Explore the roots of the civil rights movement by looking at he history of segregation in the USA.
Transcript: Civil Rights: Segregation History
Eric: The school buildings for white kids were pretty much up to date in every case. Black kids were not. Books, newer books for white kids. Black Kids got the hand me downs.
Will: In a lot of ways, in the long story of American history to have things that look equal but that are applied unequally.
Penny: If the groups of people that you’re differently, that are differently affected by your law are then racial group, it's kind of a kind of racism.
Welcome to the diversity and inclusion for all project supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
Welcome back, everyone. We're here with our guests Will Katerberg and Eric Washington to continue our series of conversations on Race in America. One of the topics we're focusing on today is the civil rights era and the civil rights movements in the United States. I'm interested to know a little bit more about what what prompted the civil rights movement and the sort of the historical context of that time period and the important events that happened then. Eric, I wonder if you can take us in, with some of the things that you think are most important to know about that era and the historical context.
Eric: African-American historians will focus some on what happens right after the Second World War and through and into the 1960s as defining the civil rights movement. Other historians will go all the way back to the 1880’s they've labeled that the long civil rights movement where you have African-American associations throughout the country that are protesting against segregation laws, Jim Crow laws in in the Deep South. But also really organizing along self-help lines. These these different associations. So really when when I take a look at civil rights movement, I take it from from the long view that civil rights movement begins to galvanize in the aftermath of of the demise of reconstruction in 1877, where the South was given home rule, quote unquote, to use the the term that C. Vann Woodward used in his book The Strange Career of Jim Crow. From there on southern municipalities and states were able to erect a system that segregated black folks and white folks in every way imaginable. So the pushback against that began began very early. And so in in a nutshell, individuals, but but also organizations, so like these different African-American associations and then later on, the NAACP and the National Urban League, they were pushing back against legislation. But also pushing back against practice, especially in in northern locales where you don't have Jim Crow laws. But you definitely have Jim Crow-ish practices that are segregating African-Americans who are moving into these different places like New York City, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and then different practices such as just redlining in different forms of housing discrimination and also job discrimination and so forth and so on. So it's big. There's a lot of stuff that's happening. But if I could boil it down, these these are movements that are arguing against the practice of racial segregation and discrimination legally, as well as by custom. And what these with these organizations and even individuals do is that they hearken back to the founding documents of this country, basically calling out American hypocrisy. In many cases, like W.E.B. Dubois, he’s broadcasting this internationally. So that's that's how quickly summarize the whole thing kind of set the table.
Penny: So it seems like it's important to know that the civil rights movement didn't suddenly start like in the late 50s, early 60s, but it was actually based on different movements and organizations that had been agitating or coalescing against certain racist policies and laws, even starting in the eighteen seventies onward.
Eric: Yes.
Penny: I'm wondering, too, if we can unpack a few things for our listeners. One is this is just a curious thing. I'm wondering if you could help me. Where does the phrase Jim Crow actually come from?
Eric Oh, it comes from American minstrelsy, a minstrel artist by the name of TD Rice. TD Daddy Rice. He did a performance. He did a song I think was like, jump around, turn around. And then so every time I jump around, I say Jim Crow. So it comes out of American minstrelsy.
Penny: One thing that I think is important for our listeners to kind their wrap their head around, too, is that the segregation wasn't just a southern thing. It may have been perhaps in the states that we associate with the southern states…it may have been more in the laws themselves, but that segregation was also happening in the north. From early on, but certainly from 1870 onward up until the civil rights movement. Are there specific instances or examples of segregation that was happening both in the north and the south that would help us understand the context of the civil rights movement?
Eric: Education was going on in both in both regions. Again in the north, it's not ubiquitous, but when you think about the the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education, I mean that that case comes out of Kansas, definitely not the south. Some we call (it) the Midwest, but it's definitely a northern locale. And so in Topeka, Kansas, there were segregated schools. It’s a class action suit that African-American parents lived in a certain neighborhood, but they had their neighborhood schools. It was for white kids and they had to trek away from their own neighborhood to go to a black school. So right there and definitely also at the south, they were segregated schools from kindergarten, elementary school on up into higher education, segregated schools in the south.
Penny: And the idea of separate but equal was one of the things that we read about that was part of the laws, if you will, especially in the south. But in fact, they were never equal.
Eric: Exactly. Carter G. Woodson in his book The Miseducation of the Negro, he broke down the disparities in terms of how much a southern municipality allotted to educate white children and black children. And in every case that that he brought up the state or the municipality put in more money to educate the white kids than black kids. The school buildings for white kids were pretty much up to date in every case. Black kids were not. Books, newer books for white kids. Black kids got the hand me downs from from white kids, I mean, it this goes all the way into the sixties, you see this and actually goes and beyond. It goes beyond the 1960s where black kids are opening up their books. They're from the 30s and 40s and they see the names of white kids in those books. So this just those things I mean, the amount of money that was set aside to educate these kids with white or black, you saw a disparity.
Penny: So education was definitely one of the areas where we see, because of different policies at all different levels, municipal, state, maybe broader regional policies, that there's not equal, they're separate but not equal. And then there's the segregation policy as well.
Redlining is something that I've heard a lot about and wonder if you could unpack that a little bit for us and tell us what redlining is, first of all, and then how that was sort of a set of policies, not just in the south, but also in the north.
Eric: I mean, redlining is really a northern phenomenon, although it it was practiced in in the south. Redlining refers to the actual laying out of a map of a city and drawing lines around certain neighborhoods that are that that are deemed undesirable. Real estate folks who actually give and not just Real estate folks but actually the city themselves, would give give grades to certain areas. So if you were a D, your neighborhood was outlined in red and the D was was the term as undesirable.
And it wasn't just the case that in an undesirable neighborhood, you had you had black folks. You could have newly arrived immigrant groups from from Europe. And they will be redlined as well. So it affected real estate in terms of housing prices and definitely kept people, certain people out of neighborhoods that were graded A or B.
Will: It's not just a function of local laws, but also practices by banks and real estate agents. So when an African-American family would be looking for a house or perhaps a family of European immigrants from southern or south Eastern Europe, the real estate agents would steer the unwanted people away from certain neighborhoods and into certain neighborhoods. Banks would refuse to give a loan to an African-American family or another unwanted family if they were trying to buy a house and, you know, quote unquote, the wrong neighborhood, a neighborhood, not for them. So it's not just laws on city or city books, but the practices of the real estate agents, the banks and all of that kind of thing. And if that didn't work, if a real estate agent broke the rules and sold a house in the neighborhood to a black family where they weren't supposed to by local convention, the black family might find itself threatened on if it moved in. It might find its house vandalized or even damaged or destroyed. And this when you think about this, as Eric mentioned, you can think places like Detroit and Grand Rapids and Chicago, but you should also think places like Los Angeles and Portland and Seattle. And in the north, sometimes by the 1920s and 30s, it was the KKK. We think of the KKK as a southern thing. But by the 1920s and 30s, the KKK was flourishing in the Midwest and northern cities, and they were often enforcing these laws with threats of actual violence.
It also affected the settlement of the American West that some new territories and states made it difficult, as difficult as they could for African-American families to claim land and the homestead as farmers.
Eric: Mm hmm. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, one of my favorite movies when I was a kid growing up was actually about African-American homesteaders. They they left … the movie called Buck and the Preacher with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. And there's a caravan of African-Americans leaving the state of Louisiana. Right. Right after emancipation, or at least, yeah, maybe…maybe 1870, maybe 1880’s. It's not specified in the movie, but they're these white men like a posse that's trailing them and basically terrorizing them in order for them to get back to Louisiana to basically become sharecroppers. So, yeah, I mean, you talking about move movement and potential housing. Yeah. This this whole thing stretches all the way back to post-emancipation.
Penny: So redlining was this policy. Either on the books or just in practice of keeping, let's say, African-Americans especially, but undesirables in certain areas in terms of housing and reserving desirable areas for, let's say, white, the desirable people. But this has long term effects for the different groups, right?
Eric: Without a doubt. If we laid out a map. A red line map of Grand Rapids from the city the 1930s and 1940s. And you see basically the racial spatial dimensions of the redlining policy. And you lay that map side by side with the same racial spatial dimension of Grand Rapids right now, it’s basically unchanged. Basically unchanged.
Penny: Redlining became illegal with the Federal Housing Act of 1968. However, folks found ways or workarounds to effectively keep many neighborhoods segregated, even after redlining was officially illegal.
Eric: The ramifications and the legacy is still with us. And and it's just not about, OK, well, there are black neighborhoods and there are white neighborhoods. It’s like what we brought up earlier about separate but equal was never equal. It's the same thing with redlining. I mean, there was a purpose behind we'll mention that the purpose behind the grading out of these neighborhoods and it was to keep those desirable neighborhoods desirable, to keep the undesirable neighborhoods undesirable. So you have a lack lack of investment in those neighborhoods. The public schools the attached schools, the public schools are underfunded and so forth and so on. And that's basically what you see here in a city like Grand Rapids. But it's …you can see it also in places like Cleveland that was also hyper hyper-segregated, it’s like Chicago was hyper-segregated. And you have just black pockets that are situated in certain areas of the city over and against white pockets and later on in Chicago brown pockets.
Will: In many ways, the crucial moment was at the end of World War two, the GI Bill, a government program to help returning GIs resettle US citizens and start their lives and families and help pay for education. But crucially, the government also backed GIs when they bought homes and then in the late 40s, 50s and early 60s was the key era when blue collar working class laborers really got the opportunity on a mass basis to buy their own homes. And despite the fact that this was a national program, it was often applied in discriminatory ways. And so black GI’s and Hispanic GI’s often couldn't get access to GI funding for mortgages. And so if you combine the redlining practices we were describing with the fact that black men had a harder time getting GI Bill loans than white, so that explains why more of this neighborhood segregation. And it also helps explain wealth differences on average between people of African-American and white descent. I think there's a couple of hundred thousand dollar difference on average in intergenerational wealth that's passed on between black families and white families in the United States. And much of that history is explained by these housing practices. So when you think about the story, it's partly practices of banks and mortgage lenders of other sorts of real estate agents and local local covenants. But it's also discrimination in enacting federal policies like the GI Bill. And so it helps explain where people live and massive average differences of wealth between black and white families.
Penny: So if my grandfather was or my great grandfather was a World War II vet and he's white, he would have qualified for some of these mortgages, and he would have been allowed to purchase a house in a desirable neighborhood. But if my grandfather, great grandfather, was a black World War II vet, there would not have been those same opportunities to buy in desirable areas, to buy a residence in a desirable area, or to even get one of those loans that was supposed to be for working class or for veterans who are coming out of World War II to to kind of give them a foot up. And then that, of course, if it's my grandfather, or great grandfather, that affects my what I inherited or didn't inherit or the wealth that my grandparents or my parents were able to sort of accumulate, because so much of our wealth in America for a lot of Americans is actually tied up in our house. Right. Or our residence. So that really has those long-term generational effects.
Will: And that means then that when you’re trying to buy a home today, because on average, you would have less wealth than a white buyer today, you would pay higher mortgage prices. And so the the penalty, you might say, continues into the present.
Eric: Yeah, so that's absolutely true.
Penny: So the context of the civil rights movement is really a long one. It it stretches all the way back into slavery and certainly into eighteen seventies with different groups agitating and advocating against policies either on the books or in practice that really were racist. They said black people, African-Americans don't get all the good stuff. We're going to reserve that for the desirables, which in almost every case were whites, northern Europeans, maybe northwestern Europe, Europeans. And definitely Protestants for a while, and that helps us understand a little bit like what's going on in the civil rights movement, it's not just suddenly in the 1960s we had a revelation, but it was really a reaction or a direct response against these racist policies that had been in place for decades, if not 100 or more years.
Eric: White, white, terroristic groups like the KKK and Knights of the White Camellia and those sort of groups during the eighteen sixties, like late 1860’s 1870’s and beyond, as some African-Americans are trying to get a leg up, some African-Americans were voting because that was it, they could vote in aftermath of the 15th Amendment, but you had African-Americans voting before the 15th Amendment. States were rewriting constitutions after the Civil War and giving African-American men the franchise. So you had this pushback. So you had you had a plethora of lynching. And what I want to just mention quickly is the work of Ida B. Wells, a journalist who exposed the reason why these these white groups were terrorizing African-American families. The narrative coming from white folk in the south was that, well, we're trying to protect racial order, but also trying to protect the purity of the white southern woman. Well, I had Ida B. Wells in her investigative reporting, which she got a posthumous Pulitzer last year on that, she exposed that. No, it wasn't about protecting the purity of white women. It was about keeping African-American families down. Economically, it was an economic motivation, again, back into the legacy of slavery. So definitely white supremacists, but white supremacy with a particularly economic edge to it. To say that African-Americans must be kept poor and impoverished and basically working for white landowners as sharecroppers.
Penny: So are you saying that the whole sort of practice of lynching was part of reinforcing the social order where blacks, African-Americans are at the bottom?
Eric: Yes. Yes. I mean, it's tied into the creation of of of black codes right after the Civil War in southern states. Yeah. And I would say that Ida B. Wells is definitely a civil rights icon in her own right with her reporting, but also with her work with the Niagara movement that in 1905, that that that led to the creation of the NAACP, the very next year.
Will: And I want to emphasize again that this echoes in the north where when redlining practices failed, threat of violence and occasionally actual violence would be used to similarly enforce housing segregation through redlining in northern and western cities. And remember too all this connects to other things. If the good jobs are moving out of the center of cities into suburban areas after World War II, African-Americans have a more difficult time, if possible at all depending on where you live, to buy a home in the suburbs. And so it's much harder for them to access the good jobs that are emerging there and the good school systems that are emerging there. So these these kinds of things work, housing, and education wrapped up in each other. And where all else fails, there's the threat or reality of violence. And so some of the violence in northern cities after World War II were usually somewhat blue collar neighborhoods where blue collar folk, you know, auto workers and so on were now able to afford better houses. They wanted to keep their neighborhoods white because they associated African-Americans with lowering of housing prices. And so these and these were often immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants who were once the non-preferred ones from places like Ukraine or Russia or Italy and so on. And they were now part of that white working class. They were accepted as white, and they were beginning because of these government programs like the GI Bill, to have the opportunity to have middle class lives. And they wanted the neighborhoods they were moving into to remain white.
Penny: When the 15th Amendment was passed, that sort of said effectively, we're supposed to give voting rights to all the American citizens, including African-Americans who are American citizens. But in practice, it was actually really difficult, especially in certain areas, for African-Americans to vote. I wonder if you could just give us some examples or unpack that a little bit, because that's another thing that was one of the things that I associate with the civil rights movement was this push to really get African-Americans practically able to vote in their different districts.
Eric: Very soon after reconstruction ended, when there was a push by southern southern states to get around the 15th Amendment. They couldn't just say, we don't want any African-American men voting. So they enacted laws like the grandfather clause, which stated that if your grandfather voted, then you can vote. Well, every African-American person in the south just about- his grandfather was enslaved. So you had had the grandfather clause. You had poll taxes where if you're African-American, you had to pay a tax in order to vote. Well, majority of the population, the sharecroppers at this time, they don't have that residual income to vote. Literacy tests that persist well into the 20th century and into the 1950s. Even African-American would-be voters having to recite and interpret passage of the Constitution or obscure passages from from books or what have you. My mother recently told me about having to do that 1959. She's she's 18. And she had to take a literacy tests. She talked about my grandmother having to take a literacy test.
Will: And so the idea was that you would have laws that on paper, look, you know, nondiscriminatory. They would, you know, they would apply to white and black people. If you couldn't pay the poll tax, if you couldn't pass the literacy test or the constitutional knowledge test, you couldn't vote. But of course, those could be applied in discriminatory ways. And so you might have a black man who’s college educated and a lawyer or a doctor, but there's no way he would be allowed to pass the test. He would be failed. Then you could have an illiterate white person who would magically pass the test. There's a long history to this., …a lot of ways in the long story of American history to have things that look equal but that are applied unequally.
Eric: It’s like what's happening in Texas and in Georgia. On the surface, it looks like, oh, well, we're just trying to combat against voter fraud or voter corruption. But when another set of eyes looks at what's going on, it's you know, you're making voting more difficult and especially for certain groups of people. So the practice continues.
Penny: Indeed, making voting difficult for certain groups of people when it's not as equally difficult for other groups of people is a kind of discrimination. Right. And if that if the groups of people that you’re differently that are differently affected by your law are then racial groups, it's kind of a kind of racism.
If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe to our podcast to stay informed about future episodes. Do you have a friend who would be interested in today's topic? We'd love it if you'd share our work with them. Our hope is that this project will spark good conversations and provide learning resources that inspire diversity and inclusion work. All views and opinions expressed in our episodes are those of the individual and do not necessarily reflect the views and positions of Calvin University or the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship.