The Legacy of Jim Crow
As a Southerner by birth, the Klan, the legacy of slavery, and Jim Crow has always been visible, even if the effects are being alleviated by time and tolerance. The KKK is certainly one of the country’s most reprehensible institutions. Despite their evil and criminal intents, being a member was practically a requirement in the American South (and beyond) to be an accepted member of society until the latter half of the 20th century. This societal pressure to adopt a racially bigoted worldview set the country back decades and extended the legacy of the country’s greatest crime. There is a quote from The West Wing where a character calls slavery “America’s original sin.” This rings true as many of America’s greatest problems originate from the massive racial divide in the country, from culture to wealth to education, which all originate from the legacy of the institution of slavery. In my own life, I see this on a daily basis. While the legacy of slavery can be extrapolated to just about every issue of racial inequity, I encounter the most obvious examples on a daily basis both in Richmond and at home in South Carolina. In Richmond, the presence of “Jefferson Davis Highway” and the statues on Monument Avenue present daily reminders to a time where this country was torn asunder by a conflict over whether owning an entire race was morally acceptable in exchange for economic benefit. At home, the vast majority of Hilton Head Island (where I live) is divided between gated communities, most of which include the word “plantation” in their name. While plantations are not inherently slave-driven, the word association in the American South is unavoidable. Similarly, just 6 minutes from my house, there lies the ruins of an old plantation house which was burned when Union soldiers took the Island. This, alongside the Union gun batteries which stand on the coast and the remains of the freed slave village of Mitchelville, provides a continual reminder of what the South once stood for.
As for Jim Crow, the legacy of this can be seen across the nation, even in regions where it was never the law of the land. Segregation was a brutal injustice, the terrible history of which is still remembered across the nation. Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, schooling was legally desegregated. However, the images of Southern governors blockading the doorways of public educational institutions to black students haunted the nation throughout the 60s, as racial rhetoric and conflict began to heat up. This resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act and other laws which required full integration and absolute equality under law between the races. Despite this, many whites found their way around this law. Redlining and white flight led many neighborhoods to be segregated unofficially and, as whites left the cities, urban populations became more and more monochromatic. This perpetuates to this day, where “segregation between suburban places has increased for blacks and white, hispanics and whites, and asians and whites” (Semuels) between 1990 and 2010. While many neighborhoods are integrated and diverse, many of the countries suburban and urban regions are still known as “the black neighborhood” or “the white neighborhood.”
While housing continues to be a problem of segregation, so does education. Over half a century has passed since Brown v. Board forced the South (and the rest of the country) to desegregate its schools and allow integration. This certainly did not go into effect immediately, as much of the country continued to see public school segregation well into the 60s. I must also note, simply based on my own experience, that the South found another way around integration: segregation academies, sometimes called “white flight schools.” These were a wide variety of private schools founded in the 1960’s and 70’s to keep white students separated from blacks, usually at the cost of a good education. As a Southerner who attended a private school founded in 1965, I have always been very aware of their existence. While my alma mater is not officially considered a segregation academy, due to never holding an official policy of racial exclusion, it participates in the South Carolina Independent School Association, which was originally founded for such purposes. In high school athletics, my school regularly competed against schools like Calhoun Academy (which paid taxes well into the 80s to remain segregated), Stonewall Jackson Academy (kind of self-explanatory), and Thomas Heyward Academy (which, to my knowledge, does not have a black student to this day).
While the South still faces issues of racial inequity, which are very easy to point out, it is often neglected that the strict laws placed on the South did force public schools to integrate with a great deal of legal force. Such laws were not enforced with nearly as much vigor in the North and West. For that reason, the worst segregation in schooling in the country is observed in a surprising place: New York. According to a study done by UCLA, “New York ‘had the highest concentration of in intensely segregated public school’” (Resmovits). This means that many schools are almost exclusively black and Latino in which “white students make up less than 10 percent of enrollment” (Resmovits). This problem is not exclusive to New York, and can be seen across the country. Many said that the election of Barack Obama may lead to a “post-racial America.” However, the persistence of these problems which were in discussion over half a century ago nullify that argument.
Works Cited
Resmovits, Joy. “The Nation’s Most Segregated Schools Aren’t Where You’d Think They’d Be.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 26 Mar. 2014, www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/26/new-york-schools-segregated_n_5034455.html.
Semuels, Alana. “White Flight Never Ended.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 30 July 2015, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/white-flight-alive-and-well/399980/.