If only...
White rage is triggered not just by the presence of black people, Anderson argues. Rather, "it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship" that becomes contradictory. Noticeably so. That is why the fear of being made to feel uncomfortable is still with us, fueling the banning of books, which speak of the lived experience of black, indigenous, other people of color, and LGBTQ today. When black people challenged this myth of a "whites only" America, they were terrorized with impunity. And what a display of cruelty? "A formidable array of policy assaults and legal contortions has consistently punished black resilience, black resolve," writes Anderson. "One of the most macabre formats for the murders was a spectacle lynching, which advertised the killing of a black person and provided special promotional trains to bring the audience, including women and children, to the slaughter."
There were white political leaders along with law enforcement weren't pleased to see blacks progress. Black people, in turn, found it difficult to "'accumulate much,'" when "signs of prosperity could attract night-riders and the bloodletting, torture, and land seizure." This occurred, writes Anderson, in areas of the South where the plantation economy wasn't a factor. In these areas, the violence was know as "whitecapping," bloodletting until anyone could ride for miles and never see a black person.
Nonetheless, black Americans still demanded to be recognized as equals. To assimilate would require existing as a zombie, that is, remain invisible in yet another version of those dreams of whiteness. Not living but born only to die! But to demand rights and "appropriate compensation" for work done was "a death sentence," writes Anderson. Any attempt to address the 200 years of impoverishment or the unequal application of justice was met with resistance. Subject to the lie of "favoritism" that pitted "taxpayers" against "lazy" people, Black Americans hitched rides, jumped trains, rode buses, walked--anything but remain literally in financial debt to the dreamers of whiteness.
It was best to move on. To quote another historian, Isabel Wilkerson, black Americans "did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left."
Like my father, black southerners would have read the Chicago Defender 's warnings about the cruelty blacks face in the North. "Years of closed doors and poverty" could be found in the North too, the paper warned. Join the "freedom movement" north, but don't expect open arms and room to grow! Whites only ruled in the North too! It settled inside your head, heart, bones so you thought of yourself, more and more, as less than the Man. But I can imagine my father like many other blacks searching for opportunities, thinking, they'd duck and dodge the Man and slide by.
When it wasn't warning blacks of the systemic racism in the North, the Defender "served as one of the primary conduits of information about opportunities up north." How did Southern elites interpret this effort by the Defender to inform its readership? Southern elites, mayors, governors, business leaders, and police chiefs, looking for "outside agitators" to blame for the mass exodus of the "servant class" taking its first step "without asking," saw in the northern paper a threat to the "old regime." Why would black people, an inferior people, think of leaving the South without the help of northern agitators, out to destroy the Southern economy? Escaping "a racially oppressive system," writes Anderson, is "displaying intelligence." The white elite couldn't grasp the "unimaginable."
The Chicago Defender did its best to educate the public about that "old regime," discussing, Anderson explains, not only the Klan but also those political offices "who benefited from a system of oppression that robbed African Americans blind." The Southern elites took action to ban the paper from circulating in the South. "Like a resistance movement in a totalitarian society, a network of black railroad porters, ministers, and teachers, even under the stress of surveillance, worked to circumvent the ban using the postal system and smuggling the paper in bulk goods."
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