

Well, my recommendation for our national motto falls on the Golden Bear side of the ledger, not shrill voices of those who espouse America’s greatness but call for its pettiness. A removal of the log from our own eye could be a fitting place to start.

Yuletide

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Yuletide is the Germanic term for the season that begins with the Winter Solstice, usually about December 21 or 22. For 2019 the fleeting moment when Earth’s true North Pole was at its maximum tilt away from the sun occurred on Saturday, December 21 at 10:19 p.m. Central Standard Time. The winter or hibernal solstice marked the twenty-four hour period of the calendar year with the least sunlight and the beginning of longer daylight days. Humans probably have always celebrated this event. It is the true “new” year.

For many people the end of the year’s gradually darkening after the Summer Solstice, about June 20 or 21 each year, is a time to reflect on the past and hope for the future. One need not be superstitious to experience a period of introspection when darkness turns to light. Nature provides the perfect metaphor.

For Peg and me as leftovers from the turbulence of the 1960’s retrospection often includes the days of Jim Crow and America’s legal system. These painful recollections were once again seared into our psyches when we happened to come upon the 2018 movie Green Book while surfing television shows for something of value, that is, something other than the cacophony of vile opinions claiming to be news.

Green Book is based on events from 1962. Dr. Don Shirley (1927-2013) was an African-American pianist who decided to engage in his own sociological experiment concerning racism in America. Instead of designing a laboratory environment where rats are manipulated and observed followed by conjectural opinions, Shirley literally put some real skin in the game, his. He hired a white Italian-American from New York City to be his driver and event manager then, with a white cellist and white bass player, the four of them dove into America before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was not pretty. Believe me, I remember.

I was born in 1943 in the legally segregated state of Oklahoma. I lived the good life of a middle-class white kid and young man with hardly a thought about why everyone I went to school or ate out with looked like me. If I ever had a passing observation of this phenomenon until after Brown vs. The Topeka Board of Education in 1954 I do not recall it.

Then in 1957 Oklahoma used “all deliberate speed” to comply with the United States Supreme Court’s decree that its previous decree that Separate but Equal was no longer constitutional. Turns out the Judicial Branch is no more virtuous than the other two. Not surprised? Me neither.

Anyway, the public schools of Oklahoma initiated their version of integration and the “colored” kids from Booker T. Washington School across Bird Creek from the rest of us came to school with the rest of us. Of course, public transportation, restaurants, restrooms and water fountains remained pristinely white until after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Jim Crow still reigned.

Green Book transported Peg and me back to those not so thrilling days of yesteryear. Don Shirley was kept back by the dominant white culture to those dark days symbolized by the Winter Solstice. Perhaps whoever erected the Stonehenge paean to the coming light had their own demons to quell. My guess is there is in human nature a certain element of dark mentality that is constant and that each generation must re-learn and deal with that fact.

Of course, for one to recognize the darkness in our souls we must have the ability to appreciate the possibilities of the coming light. When the light finally expels the dark, if it ever does, we will be able to dispel the competition between good and evil by not just hiding from the long night but reveling in the light.

Happy New Year!

Safe Language

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“Love” and “hate” have become meaningless. Not too long ago, say before the pervasiveness of cable TV, most humans, especially male humans, reserved “I love you/it/them, etc.” for those few special people and things we actually did love. “I hate you/it/them, etc.” was only applied to those rare persons and things we had a personal reason to hate.

Now everyone “loves” everything from certain soft drinks to ball teams and “hates” everything else. Love and hate are applied like a coat of paint to everything that we used to “like” or “dislike”.

And when it comes to commenting on the words or actions of others, say public officials, the national news media no longer takes the effort to produce facts which might prove a statement careless or incorrect, now the shortcut is to assert all statements are “false” or “lies”.

This deterioration in communication is probably due to our human need to keep others in those places we believe they should stay. And since we may no longer beat down our opponents with ad hominem appellations, i.e., politically incorrect terms, we just say they speak with forked tongues. This development was an unintended consequence of the p.c. movement.

No one may be publicly denigrated or even described by gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, physical attributes or age without exposing the speaker to a cacophony of boos from the political correctness police. I say good! As one who grew up in a legally segregated state at a period in history when only Anglo-Saxon males were judged worthy, I say America has taken several steps forward since World War II. It is instructive that our notions of acceptable speech now make it unwise to set out, even in a newspaper column condemning prejudicial slang, examples of such hurtful words as …. Well, you may supply your own.

However, we humans appear to be incapable of not ascribing bad motives to those with whom we disagree. And now, since we cannot rely upon demeaning terms as short-hand for those we despise or even just disagree with, we have turned to saying we hate them, they are liars, their premises are false and their motives are suspect. For some sociologically implausible rationale, it is reprehensible to refer to persons by catch phrases but perfectly fine to assert they are motivated by avarice and evil designs or have the morals of Wylie Coyote.

The national news media of today would never use politically incorrect terms for public officials but also seldom report what the officials say without gratuitously stating it is false. Setting out the facts and leaving it to the viewer or listener to come to her/his own conclusions does not seem to occur to the national media. One need only turn on the nightly news on any given evening to see how we have progressed in politically correct speech and regressed in consideration for differences in opinions.

Another interesting phenomenon has been the gradual merging of male and female speech. Until social pressure forced men to speak less paternalistically and chauvinistically, women were rarely heard, at least publicly, engaging in demeaning terminology. However, if one observes the plethora of female news anchors on today’s airwaves, venomous attacks, often factually unsupported ones, pour out without regard to the gender of the anchors.

And it is not just the media. Many of us, at least it seems to me, are now so bereft of acceptable demeaning terms for those unlike ourselves, we must seek to bring them down to our level by other means. We are uncomfortable not being able to differentiate “us” from “them”.

This phenomenon has been years in the making and is not the province of just one sociological group or political party. I recall when Congressman Joe Wilson, who still represents South Carolina, during President Obama’s speech to a Joint Session of Congress in September 2009 publicly yelled at the president, “You lie!” And I find it difficult to watch CNN anymore as they assert virtually every statement by President Trump is, “False!”, without giving any supporting data for their accusations.

I do not wish for a return to those Jim Crow days when any group one claimed to be a part of felt comfortable denigrating any other group. However, perhaps we have exchanged politically incorrect speech for terms every bit as demeaning to individuals and perhaps even more dangerous to our democracy.