During the 1920s, some 1.5 million blacks had deserted the South anyway, which prompted the elites, writes Anderson, to commence a campaign of arresting black resisters. The black exodus continued, despite the threat of arrest.
So stop the trains!
Southern leaders decided to prevent the trains from running! Trains were halted long enough to derail, temporarily, blacks on their way to the North. At operating bus and train terminals, campaigns attempted to stifle black progress resorted to tearing up the ticket that indicated a northern destination. I don't know how many of the frustrated didn't think of the SS? "When blacks tried to circumvent the dragnet by walking many miles to use another station, they were manhandled by police at the railroad stations and the charged with vagrancy." Many, Anderson writes, were packed into the jails. Blacks, Anderson continues, more determined than ever, continued to escape the South.
By the 1940s, my father would have known what to expect as he escaped the South.
As Anderson writes, in White Rage, many black southerners would have recalled recent months of working on plantations or working in someone's kitchen or caring for someone's children. Sacrificing to save the money for a bus or train ticket. Months, maybe longer, saving for to experience a life somewhere as long as it wasn't in the South. It's meant borrowing money. Saving for a car. Walking... Whatever it takes to step foot in a northern state.
Despite the obstacles stacked against them, black Americans weren't awaiting directions to move forward.
At some point in the late 1970s, while I was away in California, having completed by BA by then, my father became a foreman at the meat-packing company. I went to the factory once, when I was a teen. I saw the conditions the men worked in. I'm not sure which set of issues my father presented to the company, but for his troubles, he was fired. He tried to find employment elsewhere, but he wasn't a young man anymore.
It was the last straw. My father was a broken man. After all he went through while still living in the South. All he endured in the North, working for a white man who had no respect for black men.
When I returned to my family home in Chicago, I saw a stranger, a casualty of white rage.
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