| By ashwini - Apr 24th, 2007 at 12:44 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Tags: civil rights, High School, integration, race relations, racism, segregation, students, youth
"The white people have theirs, and the black people have theirs. It's nothing racial at all."
Mindy Bryan; Ashburn, Georgia
Segregation is often seen as a default, a natural order, the way things just sort of fall into place when people with differences exist near to one another. Ms Bryan’s sentiments are often echoed in defenses of segregation—it doesn’t come from racism or any maliciousness, but it’s just sort of the way things are, because they’re the way things have been for so long. But this ignores inequity and inequality, the main reason that “separate but equal” was found to be a myth in Brown v. Board of Education.
Turner County High School, in southern Georgia, just held its first-ever school-sponsored integrated prom. For decades, parents had been organizing their own proms for the kids, one which Black students attended, and one which white students attended. From the article, it seems that the impetus behind the integrated prom came from the student government, which is encouraging—the change came from the students themselves, rather than being thrust upon the student body by adults. The prom was generally regarded as a positive step, but there were some who were skeptical or downright hostile to the idea. A parent, Valerie McKellar, said "'That's just like you're cooking a half-baked cake, putting the icing on it, and when you cut the cake, the cake ain't no good. That's how this prom is.'” Additionally, one student said that some of her friends’ parents “didn’t agree with” the idea of an integrated prom.
This reminds me of the segregated debutante ball circuit as well—usually, to have a debutante you must belong to a country club, and as country clubs are historically segregated, so are the balls. This article in the Colorado Springs Gazette proves that this is not a problem unique to the South: “There are two debutante groups in Colorado Springs -- the Jolly Jills and the Colorado Springs Debutante Committee. Other than a picnic in 1996, the two groups haven't mingled much.”
Although separate public facilities and institutions are illegal in this country, the vast majority of people in the U.S. still live, work, relax and worship in segregated realms. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said Sunday was the most segregated day of the week. The importance of integration does not negate the equal importance of safe spaces for people from marginalized groups—hence, the need for affirmative action, identity groups and organizations, etc. But segregation is not just the way things fall into place—it is the result of institutionalized and constant racism. We need to push to undo its effects just as viligantly today as those before us did half a century ago.
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And I'll tell you--that was one of the most joyous ballrooms I've ever been in. It was a great party--dinner, dancing, a promenade. And it was segregated as hell. I mean, I didn't have to sit in the back or anything, but I stuck out like a white thumb.
I worked Atlanta politics for a few years, so I've been in plenty of situations where I'm the only white guy among anywhere from dozens to hundreds to thousands of people (Soul Jam, a concert in Macon, was awesome--Bobby Blue Bland and PFunk both performed, and I got a photo with four of Original P). I've spent more time in black churches than I have in Temple (which, I hardly need point out, is usually not the most integrated crowd, either).
Something that I'm wondering about--you're not southern, are you? The reason I ask is that, while I can't speak as to the rest of the country, down here there are community-based societies and clubs that have been operating for decades within the confines of this racially-charged region, establishing their own traditions and activities that largely flew in the face of what white society was pushing. There was a complete civil society constructed for both races--white groups would go to the VFW hall or white churches or the white restaurants; black groups would go to the Masonic lodges or the black churches--and they would do what they could to have fun given the rigidity of much of society.
Nowadays, those groups, which were integral to community cohesion and survival, can meet in the Hilton ballroom or the public park or the school gymnasium or anywhere else that rents space. Facility segregation is largely finished in the south--now we're looking at a situation where people are trying to find a balance between racial harmony and preservation of the traditions and organizations that meant so much for so long.
That's not an easy balance to find. There is a clear imperative to preserve the heritage of those groups that helped communities survive some of the most turbulent times in American history, just as there's a clear imperative to prevent racial schisms from reemerging after the long-fought battle for legal equality and social equity.
I have my thoughts about how this integration might be accomplished, but I've barely spent a collective 6 months in the South my whole life, so I don't have enough experience to go on.
Could you elaborate more about what you see all around you?
I think Masonry might be a good example, too. My great-uncle was a 32nd degree Mason in the Northeast because Masonic Lodges were a good place for Jewish Eastern-European immigrants to network and socialize. I think most of his lodge was white immigrants. In the South, I've met a lot of Masons and spent a lot of time in Masonic lodges during campaign tours, but I've met very few white Masons, because most of the lodges I've been to were employed extensively during the Civil Rights era and before as community centers for black society (sort of a secularized version of the black church--a center for social organizing). As a result of the historical role of Masonic lodges in much of the South, the people who grew up with an understanding of that history gravitated towards Masonic groups in later life and taught their families about how the Masons impacted their community, reinforcing the lodge's role within certain segments of local society. The segments of society without the historical attachment to Masonry largely ignore the lodges in the South.
There are thousands of examples of Southern cultural icons that are only widely recognized by certain segments of the population, usually along racial lines. In Atlanta, for example, there's this nice little restaurant near Clark Atlanta University called Pascal's. To most white people it's an upscale restaurant in a mostly black part of town. To many black people it's where the giants of the Civil Rights movement, like King and Abernathy and Lowery, held many of their strategy sessions or sought refuge with their families. A few years back the original site of Pascal's was bought and the restaurant changed locations, and you would have thought there had been a massacre for all the community outrage that, as far as many whites were concerned, came out of nowhere.
It's tempting to think of a single Southern society that was split by race, but it was more like multiple societies that coexisted in one area, and Integration, by its very nature, is forcing those societies to compromise over what they once revered and practiced in the name of A More Perfect Union. While the united, singular society that grows out of Integration should be a greater and more cohesive one than what existed before, to a large degree achieving that societal cohesion means asking established cultural groups (albeit groups frequently defined or identified by race) to surrender what had been in the past sources of strength and community. There is still a generation that lived through Jim Crow, and they and their families have made it for decades because of these institutions that are now, to some degree, obsolete (or at least superfluous). What used to be a nexus of community activism is now just a local church, an abandoned school, a Masonic lodge less than a mile from a new community center, or just a damn good restaurant. Events that used to be grand social outlets are now relics kept alive by those who remember their value from a bygone era. In a sense it's living history, and in a sense it's a hurdle to overcome on the path to social equity, and balancing those two competing views has been one of the biggest challenges to face the New South.