The Black History Month part 2: A Long Road Of Racism

Every history book has one topic that we must always study and be taught from elementary to college or even for life. It is about racism. I want to discuss this topic because it’s essential nowadays when so many bad things are happening to the Black community, and racism has taken it to a new level. It is hard to believe there were so many scars on their bodies and souls. For many years, many previous generations had sacrificed themselves to fight for justice and equality for African Americans and other races in the U.S. So today, let's discuss it. There will be three episodes on this topic because the stories and events around it are so vast and vital, so I want to discuss it more. In this episode, I would like to go back to the 20th century, from the early 1940s to the 1970s, where I believe the fight for Civil Rights Movements and the racial system of America was inhumane and left the consequences for today. We will see how it changed over time. Is it worse, or is it better?  

Many people fail to believe that race isn’t a biological category but an artificial classification of people with no scientifically variable facts. Race was created socially, primarily by how people perceive ideas and faces we are not quite used to. The definition of race depends on where and when the word is used. Racism is a system of racial discrimination and prejudice. The concept of race as classifying people can be seen as misleading people and involved in the quality of human life. During the civil rights movement, there were many revolutions made by African Americans to gain some justice for themselves. The southern area was famous for cotton fields and slavery, of course. They had a long history of racism, the rise of the KKK, lynching, execution without trials, and inequality, and African Americans, through generations, had written a heroic history that the next generations would never forget.  Blood was shed, and lives were lost to sacrifice for freedom, equality, and the future of Americans.

Source: Getty Image

Looking at past events that happened to Rodney King, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, or Breonna Taylor, and reflecting on the past on what racism and abuse of power of the police department did to the Black people, I think there is one word to summarize everything. Violence was one of the acts of racism. They once said that when the language is helpless, violence to the throne. Indeed, when you go against something unequal or disturbing, there is no way you will have a peaceful protest because the law enforcers who are being respected will not leave it alone. See what our current president was doing at that time. He ordered the special troops to stop the protestors on the street by shooting and throwing tear gas at them, and he, well, just walked to the church near the White House and took a photo with a Bible. A true leader will never do it; a true leader will know how to deal with that situation. Returning to the word “violence,” everyone must be familiar with the event in Selma in 1965, which was one of the most important events during the civil rights, which they called Bloody Sunday.

According to the website BlackPast.org, six hundred Negroes began a 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state Capitol in Montgomery, led by Martin Luther King and John Lewis. They were mourning the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, who had been shot on February 18 by a state trooper while trying to protect his mother during a civil rights demonstration. After the Negroes crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Selma’s outskirts, white state troopers attacked them. When the protesters refused, the officers shot tear gas and waded into the crowd, beating the nonviolent protesters with billy clubs and hospitalizing over fifty people. They knocked many to the ground and beat them with nightsticks. Another detachment of troops fired tear gas while mounted troopers charged the marchers. In all, 17 marchers were hospitalized, and 50 were treated for lesser injuries. How horrific it was. However, on March 21, the final triumphant march began with federal protection, and on August 6, 1965, the federal Voting Rights Act was passed, which completed the process that Dr. King had hoped for. 

At that time, it would be a big mistake if we didn’t talk about a role that played an essential part in the road to freedom along with protesting and marching. It was the role of African American women. Many African American women were strong enough to fight along with African American men. But some were weak and powerless. I must say that African American women have suffered a lot from racism and unequal, and they lost their lives and their reputation. In my first year of college, I had a chance to learn the story of Henrietta Lacks through the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloots. In the 1950s, Henrietta Lacks was a poor Virginian tobacco farmer, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves. She was born in 1920 and lived with an aggressive cervical cancer until it killed her in 1951 when she was only 31, leaving behind five children in 1951. In the science field, however, Henrietta Lacks was only known simply as HeLa, from the first two letters of her first and last names. Cells from Mrs. Lacks’s cancerous cervix, taken without her knowledge, were the first to grow in culture, becoming “immortal” and changing the face of modern medicine forever.

Ms. Skloot writes, “trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.” Laid end to end, the world’s HeLa cells would wrap around the earth three times today. But doctors at John Hopkins hospital took out her cell without permission, eventually leaving her to die without saving her. The lack of responsibilities and doctors’ insensitivity were unacceptable because they had no gut to face with their actions. Doctoring is a job, I think, to save people. They have a gift and must use it to help the patients to save lives without segregating based on their race. Those doctors did not deserve to be doctors because they had no heart or capacity.  An act of racism, and they hid this story from the society and people in Henrietta’s family. The story of Henrietta is one of the clearest examples of racism during civil rights. 

With no power, rights, or strength to fight back, racism against African American women also showed through sexual harassment. Before the story of Henrietta Lack, which shocked the world, Recy Taylor—a novel that reinterprets the history of America's civil rights movement regarding the sexual violence committed against black women by white men. Recy Taylor was a young wife and a mother. In 1944, she was walking home from a church service. She’d attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped, and left blindfolded by the side of the road. They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone. The detail of that horrific and inhumane harassment was described in the book At the Dark End of the Street by Danielle L. McGuire. Her description is as follows on page 16: “Lovett (one of the rapists) walked Taylor to the car and shoved her into the backseat. Three men piled in behind her while four others squeezed into the front. The headlights switched off, and the car crept away. Lovett grabbed his gun and waved Taylor and his companions out of the car”. (16) Not only not stopping there, but the harassment was also being gone further and described even more horrifically: 

Sobbing, Taylor pulled off her clothes. “Please,” she cried, ‘let me go home to my husband and my baby.’Lovett spread an old hunting coat on the ground, told his friends to strip down their socks and undershirts, and ordered Taylor to lie down. Lovett passed his rifle to a friend and took off his pants. Hovering over the young mother, he snarled, “Act just like you do with your husband or I’ll cut your damn throat. (McGuire 17)

It sounds familiar to me or maybe to all of you. Oh, I see. It is precisely what women have been through these days. Not only Black but also other women from different races. The power of men over women had existed for a long time before, and sexual violence had happened a long time in long decades.

Later on, her story was reported to the NAACP, where a young woman named Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case, and together they sought justice. But justice wasn’t an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy it were never persecuted. The name Rosa Parks was not strange to anyone worldwide because of what she did; what she dedicated was heroic and meaningful. Rosa Parks quietly incited a revolution on a cold December evening in 1955 by sitting down. She was tired after spending the day at work as a department store seamstress. She stepped onto the bus for the ride home and sat in the fifth row, the first row of the “Colored Section.” The bus was packed, and a white passenger had to stand. The driver orders Rosa to move to the back. Three riders complied; Parks did not. Later, they arrested her and put her in jail with $10 bail. And the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott began, which is often considered the opening scene of the civil rights movement, was in many ways the last act of a decades-long struggle to protect black women, like Taylor, from sexualized violence and rape. 

Talking about bus boycott, a direct nonviolent action by African Americans achieved its first significant success in Montgomery, Alabama, with bus boycotts of 1955, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and E.D Nixon. The quiet but defiant act of Rosa Parks prompted this protest. 90 percent of Montgomery’s black citizens stayed off the buses. That afternoon, the city’s ministers and leaders met to discuss the possibility of extending the boycott into a long-term campaign. During this meeting, the MIA was formed, and King was elected president. Resistance to African American demands for the desegregation of Montgomery’s buses was finally overcome when the Supreme Court ruled in November 1956, which based its decision on the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. The boycott was a success.

Mother love is always the most precious miracle ever happening to everyone’s life. She loves us with all of her heart, and with her, we are the precious treasure. They said that when a mother lost her child, she lost the whole world. It’s true, and I always consider this following story as such a horrible and haunting tragedy for my life because I can see the inhumane of society and the cold blood of those maniacs. Emmett Till, fourteen years old, went to Money, Mississippi, to visit his family, and was brutally killed for allegedly flirting with a white woman by saying “Bye, baby.” Later on, the killers, who were that white woman’s husband and her brother, came to the house of Emmett’s uncle and forced him to get inside the car. They made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river. After his death, Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till, was so shocked and horrified. But she still held the strength inside her and knew she had to do something to make sure that her son would be recognized and his death would be remembered forever. Later on, Mamie Till told in her memoir “Death of Innocence '' that: "When I began to announce that Emmett had been found and how he was found, the whole house began to scream and to cry. And that's when I realized that this was a load I would have to carry. I wouldn't get any help carrying this load."(85). Horrified and desperate by the mutilation of her son's body, Mamie decided that Emmett would have an open-casket funeral. You should check the image of Emmett Till’s body online to see how horrible it is and what those maniacs had done to that boy. She believed that everybody needed to know what had happened to his son. Some 50,000 people went to Emmett’s funeral to view his corpse in Chicago, with many people leaving in tears or fainting at the sight and smell of the body. Those people, Bryant and Milam, who killed Emmett, were found not guilty because the authority couldn’t recognize the body. Once again, justice hadn’t been done yet like Recy Taylor. After Mamie wrote this memoir, she answered in an interview in tears a few days before she passed away that “I focused on my son while I considered this book. The result is in your hands. I am experienced but not cynical. I am hopeful that we all can be better than we are. I've been broken-hearted, but I still maintain an oversized capacity for love”. 

Throughout so many bloody events, in 1968, President Johnson finally signed the Civil Rights Act and Right to Vote for African Americans. But was it the end of racism in this country? I don’t think so. People still have the federate flag, people are still having cults like the KKK, people are still holding White Supremacy, and people are still raising hate inside the heart. It has not been over yet. It is continuing. 

References

Kindig, Jessie. Selma, Alabama, Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. University of Washington, Seattle. Blackpast.org. https://blackpast.org/aah/bloody-sunday-selma-alabama-march-7-1965

Mc. Guire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Sep 7, 2010. Print

Moore, Harry T. "Montgomery Bus Boycott." The Cambridge Guide to African American History (2016): 193.

Stockett, ‎Kathryn. The Help. Penguin Books, 2009. Print.

Till-Mobley, Mamie and Christopher Benson. Death Of Innocence: The Story Of The Hate Crime That Changed America. Ballantine Books, 2004. Print.