Jim Crow Children

My mother taught me to show Jim Crow what I can do to gain respect from Jim Crow children--black, white, brown and every other color.

And when I enrolled in my white university of choice, I developed a habit of my own: 

Take it to the limit of my abilities! 

No excuses! 

(Kindle Edition) Jim Crow's Children:
The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision

1963

Source: © Warren K. Leffler
Library of Congress 
Prints and Photographs Division

School is key in children's beliefs and self image.

Today, school is replacing home as the place where a child develops character. Young mothers are not like my mother. In fact, I was not like my mother when I was a young mother. Even though my mother worked, like I did, and so many others do today, my mother explained THINGS to me--racial things--large and small. She led me to believe that I could compete and she went on to help me prepare for the competition. 

My mother bought reference books that my school did not have; she helped me write papers; she scoured used bookstores and yard sales for titles she though appropriate for me to read; she made my father help me with my math, which he called arithmetic; she invited neighborhood kids to come to our house and study; and she passed on a tradition of education to me and my friends. She did all of this because our schools were segregated with few resources. 

"Nobody in that Jim Crow Central Office cares that you don't know anything," my mother said. "Ignorance makes it easier to control everything you do."  

"Who is Jim Crow?" I asked.

"A clown we have been fighting for centuries!"

"What?"

"Jim Crow is the father of all the people in our nation."

"Jim Crow is not MY father!"

"Yes, he is," she said sadly. "He is the father of all Americans, whether they know it or not. Maybe it will be you who will help put Jim Crow to rest for good."

In ways that may not be so obvious, today, education maintains racial segregation and increases racial gaps in grades, opportunity for college and later employment. 

My mother told me this when I was in high school. "The door is not open, yet. All you should expect when the door does opens is entry. And what you do when you get through the door is up to you!"

As students enter adulthood, sentiments on race tend to harden, a residual of Jim Crow laws before the Civil Rights Movement, which began to erase such practices. And I remembered my mother's words. 

So, you see, school means much more to society than proper textbooks and the right school supplies. School educates people for life, either segregated or integrated.

A feeling of inferiority is a feeling of inequality; a feeling of superiority is a feeling of inequality; only a feeling of equality is a feeling of equality.

Examine books, movies, music, news and social media for Jim Crow.

It is difficult to keep emotion out of discussions on race and education, especially today, when many events in movies, television, news and social media keep passions fresh. Racism is a personal issue rooted in the most private institution we know, the family--our offspring, our loved ones, whom we wish to protect from pain and controversy at any cost. Without bias, Irons approaches the subject of race and education factually and attempts to illuminate what has been hidden over the ages in our nation, covered up, if you will, at a time when America should be moving past Jim Crow laws and toward post-racism as seen on television today, and somewhat through social media networks like FaceBook.

Well, we're not past racism, even in our FaceBook age, which easily links people of different cultures, based on interests. However, there still seem to be clear lines of difference when examining the profile pages of different ethnic groups. Likes tend to befriend likes.

Modern studies show today that some young children are being taught by their parents, relatives and school that they should not be friends with children of a different color and they should not date them when they are older. The effects of these types of instruction become more apparent as the child approaches puberty, indicating that the closer the child gets to reproductive age, the more impact race has on his or her development. The same results were reported in studies conducted more than 60 years ago.

President Jimmy Carter broached the subject of race and education in his book about growing up in the South, as did Ron Reagan in his book about is father Present Ronald Reagan. Race had an impact on the education and lives of these presidents, but nowhere near the impact it had on America's first African American president, Barack Obama, who has the burden of multiple bloodlines. Imagine the tightrope President Obama walks on whether or not he is showing favoritism for one race over others.

Strength of character is needed to overcome harmful habits that have been bred and embedded into us in school. Read the text and see the video of the race relations in America speech President Barack Obama delivered during his campaign and view the collection of books written by and about President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.  

What I attempt to make an objective observation of the historical origins and reasons for racism and why the new nation back then, at the time of its founding, under the supervision of its Founding Fathers, saw need to promote and preserve separation of the races even before slavery had assumed the permanent and legal framework of Jim Crow laws that eventually supported it. 

Was slavery allowed to go wild and become a monster on its own? Or was there a sinister plot to separate people by skin and evolve into Jim Crow laws? 

What I am discovering as I ponder this line of thinking is that America's children, all of us--young, old, dead, alive, black, white and every shade and physical condition in between--are all the offspring of Jim Crow laws, regardless of the skin type holding our mortal bodies together. 

I am the offspring of Jim Crow, too. When I was young, I was unaware of the influence segregation had on me and community. We went about life the way Jim Crow laws allowed and made the best of what we had. My mother had plans for me, however, of which I was unaware. She intended for me to go to college, but not a segregated Jim Crow college, a major university, because she knew the days of Jim Crow laws were numbered. The video below is an example of the lengths my mother went to to get me a little misunderstood dance costume, a tutu, that she believed would help prepare me for her dream.

Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision explains how, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court sounded the death knell for school segregation with Brown v Board of Education. The book explores articles on many Brown participants, such as Thurgood Marshall and Earl Warren, and later public education rulings, as well as sketches of numerous black students throughout the history of Jim Crow laws and school desegregation. Most fascinating are the dramatic courtroom scenes that Irons uses to demonstrate the erosion of Brown as the 1970s' conservative political movements fought to maintain segregated neighborhoods and, thereby, segregated public and private schools across the nation--North and South, illustrated on television news broadcasts and social media networks like Twitter. 

(Photo: Pinterest)
Peter Irons
Jim Crow's Children:
The Broken Promise
of the Brown Decision
(Paperback)
Jim Crow's Children:
The Broken Promise
of the Brown Decision
(Kindle)

When I read Jim Crow's Children by Peter Irons, I knew I had to share the book for the understanding it lends to an emotional topic that still plagues our nation--race relations in America and the effect of race on education and school choice. One way to have intelligent and useful conversation on the topic of race and education is to find authors like Peter Irons who approaches hot buttons without a hot temper.

From Publishers Weekly: "Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that mandated the desegregation of U.S. schools, is popularly seen as a hallmark of American justice. But Peter Irons, professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, surveys recent U.S. history to reveal a quite different picture: many states have found ways to delay implementation of, or totally evade, the ruling. Further, in response to the often violent battles around school busing and a clear rise of conservatism in the country, Irons argues that in 1991 the court began 'judicial burial' of Brown by setting precedents that continued to allow segregated schools."

TODAY, separation of the races in education, public facilities, services and jobs and professional schools are not wholly based on skin color, race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, physical ability/disability or language. 

Today, job discrimination and education, more and more, can be traced along class lines--groups that have wealth and groups that have no wealth, with contemporary origination still traceable directly to Jim Crow inheritance, practices and laws, dating back to the founding of the nation when slavery and white poverty were pervasive conditions in the colonies due to slave and early European indentured servant trade, all of which affected school attendance and education. Later, those territories that became slave states attracted poor white former indentured servants, free African Americans and other poor ethnic groups looking for fortune or, at least, education for their children, jobs and business opportunity, landownership and slaves.

Movies, television, books and media influenced how the public perceived black people.

The Help 
by Stockett, Kathryn
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Like other New Englanders, the Founding Fathers looked upon slaves as a commodity, not a group of human beings. This misunderstanding of slaves and later free black servants is the reason sensitive conversations were conducted in their presence without fear of retribution, as illustrated in award-winning books and movies like The Help. Throughout history, before and after the Civil Rights Movement, authors and film producers have been telling the same story of household servants--slave and free--learning information while in service and then taking the information back home or to church meetings.

American History can be easily traced along racial and color lines, as the not-fully-developed human portrayal of African Americans plays out on movie screens and theaters. Today, however, young black Hollywood roles show a more fully-developed human character than did roles in early American film, which reflected, not only the period the movie depicted, but also  the way society expected the powerless maid and others in her position to behave in the reality of their day. 


When Margaret Mitchell was asked in an interview about the way she wrote the black characters in her book, Gone with the Wind, she said she handled them respectably, and maybe she did for her time in her own way. However, it is documented that Mitchell, born in 1900, refused to attend classes at Smith College because one of her classmates was black, which demonstrates Mitchell's personal views on racial inequality in education and other social areas. 

Gone With the Wind
(Hardcover Book)

Gone With the Wind
(Paperback Book)

Gone with the Wind
(Kindle Edition)

Early black Hollywood routinely cast black actors in roles inferior to those of white actors, true in the 1939 film version of Mitchell's book, Gone with the Wind, in which Hattie McDaniel made so much of the maid's role that she became the first African American to win an Oscar for her portrayal of a servant in the film privy to delicate white family information.

The 1934 Imitation of Life and 1959 remake had maids involved in white family business, while at the same time, showing a dismissive attitude to their presence and problems, until one of the white characters gains empathy with their plight. 

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Bigmama Didn’t Shop 

At Woolworth’s 

Sunny Nash

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Sunny Nash is an author, producer, photographer and leading writer on U.S. race relations. 

Sunny Nash writes books, blogs, articles and reviews, and produces media and images on U.S. history and contemporary American topics, ranging from Jim Crow laws to social media networking. Sunny Nash is the author of Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's (Texas A&M University Press), about life with her part-Comanche grandmother during the Civil Rights Movement.

Sunny Nash’s book is recognized by the Association of American University Presses as essential for understanding U.S. race relations. Nash's book is also listed in the Bibliographic Guide for black studies at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York; and recommended for Native American collections by the Miami-Dade Public Library System in Florida. Nash uses her book to write articles and blogs on race relations in America through topics relating to her life--from music, film, early radio and television, entertainment, social media, Internet technology, publishing, journalism, sports, education, employment, the military, fashion, performing arts, literature, women's issues, adolescence and childhood, equal rights, social and political movements--past and present—to today's post-racism.

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