I was just minding my own business doing some summer reading when the following passage jumped off the page at me, leaving me stunned contemplating the way history repeats itself with twists and complications. Guess what historical moment of potential long-term school closings is being described by author Jason Sokol in There Goes My Everything:
State representative Smith painted a grim portrait of that future. “Where flowers bloomed, the weeds have raised their ugly hyrda-like heads. The playgrounds where…childish voices had raised a melodic cacophony, stand as silent sentinels of a departed host….Inside…closet doors are closed on the thousands of books whose jackets bear the imprint of small, grimy hands.”
That was only the half of it. Far worse would be the effect of closed schools upon parents, teachers, and children:
Housework is a problem with the children underfoot, not for a short three months, but ALL THE TIME…the baby-sitting problem has become a full-sized nightmare….The older children hang around the corner drug store or record shop, go to movies until sated, then seek various and often ill-advised means of escaping boredom. The teachers – well, God help them, for He alone can – NOW. (p. 121)
These statements were made on November 17, 1958, in Atlanta, GA, as segregationists proposed resistance to desegregation orders by shutting down public schools. The quotes are from Fulton County representative M.M. “Muggsy” Smith, demanding that public schools remain open. (The book is called: There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1973.)
Sounds mildly familiar to the discussions we are witnessing in the summer of 2020, doesn’t it? In 2020, school closures due to COVID-19 and the demands for racial justice are somewhat independent strands, but in 1958 school closures were used as a way to prevent racial justice. The current protests over police brutality make the issue of race relations reverberate in complicated ways. (I’m writing this post after the killing of Caleb Blake in Kenosha WI and the subsequent killing of two protesters by a 17-year-old self-proclaimed militia member.) For me, reading this book right now is a mighty collision of past and present, current events and history.
I found Sokol’s chapter on the early response by white people to desegregation in the late 1950s and a 1960s to be profoundly moving and interesting. I hadn’t really considered the topic too deeply before. He portrays some unintended, ordinary heroes. While many whites abandoned public schools when Black students started attending, some families chose to remain. These families valued the concept of public schools more than they valued white supremacy, and they had neither the desire nor the means to pull their children from their public schools. These families, it turns out, faced the full assault of segregationists. Parents were harassed, family members fired from their jobs, property was destroyed, and children were threatened. Many of these families persisted, and Sokol recounts the harrowing and disturbing ordeals of Lloyd Andrew Foreman and James and Daisy Gabrielle in New Orleans, white people who continued sending their children to school with Ruby Bridges. Spoiler alert: the Klan hates white allies of Black people more than they hate Black people.
To make the story more complicated, many of these white families who remained in public schools in the South were not actually in favor of integration. They preferred segregation. But they acknowledged the court rulings, and they were resentful of the hostile behavior of the pro-segregation activists. They dug in, to demonstrate they could not be pushed around, and found themselves on the front lines of a movement they hadn’t supported, suddenly allies with Black families in ways they had not intended.
That is so complicated, and immediate to 2020, as well.
Sokol’s book also has chapters on white southerners’ reactions to integrated businesses and politics. In the final chapter, “The Price of Liberation”, Sokol considers James Baldwin’s vision that “The price of liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks.” (p. 311) I found Sokol’s writing that includes statements from multiple viewpoints that racial justice was needed for the sake of white people’s own liberation from racism to be moving. (On a different level, but related to this blog and my professional work, I note how the concept resonates for me: the price of liberation of teachers is the liberation of students. I might elaborate elsewhere, but I feel free as a teacher because my students are “free” to work with me as they choose.)
I have never lived in the south, and have very few connections to white southerners. I don’t feel like I “know” these people and communities the way I “know” the Midwest and New England. What I am left with after finishing this book is contemplating the strands of history and how they impact the present. School closures were once the tools of racists; in 2020 I’m part of the school closure movement while people I don’t trust are demanding that schools be open. Black Lives Matters holds more approval and support than in prior years, and the President’s attempts to attack protesters with unidentified federal troops pushes more observers to support the movement. Before reading this book, I was pretty sure what the President meant by “MAGA”; now I am certain.
A second August read was even more compelling to me: Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino. In this summer of 2020 in which we learned more about the Tulsa riots of 1921 destroying the Black Wall District of Greenwood in Tulsa, OK, I happened upon this book recounting a similar event in Wilmington, NC in 1898. As a former U.S. History teacher, I had known a bit about Tulsa (thank you Howard Zinn), but I had never heard of a conflict in Wilmington, NC.
Zucchino writes with a simple and powerful storytelling approach. Briefly, Zucchino recounts how in the mid-1890s, white populists and Black voters aligned to elect many Black people to office in Wilimington, then North Carolina’s largest city. A strong Black community that constituted 56% of the population had developed in the decades after Reconstruction, and by 1898 had elected Black citizens as local leaders, alongside a thriving Black business community that included a daily newspaper. Some white people found this situation intolerable, and they planned and led a violent coup that resulted in the deaths of at least 60 Black people and forced most of the Black leaders to flee. Wilmington has never been the same, and today the Black population of Wilmington is approximately 16%.
Zucchino tells of horrible misdeeds with a non-judgmental narrative, forcing me to respond with my own outrage. He unwinds the story almost as a movie, and I felt captivated by the people he portrays, such as Abraham Galloway, an escaped slave and a state senator, and Alexander Manly, the editor of the Black newspaper The Daily Record. Acccording to Zucchino, it was Manly’s printed editorial defense of Black men and accusation of white men regarding the issue of rape that sparked much of the conflict of 1898. Zucchino narrates the actual day of the coup, tracking the responses, the escapes, and the deaths of many of these individuals.
As a history teacher, I never taught any students about this story. I may have mentioned the Tulsa riots on occasion, especially noting the use of planes by the government against Black people. Whatever issues I may have encountered with the breadth and scope of the 8th grade U.S. History curriculum, here’s one simple conclusion: I couldn’t teach what I didn’t know existed.
This book shakes me to my core. I have since watched several interviews with the author, and I look forward to reading more on the events in Wilmington. (A friend who grew up in North Carolina has referred me to a novel called Cape Fear Rising.) This story is not some hypothetical novel. We don’t have to ask what might have happened if Black people had voted. We don’t have to ask what might have happened if Black people had established businesses. They did these things. It all did happen. The question we can ask is, “What might have happened if white people could have lived with Black people’s success more than a century ago?” Institutional racism might be complicated to understand, but the overt racism of physical destruction is blatant. Except when it is ignored and covered up.
The current Attorney General recently had the audacity to claim “the winners write the history books” in regard to his current controversial actions. The fact that North Carolina history books have written up the events of 1898 as the heroic rescue of a city from corruption is outrageous. The fact that most U.S. history books don’t mention these events is dispiriting.
If you have time for one book, read Wilmington’s Lie. I would value a wider discussion to make sense of this event and how it affects our community.