This column is prompted by the current debate over how American history should be taught in schools, and in particular, how our racial history should be taught. This debate has been highly visible at the state level: In 2021, twenty-four state legislatures took up this question, and by the end of the year, nine of them had passed laws prescribing how our nation’s history should be presented to students.
Amid all the rancorous discussions one point should not be lost: As we look back at our past, we should not only celebrate our achievements, as we are wont to do, but we should also acknowledge and face up to the darker events and episodes, those times when we failed to live up to our ideals.
Let me suggest three books which shed welcome, if discomfiting, light on some lesser known, but significant aspects of this racial history.
The first of the three is “The Color of Law” by Richard Rothstein. The scope of the book is nicely summarized in the subtitle: “A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.”
In using the word “segregated,” Rothstein is thinking specifically of racial segregation in housing, also called residential segregation — the creation and perpetuation of all-white neighborhoods, subdivisions, and suburbs.
Rothstein asserts that government at all levels was deeply involved in this undertaking.
The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), an agency created in 1934 to assist first-time homebuyers, was involved by insuring bank mortgages with the appraisal form the FHA used containing a “whites-only” provision.
In this way, Rothstein notes, segregation became a requirement in the federal government’s mortgage-assistance program. When the FHA moved into the development of subdivisions and even entire suburbs, it retained the “whites-only” requirement.
At the local level, municipal officials displayed remarkable ingenuity in maintaining residential segregation. When they became aware that the houses in a proposed development would be sold to both Black and white people, they would squelch the project by rezoning the area for industrial use only.
Or they might increase the minimum lot size, thus making the lots too expensive for the less affluent — Black ― buyers.
The second book is provocatively titled “When Affirmative Action Was White.” The author is Ira Katznelson, a professor of history at Columbia University. His stated aim is to help his readers think with greater clarity and more historical background about affirmative action. To this end, he examines some of the policies formulated by the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s and identifies “specific forms” of racial bias that followed from those policies.
Two of the measures he considers are the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, popularly known as the G.I. Bill, passed in 1944. Katznelson maintains that these two acts disadvantaged Black people and advantaged white people.
The Social Security Act, for example, excluded farm workers and domestics (maids). This was not an accident or oversight: A large percentage of Black men at the time worked on farms, and many Black women were maids. Excluding their category of work from the benefits of the Act was a way of excluding them.
How did this come about? The Social Security Act was drafted by the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee. Southerners held sway in these two committees. Katznelson explains that the Southerners welcomed the money the Social Security Act would send into their region, which was poor, but they did not want their way of life undermined.
Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, for instance, insisted that safeguards be inserted in the Act to keep the federal government from intervening in the South’s handling of racial issues. The Southern lawmakers insisted on maintaining control over how the money from the Act would be distributed in their states.
The same fate awaited the G.I. Bill. As with Social Security, the drafting of the bill was in the hands of Southern senators and representatives, and they saw to it that the bill would be administered not at the federal, but at the state and local level, as would the distribution of money. In the South, this meant administration and distribution by whites.
Helping veterans pursue their educational goals was the program for which the G.I, Bill was best known. But it offered other benefits as well, such as job placement assistance and access to bank loans.
Black veterans were not always well served by these programs. In the loan access program, the Veterans Administration guaranteed the loans, but the veterans had to apply to the banks themselves.
“The vast majority of banks,” Katznelson asserts, “would not loan to Blacks, sometimes because they supposedly were not good credit risks; but sometimes for nakedly-racist reasons.”
The third book is “Slavery by Another Name” by Douglas Blackmon. “Slavery” in his title refers to forced labor that emerged in the Southern states in the final decades of the nineteenth century.
It was a system in which young Black men were coerced into working on cotton farms and in coal mines. It was a corrupt and depraved system that ensnared up to as many as 100,000 Black men, and possibly twice that number.
A public official in a county or town — a sheriff, say, or a justice of the peace — would arrest a young Black man for a minor offense, or even a trumped-up charge.
The man would be hauled into court, where the judge, with little concern for justice or due process, would declare him guilty and sentence him to thirty days at hard labor.
As a kind of postscript to the proceedings, he would assess the man for court costs and fees. Invariably, the man was too poor to pay, so the judge would extend the sentence to three months or six months, or a year.
At this point the public official involved in the case would inform a local cotton farmer or mine owner and an agreement would be struck: The official would turn the convicted man over to the farmer, and the man would “work off” the amount he had been assessed by working on the farm.
He would be completely under the control of the farmer; the farmer “owned” him. In return for getting the labor of the man for free, the farmer would pay the official the amount the man had been assessed.
For the young Black men forced to work on cotton farms or in coal mines, life was grim. Living conditions were wretched with meager food; inadequate clothing; crude, unheated structures for housing and unsanitary conditions.
One farm Blackmon writes about was, in his words, “a miserable compound of rampant disease and death.”
Men sent to coal mines dug coal from before sunrise until after dark, six days a week. They saw sunlight only on Sundays. They worked in dark, cramped spaces no more than 4 feet high, sometimes a mere 2 feet. Dangerous gasses collected in unventilated areas, and the men were continuously exposed to coal dust.
The men caught up in the system were routinely whipped and condemned to 30 to 40 lashes at a time. It was barbaric, wanton and gratuitous cruelty.
We can all take the time to gain deeper insight into our racial history thanks to these books and others.
L. John Adams is a retired librarian and Peabody resident.
