tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/black-history-month-2015-14775/articles
Black History Month 2015 – The Conversation
2015-02-27T11:09:40Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/37907
2015-02-27T11:09:40Z
2015-02-27T11:09:40Z
The forgotten voices of race records: Pullman Porters, the Rev TT Rose, and the ‘Man with a Clarinet’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73244/original/image-20150226-1819-pfhq3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ma Rainey was one of Paramount Records' most popular artists.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2013/11/01/242155743/holding-music-history-in-your-hands-why-archives-matter">JP Jazz Archive/Redferns</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the 1920s and 1930s, record sales of black artists were very lucrative for the music industry. As a June 1926 article from Talking Machine World explained: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Negro trade is…itself…an enormously profitable occupation for the retailer who knows his way about…. The segregation of the Negro population has enabled dealers to build up a trade catering to this race exclusively.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet record companies routinely took advantage of the more unschooled, vernacular performers – especially black ones, who were already denied access to broader markets. It was standard operating procedure back in the days of <a href="http://www.centerstage.org/marainey/DigitalDramaturgy/TheBlues/RaceRecords.aspx">“race music”</a> – the name given to recordings by black artists that were marketed to the black buying public. </p>
<p>“Some will rob you with a six-gun…and some with a fountain pen.” So said Woody Guthrie in his song “Pretty Boy Floyd.” </p>
<p>Bottom line: if record companies could get away with it, there was no bottom line. No negotiated contract to sign. No publishing. No royalties. Wham bam thank you man. Take a low-ball flat fee and hit the road. Anonymity was also implicit in the deal, so many black artists were forgotten, their only legacy the era’s brittle shellac disks that were able to withstand the wear of time. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73233/original/image-20150226-1761-1l7m71u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73233/original/image-20150226-1761-1l7m71u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73233/original/image-20150226-1761-1l7m71u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73233/original/image-20150226-1761-1l7m71u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73233/original/image-20150226-1761-1l7m71u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73233/original/image-20150226-1761-1l7m71u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73233/original/image-20150226-1761-1l7m71u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Some will rob you with a six-gun…and some with a fountain pen’ – record companies like Paramount routinely exploited black musicians in the 1920s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.goldminemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/SeeSeeRiderBlues.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of the most prominent early race labels was Paramount Records, which, between 1917 and 1932, recorded a breathtaking cross-section of seminal African-American artists. </p>
<p>In 2013 I learned that Jack White of Third Man Records (in partnership with Dean Blackwood’s Revenant Records) would be putting together a compilation of Paramount’s historic recordings. The project would be a grand collaboration of two deluxe volumes that would contain <a href="http://revenantrecords.com/musics/products/the-rise-and-fall-of-paramount-records/">a stunning 1,600 tracks</a>. </p>
<p>I was part of a team of researchers and writers tasked with unearthing new information about the featured artists and their songs. For me, it was an opportunity to put a face on some of Paramount’s more enigmatic artists. Listening to track after track, a zeitgeist began to coalesce. As voices from the grooves accrued to tell a story of a collective black experience, I came to see these performances as cumulative cultural memory – each track a brushstroke in a painting of a long-forgotten landscape. </p>
<p>Here’s a taste of what I found. </p>
<h2>Pullman Porters Quartette</h2>
<p>The Pullman Company, manufacturers of railroad passenger cars, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rising-Rails-Pullman-Porters-Making/dp/0805078509">was magnanimous towards its African-American workforce</a>. Among other benefits, they provided in-house musical instruction, which included a cappella quartet singing lessons. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73242/original/image-20150226-1828-173ppum.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73242/original/image-20150226-1828-173ppum.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73242/original/image-20150226-1828-173ppum.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73242/original/image-20150226-1828-173ppum.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73242/original/image-20150226-1828-173ppum.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=713&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73242/original/image-20150226-1828-173ppum.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=713&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73242/original/image-20150226-1828-173ppum.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=713&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Pullman Company employed a large number of African Americans as porters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7351/10376546093_164a800266_b.jpg">Flickr/antefixus U.E.</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Pullman quartets, I learned, were a franchise: multiple configurations of singers performing concurrently under the company banner. They put on concerts, either performing live on the radio, or on long haul train routes as a form of passenger entertainment. The men who made the records were billed as the “President’s Own” – the working Pullman porters considered the company’s premier lineup.</p>
<p>In the late 1920s, The Pullman Porters Quartette of Chicago recorded a number of sides for Paramount. One tune was “Jog-a-Long Boys,” where they sang of sad roosters and being turned down by widow Brown, the “fattest gal in town.” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCyUnyRwOPU">The chorus went</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Jog-a-long, boys, jog-a-long, boys,</p>
<p>Be careful when you smile,</p>
<p>Do the latest style,</p>
<p>But jog-a-long, jog-a-long boys.</p>
<p>Jog-a-long, boys, jog-a-long, boys,</p>
<p>Don’t fool with google eyes,</p>
<p>That would not be wise,</p>
<p>But jog-a-long, jog-a-long boys.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At first, it seemed as if it were no more than a silly ditty performed in upbeat counterpoint harmony. Then it hit me: they were making light of a horrific reality – specifically, that a black man who dared to smile or even look askance at a white woman was putting himself in grave danger. </p>
<p><em>Look your best, but don’t forget your place…and just jog along, boys.</em> </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TvGJ-rzyxSA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Jog-a-long Boys,’ by The Pullman Porters Quartet of Chicago.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Horace George</h2>
<p>Horace George of Horace George’s Jubilee Harmonizers was a showman and an opportunist, a versatile musician who performed in whatever style sold, whether it was novelty gospel, blues, comedy or jazz. </p>
<p>His gospel group cut one record for Paramount in 1924, but he first surfaced as early as 1906, advertised in the Indianapolis Freeman as “the great clarinetist, comedian, and vocalist.” A few years later, George found himself in Seattle as the “Famous Colored Comedian…who gives correct images,” and later as the “Man with the Clarinet” in a touring black vaudeville troupe, the Great Dixieland Spectacle Company. </p>
<p>In the late 1910s, a black newspaper – the Indianapolis Freeman – called Horace George “a novelty on any bill.” The novelty? He could play three clarinets at once! </p>
<h2>Rev TT Rose</h2>
<p>Beyond the rollicking piano-driven gospel sides he cut for Paramount in the late 1920s, nothing was known of Rev T T Rose. Rose’s “Goodbye Babylon” was the title track of Dust-to-Digital’s 2004 Grammy-nominated collection, <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2004/03/the_bloody_and_the_beautiful.html">Goodbye, Babylon</a>. It was also inspiration for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9hHxm5qbEk">a rock ‘n’ roll tune by the Black Keys</a>. And Rose’s recording of “If I Had My Way, I’d Tear This Building Down” – later performed by artists ranging from Rev. Gary Davis to the Grateful Dead – is one of the earliest known recorded versions of that song.</p>
<p>Rev Rose’s personal story was the most heartening of all. He lived in Springfield, Illinois, and I located his 90-plus-year-old daughter Dorothy, who described her father as a man on a mission to end racism and institutionalized segregation.</p>
<p>As a child, Rose had witnessed the aftermath of the infamous <a href="http://www.lib.niu.edu/1996/iht329622.html">1908 Springfield Race Riots</a>, an event that precipitated the formation of the NAACP. In the late 1920s Rose moved from Chicago to Springfield, in order to minister the city’s black community. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.uis.edu/informationtechnologyservices/teaching-and-learning/revealingvoices/">In an oral history recording</a>, Rev Rose described Springfield as “just really a type of Southern town” with an “overpowering resentment of the Negro…distrust and the fear that the Negro might someday become stronger.” When he returned to Springfield, he observed that the time that had elapsed since the race riots was “a very short span of time to erase all the scars and the prejudices and the hate that was engendered…in that very unfortunate affair.” </p>
<p>It was a hate, he continued, that “Kind of hung like a cloud from an atomic bomb over the whole neighborhood” causing the black citizens of Springfield to go “into themselves quite a bit.”</p>
<p>After his short recording career with Paramount in the late 1920s, Rev Rose went on to become a regional bishop in the Church of God in Christ. He recorded because he thought songs could both uplift and spread messages of hope and perseverance in the struggle for Civil Rights. When he sang “If I Had My Way,” it’s clear that the building he wanted to tear down was no less than the edifice of racism. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Lord, if I had my way,</p>
<p>Oh Lord, if I, if I had my way,</p>
<p>In this wicked world, if I had my way,</p>
<p>God, knows I’d tear this building down.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oqc9BQihB24?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘If I Had My Way,’ by Rev TT Rose.</span></figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/37907/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jerry Zolten does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In the 1920s, many black musicians were exploited by record companies, and faded into anonymity. Here are some of their stories.
Jerry Zolten, Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences, Penn State
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/37982
2015-02-26T11:03:35Z
2015-02-26T11:03:35Z
22 million reasons black America doesn’t trust banks
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73149/original/image-20150226-1774-j506if.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Emancipation is about financial security too </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation#mediaviewer/File:EMANCI4.jpg">Harper's Weekly 1865</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“This bank is just what the freedmen need,” <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/freedmens-savings-bank-a-chapter-in-the-economic-history-of-the-negro-race/oclc/326817">remarked</a> President Abraham Lincoln on March 3, 1865, as he signed the Freedman’s Bank Act, authorizing the organization of a national bank for recently emancipated black Americans. </p>
<p>A little more than a month later he was killed, making the Freedman’s Bank Lincoln’s last act of emancipation. </p>
<p>His assassination, however, did not impede its rapid growth. By January 1874, less than ten years after the establishment of the Freedman’s Bank, deposits at its 34 branches across the United States <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/black-citymakers-9780199948130?cc=us&lang=en&">totaled</a> US$3,299,201 ($65,200,000 in <a href="http://measuringworth.com/uscompare">current dollars</a>). </p>
<p>Despite such successful expansion, the Freedman’s Bank closed on June 28, 1874 under a shroud of suspicion and accusation. </p>
<p>The story of the rise and collapse of the Freedman’s Bank is an important and little known episode in black and American history in the years following Emancipation. </p>
<p>While it is widely known that there are severe disparities in wealth and income between black and white Americans, the origins of this are less appreciated. Indeed, before there was a Great Recession or a Great Depression, recently emancipated black Americans had their first monies as freed persons mishandled and never returned in full. </p>
<h2>The genesis</h2>
<p>Several issues led to the creation of the Freedman’s Bank: the emancipation of slaves, increased pay of black soldiers, and migration of black Americans throughout the North and South. </p>
<p>Cases of black soldiers being swindled, for instance, were <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/black-citymakers-9780199948130?cc=us&lang=en&">quite common</a>, highlighting the need to establish a formal and central banking institution for newly freed blacks. </p>
<p>Following a meeting of key political and business leaders on January 27 1865, plans proposing the Freedman’s Bank were sent to the United States Congress, which swiftly approved the banking institution. </p>
<p>The subsequent outreach efforts by the bank’s initial president (and inspector and superintendent of schools for the Freedmen’s Bureau - the organization authorized by President Lincoln on March 3, 1865 to support and assist freedmen and freedwomen during Reconstruction) was a white northerner named John W. Alvord. </p>
<p>Alvord, a former minister and attaché to General William Tecumseh Sherman during the Civil War, traveled throughout the South recruiting blacks using endorsements from General OO Howard (the commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau): “as an order from Howard … Negro soldiers should deposit their bounty money with him.” </p>
<p>To assure possible depositors, Alvord also carried a handwritten letter from General Howard which <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/freedmens-savings-bank-a-chapter-in-the-economic-history-of-the-negro-race/oclc/326817">read</a>: “I consider the [Freedman’s Bank] to be greatly needed by the colored people, and have welcomed it as an auxiliary to the Freedmen’s Bureau.” </p>
<h2>Success</h2>
<p>Due to such recruiting efforts, the bank’s list of black depositors grew quickly, and soon 34 branches were established in locations across the country including New York City, Atlanta, Memphis, Philadelphia and Washington DC which also served as the headquarters. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Go in any forenoon and the office is found full of Negroes depositing little sums of money, drawing little sums, or remitting to a distant part of the country where they have relatives to support or debts to discharge” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>remarked a <a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3113649?sid=21105458578531&uid=3739520&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256">reporter</a> in 1870 in Charleston, South Carolina amazed by the bank’s popularity. </p>
<h2>Problems</h2>
<p>By 1871, Congress had authorized the bank to provide mortgages and business loans. </p>
<p>Such mortgages and loans, however, were usually given to whites, creating a financial paradox -— a bank using the savings and income of black depositors to advance the economic fortunes of whites who had at their disposal mainstream banks that excluded blacks. </p>
<p>Soon reports and rumors of corruption within the bank’s white management threatened the bank’s existence. In response, the bank’s management was replaced with a variety of black elites, most notably Frederick Douglass, who was appointed to head the bank in March of 1874. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72972/original/image-20150224-25686-1v1ec4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72972/original/image-20150224-25686-1v1ec4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72972/original/image-20150224-25686-1v1ec4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72972/original/image-20150224-25686-1v1ec4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72972/original/image-20150224-25686-1v1ec4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72972/original/image-20150224-25686-1v1ec4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72972/original/image-20150224-25686-1v1ec4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Freedman’s Savings Bank last president.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frederick_Douglass_portrait.jpg">National Archives</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These changes did not prevent the bank’s closing, with Douglass later describing the experience as being unwittingly “married to a corpse.” </p>
<p>Despite their usual disagreements, both WEB DuBois and Booker T Washington did agree that the bank’s collapse was a major blow to the confidence and livelihood of scores of black depositors who trusted the bank with their savings. </p>
<p>DuBois would remark:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Then in one sad day came the crash —- all the hard-earned dollars of the freedmen disappeared; but that was the least of the loss —- all the faith in saving went too, and much of the faith in men; and that was a loss that a Nation which to-day sneers at Negro shiftlessness has never yet made good.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Booker T. Washington noted:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“When they found out that they had lost, or been swindled out of all their savings, they lost faith in savings banks, and it was a long time after this before it was possible to mention a savings bank for Negroes without some reference being made to the disaster of [the Freedmen’s Bank].”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By 1900 only $1,638,259.49 ($43,900,000 in current dollars), or 62%, of the total amount of deposits prior to the bank’s failure had been paid. Deposits worth some $22 million in today’s dollars were largely lost.</p>
<p>In the end, most black depositors lost their savings, receiving little to no money back from the bank or the federal government.</p>
<h2>Echoes today</h2>
<p>As we mark the 151th anniversary of the Civil War, the lessons of that era remain potent. </p>
<p>For its part, the story of the Freedman’s Bank reveals the important foresight Lincoln had in seeing a connection between the political freedom of black Americans and their financial security. </p>
<p>It also reminds us that to understand black banking and wealth today, we need to know some history. </p>
<p>Black wealth issues are not new problems. Rather, they are historically rooted in a persistent pattern of loss and mistreatment beginning with the mishandling of freedmen and freedwomen’s money during Reconstruction. </p>
<p>This is part of the promise of Black History Month, as it provides an opportunity to shine a light on not only the successes of black Americans but also on the roots of persistent patterns of unequal and unfair treatment endured. </p>
<p>Indeed, as we continue to carve a path through the aftermath of the Great Recession, the mortgage crisis and growing racial disparities in wealth, the history of the Freedman’s Bank can serve as an important reminder of the connection between financial and political freedom and mobility. </p>
<p>Damage was done to black wealth and confidence long before banks were too-big-to-fail.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/37982/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marcus Anthony Hunter receives funding from the National Science Foundation (Grant ID #0902399).</span></em></p>
The dramatic story of the rise and fall of the Freedman’s Bank 1865-1874
Marcus Anthony Hunter, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/37015
2015-02-23T10:57:43Z
2015-02-23T10:57:43Z
Proposed 1920s orphanage study just one example in history of scientific racism
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72696/original/image-20150222-21899-1gwft2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Respected scientists within the recently formed National Research Council proposed building orphanages to study nature vs nurture with respect to racial differences.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/npc2007011372/">Library of Congress</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the late 1920s, scientists hatched an outrageous plan to settle a question at the heart of American racial thought: were differences between racial groups driven by environment or by heredity? In other words, was the racist social order of the time – white over black — an inevitable and genetically driven outcome? Or did the environment in which all Americans lived create the deep disparities and discord between races that defined the social, economic and political reality of the United States?</p>
<p>A committee on “Racial Problems,” jointly sponsored by the venerable National Research Council and the Social Science Research Council, <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/race-unmasked/9780231168748">discussed an experiment</a>: create racial orphanages, separate institutions where children of different races would be received as close to birth as possible. The idea was to compare white and black children under similar conditions. Scientists could closely monitor the institutionalized children as they developed to figure out whether differences were due to innate characteristics or environmental influence. Nursery schools and foster homes were proposed as places of comparative study too, but most of committee’s discussions focused on the idea of racial orphanages.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72697/original/image-20150222-21911-1hac62q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72697/original/image-20150222-21911-1hac62q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72697/original/image-20150222-21911-1hac62q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72697/original/image-20150222-21911-1hac62q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72697/original/image-20150222-21911-1hac62q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72697/original/image-20150222-21911-1hac62q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72697/original/image-20150222-21911-1hac62q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72697/original/image-20150222-21911-1hac62q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Morton and contemporaries believed differences in skull size among races explained variance in intelligence. Here scientists fill skulls with water to measure capacity. Morton filled them with lead shot.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.artandmedicine.com/biblio/authors/america/BillingsMatthews1885.html">Washington Matthews</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Science has made claims about race in America since the late 18th century, when Thomas Jefferson hypothesized that the differences between races are “<a href="http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7Ehyper/JEFFERSON/ch14.html">fixed in nature</a>.” In the 19th century, anthropologists such as Samuel Morton argued for a <a href="http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/product/Emperors-New-Clothes,960.aspx">racial hierarchy of intelligence</a> and believed human races evolved from separate origins. Eugenicists tried to quantify the hereditary nature of race difference in the early 20th century, using their science to develop social policy, including <a href="http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay8text.html">forced sterilization</a> and <a href="http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay9text.html">anti-immigration laws</a>. Racism has indeed left its stain on scientific thought.</p>
<p>The committee on “Racial Problems” was no different. Its 1930 report alleged the racial orphanage experiment could “throw light” on how heredity and environment influenced health, vigor, intelligence and sociability. To do this, scientists would try to improve the condition of the black children in the study by altering environmental factors, including shielding the children from racism, offering improved nutrition, and providing better educational opportunities than they might otherwise have had.</p>
<p>The idea for the experiment came from Dr Joseph Peterson, a psychologist at George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville (now part of Vanderbilt University). Peterson wrote extensively on racial differences in intelligence. He proposed that the experimenters have “complete control” over children enrolled in the study from birth through schooling years. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72693/original/image-20150222-21891-ukzzre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72693/original/image-20150222-21891-ukzzre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72693/original/image-20150222-21891-ukzzre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72693/original/image-20150222-21891-ukzzre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72693/original/image-20150222-21891-ukzzre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72693/original/image-20150222-21891-ukzzre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72693/original/image-20150222-21891-ukzzre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72693/original/image-20150222-21891-ukzzre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The study would have experimented on children similar to those who lived at the segregated Colored Orphan Asylum in New York.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.lehman.edu/lehman/enews/2005_04_11/feat_orphans.html">Harlem Dowling-West Side Center for Children and Family Services</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At a 1930 meeting to discuss the proposal’s feasibility, concerns were raised on a number of issues. Could the differences in care between the black and white children be controlled for? Could the children be shielded from the racist world around them? And how would children be recruited into such a study? </p>
<p>Recruitment proved to be a sticking point. In a chilling exchange, psychologist Knight Dunlap from Johns Hopkins and Clark Wissler, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, discussed “the difficulty of obtaining children.” Dunlap worried about the “difficulty in getting a perfect sampling of children away from their parents.” Wissler’s response: “Suppose you took infants completely at random. If we are interested in the question of how much the actual life creates bias, shouldn’t you have random selection?” The committee went on to debate whether it would be more “desirable in this study to take orphans, in order to be free from the home environment” or whether “taking negro children away from negro families” would be better for the proposed experiment.</p>
<p>What Dunlap and Wissler meant when they talked about “taking” children from black families isn’t clear. Whether they wanted to forcibly remove black children from their homes or had in mind some form of consent or some incentive, is unknown. It’s ironic that the closest the committee came to any level of concern for the children was wondering what would happen to black children raised in an environment shielded from racism once they became adults, left the orphanage, and experienced the full force of American racism.</p>
<p>By today’s standards, such an experiment seems preposterous and disgraceful. Preposterous because of the implicit and explicit racism that shaped and limited such a study. Disgraceful both because of the inferiority committee members ascribed to an entire race – even while debating an experiment to see if that alleged inferiority was or was not innate – and because there was no consideration of the ethical implications of placing children in an orphanage under experimental conditions. </p>
<p>The only good news in this history is that the study never went forward. By 1931, the idea for racial orphanages died.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72692/original/image-20150222-21928-1inxo50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72692/original/image-20150222-21928-1inxo50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72692/original/image-20150222-21928-1inxo50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72692/original/image-20150222-21928-1inxo50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72692/original/image-20150222-21928-1inxo50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72692/original/image-20150222-21928-1inxo50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72692/original/image-20150222-21928-1inxo50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72692/original/image-20150222-21928-1inxo50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Blood being drawn from one of the Tuskegee study subjects.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment_venipuncture.jpg">Centers for Disease Control and Prevention</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet, at that same time, preparations were beginning for another awful and unethical racial experiment. Beginning in 1932, the notorious “<a href="http://www.examiningtuskegee.com">Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male</a>” was in the earliest stages of its forty year study. Like the proposed racial orphanages experiment, it was a federally sponsored project and assumed that traits believed to be unique to African-Americans and whites were worthy of both study and expense. </p>
<p>These studies of race — proposed and actual — assumed difference and inferiority. Such presumptions fueled unethical behavior, from the denial of effective medical care for the men in the Tuskegee Study to the proposal to take children from their families to place in an orphanage. It is somewhat heartening that neither study would win approval today thanks to <a href="http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/policy/belmont.html">ethical safeguards</a> put in place in part because of the fallout from the Tuskegee Study.</p>
<p>Though the deeply rooted racism of the proposed racial orphanages experiment is today largely absent from science, science still struggles with the meaning of race. Today mainstream scientists utilize race in studies of human evolutionary history, to study the distribution of health-related traits within and between groups, and to use an individual’s ancestry to help determine the best medical treatments.</p>
<p>But this too is not without controversy. Many scientists argue that race is an imprecise marker of human genetic diversity and a poor proxy for predicting disease risk or drug response. As experiments like the racial orphanage and Tuskegee studies remind us, the scientific and social meanings of race are inseparable. The use of race in scientific study is problematic at best and dangerous at worst.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/37015/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Yudell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The history of race science is a history of racist science, as epitomized by this proposed but never carried-out experiment from the early 20th century.
Michael Yudell, Interim Chair and Associate Professor at the School of Public Health, Drexel University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/37450
2015-02-19T10:54:44Z
2015-02-19T10:54:44Z
Only the puck was black: a story of race and the NHL
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72290/original/image-20150217-19478-s2aoxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Willie O'Ree, the first black NHL player, debuted for the Boston Bruins in 1958. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.theroot.com/content/dam/theroot/slideshows/2010/06/04/willie20o27ree2020boston.jpg">The Root</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Last week’s release of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Black-Ice-The-James-Story/dp/1770412018">Black Ice</a> – the memoir of Val James, the first African American to play in the NHL – brought me back to when I was a teenager living in Boston. It was the winter of 1978 – the year of the infamous blizzard – when I had my first encounter with a sport that, until then, had only existed as something on TV that would compel me to change stations.</p>
<p>I had an after-school job at a McDonald’s just across the street from the Boston Garden. The location I worked at offered an incentive to employees: if you weren’t scheduled to work, and there was a game going on at the Garden, you could work the before-and-after game rush and receive a free ticket to whatever event was being held. </p>
<p>We never liked the Celtics because of the city and team’s history of discrimination. (Celtics legend Bill Russell would later <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Second-Wind-Bill-Russell/dp/0345288971">write</a> that Boston was a “flea market of racism.”) So whomever the Celtics were playing, I invariably cheered for the other team – especially if it had a black star. I recall seeing the silver and black uniform of San Antonio’s #44 George “The Iceman” Gervin and marveling at how he made the finger roll look like ballet. </p>
<p>On one of these game days, I had learned there were a couple of tickets up for grabs. My interest piqued when I heard that Julius “Dr. J” Erving and the 76ers were scheduled to play the home team, so I finished my shift, snagged the tickets and hustled across the street to the Garden. </p>
<p>But I soon noticed that a lot of folks weren’t attired in the usual Celtic green. In fact, no one was. Instead, I witnessed a sea of yellow and black – the colors of Boston’s hockey team, the Bruins. (Apparently, I hadn’t looked at the schedule closely enough.) Before I knew it, I was attending my first NHL game. The only reason I stayed was because I had to work the post-game shift at McDonald’s. </p>
<p>I felt like I’d landed in a different country. It was strange, cold and the fans appeared more belligerent (either due to their drinking or the frigid temperature). I remember glancing around and not seeing another black face, which heightened my nerves; recently I’d been trounced by four, angry white male teenagers – for having done nothing more than waiting at a school bus stop and being black. Still reeling from <a href="http://www.wbur.org/2014/09/05/boston-busing-anniversary">court-ordered busing</a> to desegregate the city’s schools, Boston was hot with racial animus – and here I was at a “white Boston” pastime. Outnumbered. Again.</p>
<p>Yet I found myself drawn to the game. It was fast. Its qualities seemed at odds with one another, but attractive nonetheless: agility and grace, paired with blistering hits and violent brawls. Soon, I found myself cheering for a Boston team, and I later discovered that the 1977-78 Bruins squad was one of the best in the NHL. Coached by Don Cherry and nicknamed the “lunch-pail gang” for their scrappy style of play, they were the team of Boston’s working people. </p>
<p>While my father worked, he was decidedly not of the working class. A professor and a dean at a local Boston college, he was of the civil rights era and attuned to the racial problems that plagued the city. We never discussed hockey. In fact, none of my friends watched or discussed the sport. For young black males, the stereotype associated with hockey was that it was a game for poor white kids. </p>
<p>In reality, like most “white-dominated” sports (swimming, tennis, baseball, crew, golf, etc.) even though “integration” had happened, we were still denied equal access and acceptance. So as a form of resilience we focused on what we had access to: track and field, basketball and football. </p>
<p>As a young teen, I wondered what the game and fan dynamics would have been like had the Bruins had a black professional hockey player. It wasn’t until I created a university course in 2004 – Race, Sports, and American Culture – that I learned that Boston did have a black player, the first ever, in 1958. He was from Canada and his name was <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/blackhistory2008/news/story?id=3231276">Willie O’Ree</a>. It had been 11 years since Jackie Robinson broke the racial barrier in professional baseball amid a whirlwind of controversy and media attention; but no fanfare accompanied the future Hall of Famer O'Ree – the “Jackie Robinson of Hockey.” </p>
<p>There are at least two reasons for O'Ree’s integration of the NHL going virtually unnoticed. First, O'Ree was Canadian, where racial tension was far less palpable. Second, blacks were in no position to threaten white dominance of hockey. While in baseball there was a cadre of Negro Leaguers waiting in the wings to potentially take power from white ballplayers – Larry Doby, Hank Thompson and Willard “Home Run” Brown, to name a few – in hockey, there simply wasn’t. </p>
<p>For nearly twenty years, O'Ree had no successor. Cracks in the ice, however, appeared again in the late 1970s with Valmore “Val” Edwin Curtis James. Born in Ocala, Florida, James didn’t take up skating until he was a teenager in Long Island, New York. He began his career in Quebec, Canada with the Junior Hockey League, and he would go on to become the first African American player in the National Hockey League when he signed with Buffalo Sabres in 1981; in 1986, he became the first black player of any nationality to skate for the Toronto Maple Leafs. As with many “first and only” individuals breaking barriers, <a href="http://espn.go.com/nhl/story/_/page/blackhistoryNHL1/nhl-pioneer-val-james-not-bitter-tortured-playing-days">James endured his share of racist jeers and taunting</a>.</p>
<p>Blacks on skates are still a rare sight: in the NHL’s nearly 100-year history, there have been just over 70 black players. In 2003, Black Canadian Grant Fuhr was the first black hockey player to win the coveted Stanley Cup and to be inducted to the Hockey Hall of Fame. As of September 2014, there are about 30 players of African-descent either playing in the National Hockey League, or for an NHL affiliate. Among them are perennial fan favorites PK Subban, Jarome Iginla, Kyle Okposo, Wayne Simmonds and Evander Kane. </p>
<p>However despite these minor gains, the dearth of black players continues. For the past ten years I’ve posed the question to my students: “Why are there so few black hockey players?” Over 100 students from all races, socio-economic backgrounds and geographic regions largely conclude that it is due two reasons: low interest (possibly due to stereotypes of hockey as a “white sport”), and little access to opportunity and training. Both remain formidable barriers to black participation in hockey, making the probability of seeing more Val James’s as low as finding a four-leaf clover in Boston.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/37450/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gilman W. Whiting does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Last week’s release of Black Ice – the memoir of Val James, the first African American to play in the NHL – brought me back to when I was a teenager living in Boston. It was the winter of 1978 – the year…
Gilman W. Whiting, Associate Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies, Director of the Scholar Identity Institute, Vanderbilt University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/37103
2015-02-18T10:58:30Z
2015-02-18T10:58:30Z
100 years ago, the first White House film screening sparked nationwide protests
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72164/original/image-20150216-18463-1hs0ru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A still shot from DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/2015/02/the_birth_of_a_nation_still.jpg">The Hollywood Reporter</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Last month President Obama <a href="http://time.com/3672767/president-obama-selma-mlk-common-oprah-oyelowo-duvernay/">welcomed the film Selma into the White House</a> – a first-family showing that, as it happens, occurred a century after the first-ever screening of a movie inside the White House.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72148/original/image-20150216-18489-7m9s0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72148/original/image-20150216-18489-7m9s0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72148/original/image-20150216-18489-7m9s0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72148/original/image-20150216-18489-7m9s0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72148/original/image-20150216-18489-7m9s0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72148/original/image-20150216-18489-7m9s0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72148/original/image-20150216-18489-7m9s0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In February 1915, President Woodrow Wilson held showing of a film at the White House.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Woodrow_Wilson_1902_cph.3b11773.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For on February 18 1915 a very different president, Woodrow Wilson, showcased what was then a revolutionary form of entertainment: the feature film. Wilson, his daughter Margaret and select guests gathered in the East Room to view director DW Griffith’s just completed masterpiece, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0004972/">The Birth of a Nation</a>.</p>
<p>But where Selma’s White House screening was a crowning moment for a film that has generally garnered <a href="http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/selma-review/">rave reviews</a> from black film critics, the response in the black community to the overtly-racist The Birth of a Nation was overwhelmingly negative. The controversy came to a head in Boston, where a largely-forgotten Civil Rights activist led mass protests in an effort to ban the film. </p>
<h2>Audiences blown away by innovative film</h2>
<p>The president had agreed to host a movie night as a favor to the writer Thomas Dixon, an old college buddy, a fellow Southerner – and an unapologetic racist. Dixon’s bestselling novel The Clansman was the basis for filmmaker DW Griffith’s three-hour dramatization of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which depicted Ku Klux Klan members as heroes and martyrs.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72146/original/image-20150216-18458-mg8bvr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72146/original/image-20150216-18458-mg8bvr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72146/original/image-20150216-18458-mg8bvr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72146/original/image-20150216-18458-mg8bvr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72146/original/image-20150216-18458-mg8bvr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72146/original/image-20150216-18458-mg8bvr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72146/original/image-20150216-18458-mg8bvr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72146/original/image-20150216-18458-mg8bvr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Birth of a Nation was based on Southern writer Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman, which portrayed the KKK in a heroic light.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://mormonitemusings.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/the-clansman-1905-title-page.jpg">Mormonite Musings</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Griffith later bragged to a reporter from the New York American that “The Birth of a Nation received very high praise from high quarters in Washington.” Coy about presidential name-dropping, he continued, “I was gratified when a man we all revere, or ought to, said it teaches history by lightning.”</p>
<p>Wilson had <a href="http://www.bu.edu/professorvoices/2013/03/04/the-long-forgotten-racial-attitudes-and-policies-of-woodrow-wilson/">loved the film</a>. So did most of the viewing public. </p>
<p>Audiences were swept away by Griffith’s storytelling prowess, in awe of his recreation of Civil War battles and his innovative film techniques – scenes shot from multiple angles, the close-up and the fade-out, to name a few. Viewers wept, cheered and jumped to their feet at different moments in the epic story. Heaping praise, one Atlanta Constitution critic later gushed, “Ancient Greece had her Homer, modern America has her David W. Griffith.” </p>
<p>To most Americans, the production was flawless. But there was a major fault: the film’s bigotry. Griffith portrayed blacks as heathens and sexual predators, undeserving of emancipation and unfit to exercise newly gained voting rights – in short, as a danger to American values. Meanwhile, the KKK was portrayed as a healing force, riding to the rescue to restore order amidst the chaos and lawlessness of Reconstruction.</p>
<h2>Trotter and NAACP respond to film’s racism</h2>
<p>The movie triggered mass protests across the nation, a rolling thunder that rumbled loudest in Boston. Leading the charge was a now largely forgotten civil rights leader and newspaper editor named William Monroe Trotter, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard whose father had fought for the Union as an officer in an all-black regiment from Boston.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72149/original/image-20150216-18456-1kqmz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72149/original/image-20150216-18456-1kqmz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72149/original/image-20150216-18456-1kqmz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72149/original/image-20150216-18456-1kqmz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72149/original/image-20150216-18456-1kqmz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1000&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72149/original/image-20150216-18456-1kqmz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1000&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72149/original/image-20150216-18456-1kqmz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1000&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Civil Rights activist William Monroe Trotter appealed to Boston mayor James Michael Curley to block the film.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/WMTrotter1915.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During a hearing early that April at Boston’s City Hall before Mayor James Michael Curley, Trotter argued that Griffith’s film was pure racist propaganda. In a bid to convince Curley – who also acted as the city’s Culture Czar – to banish the film (as he had controversial stage plays), Trotter claimed Griffith’s bigoted take on blacks was designed “to rouse the passions of white men to a hostile, retaliatory, even murderous feeling toward Colored men.”</p>
<p>Though censorship in America is almost unheard of today, in the context of the time, Trotter and other black leaders from Boston’s branch of the fledgling NAACP had every reason to think Curley would ban Griffith’s work. For one thing, no less a body than the US Supreme Court had ruled film did not warrant the First Amendment’s protection for free speech and expression. The previous month, in <a href="http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=236&invol=230">Ohio v. Mutual Film</a>, the court unanimously decided that movies were not art but a business – and thus subject to government regulation. </p>
<p>Yet the Boston mayor refused to budge, allowing the film’s showing to proceed. “You have introduced no evidence that I could use in stopping at least one performance,” <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Birth-Nation-Legendary-Filmmaker/dp/1586489879">Curley told Trotter and other anti-film militants</a>.</p>
<p>In response, a defiant Trotter drummed up a call to action, leading protests that played out throughout the spring on 1915 in every venue imaginable: city hall, the courts, the state legislature, the streets. Foreshadowing the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the organized demonstrations featured several thousand marchers. During one protest outside the movie theater, Trotter and others were arrested by Boston police and hauled away. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72152/original/image-20150216-18482-vug3cc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72152/original/image-20150216-18482-vug3cc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72152/original/image-20150216-18482-vug3cc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72152/original/image-20150216-18482-vug3cc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72152/original/image-20150216-18482-vug3cc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72152/original/image-20150216-18482-vug3cc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72152/original/image-20150216-18482-vug3cc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Boston’s populist mayor James Michael Curley resisted the attempts of black activists to ban the racist film.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/curleythumb.jpg">New England Historical Society</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Trotter certainly knew that calling attention to the film had the unintended consequence of fueling public interest and ticket sales. But he also knew that to not speak out – to swallow the film’s racism – would be worse. It was as if he understood the new medium’s potential power to shape public opinion – that he might circulate a year’s worth of newspapers and still not reach the numbers of people filling movie houses around the country. The writer Dixon was one who surely understood the potency of “moving pictures.” In a letter that spring to President Wilson, he riffed on harnessing that power for electoral politics. </p>
<p>“The next political campaign may witness a revolution in political method,” he wrote. Old media – meaning newspapers – were old hat, he said. “We have launched a cyclone before whose beast the press is a zephyr.”</p>
<h2>Trotter’s legacy</h2>
<p>The protest story of 1915 became equal to the film’s prominence, so that one cannot consider the debut of Griffith’s film at the White House without taking on the other. Trotter’s militant refusal to accept a film – regardless of its artistic value to the medium – indicated his awareness of the damage it could cause. The film was ultimately part of <a href="http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/brute/">a long line of post-Civil War literature</a> that sought to reshape the events of the Civil War and Reconstruction – and return blacks to a position of inferiority.</p>
<p>While today The Birth of a Nation is considered a virulent brand of hate speech, the stereotypes of blacks embedded in the film – their depiction as lawless brutes and a danger to American values – continue to haunt public discourse about race in America. Whether it’s the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri or the police killing of Eric Garner in New York City, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/michael-brown-a-criminal-and-a-thug/">many continue to frame racially charged tragedies in similar terms</a>.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Trotter’s concerns were not just rooted in 1915 America, but echoed throughout the century – and into this one. Trotter, scholar and journalist Lerone Bennett Jr. <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=HNoDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">later wrote</a>, “was a true pioneer, decades ahead of his time.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/37103/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dick Lehr does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Last month President Obama welcomed the film Selma into the White House – a first-family showing that, as it happens, occurred a century after the first-ever screening of a movie inside the White House…
Dick Lehr, Professor of Journalism, Boston University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/37480
2015-02-12T07:17:37Z
2015-02-12T07:17:37Z
Desegregating blood: A civil rights struggle to remember
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71794/original/image-20150212-16604-ms9ccg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sicily, 1943: Whose blood was this U.S. soldier getting? </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">NARA </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In December 1941, a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II, a Detroit mother named Sylvia Tucker visited her local Red Cross donor center to give blood. </p>
<p>Having heard the “soul-stirring” appeals for blood donors on her radio, she was determined to do her part. But when she arrived at the center, the supervisor turned her away. “Orders from the National Offices,” <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/jahist/97.1.63">he explained</a>, “barred Negro blood donors at this time.” </p>
<p>“Shocked” and “grieved,” Tucker left in tears, later penning a letter of protest about the whole ordeal to first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.</p>
<p>Today, this discriminatory blood program and African-Americans’ determined opposition to it are long forgotten, despite the fact that a few scholars, including <a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/spencie-love/one-blood/">Spencie Love</a>, <a href="http://www.medhist.wisc.edu/faculty/lederer/index.shtml">Susan E. Lederer</a>, <a href="http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/english/sarah-chinn/sarah-chinn">Sarah E. Chinn</a>, and myself, have explored the topic.</p>
<p>This history is worth remembering. It provides an antidote to facile, feel-good stories about the “Good War,” stories that scholars such as <a href="https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/best-war-ever">Michael C.C. Adams</a> and <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Myth-and-the-Greatest-Generation-A-Social-History-of-Americans-in-World/Rose/p/book/9780415956772">Kenneth D. Rose</a> have long refuted but that live on in museum exhibits, blockbuster films, best-selling books and war memorials. </p>
<p>The story of how blood got desegregated also reminds Americans that, as novelist <a href="http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-america-would-be-like-without-blacks/">Ralph Ellison</a> wrote nearly a half-century ago, “The black American … puts pressure upon the nation to live up to its ideals.” </p>
<p>Historian <a href="http://www.history.ucla.edu/people/faculty/faculty-1/faculty-1?lid=6785">Robin D.G. Kelley</a> puts it more broadly: “The marginal and excluded have done the most to make democracy work in America.” </p>
<p>In an age of resurgent racism, Ellison’s and Kelley’s words are especially important and timely. </p>
<h2>‘A tremendous thing’</h2>
<p>The Red Cross Blood Donor Program began in early 1941 – and went on to collect blood from millions of Americans that the military shipped to soldiers fighting overseas. </p>
<p>“If I could reach all America,” <a href="https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.458666/2015.458666.The-Compact-History-Of-The-American-Red-Cross_djvu.txt">asserted General Dwight D. Eisenhower</a> at the end of the war, “there is one thing I would like to do – thank them for blood plasma and whole blood. It has been a tremendous thing.” </p>
<p>Tremendous indeed: The blood program saved many lives. But it also initially excluded African-American donors like Sylvia Tucker. When it did accept them, in January 1942, it did so on a segregated basis. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203891/original/file-20180129-89559-akma7v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203891/original/file-20180129-89559-akma7v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=734&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203891/original/file-20180129-89559-akma7v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=734&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203891/original/file-20180129-89559-akma7v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=734&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203891/original/file-20180129-89559-akma7v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203891/original/file-20180129-89559-akma7v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203891/original/file-20180129-89559-akma7v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Charles Drew (1904-1950)</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Charles_Drew.jpg">Howard University. Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Never mind that scientists saw no relationship between race and blood and that one of the world’s leading authorities on blood banking at the time, and the director of the Red Cross’s pilot blood program, was an African-American scientist named <a href="http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/Narrative/BG/p-nid/336">Dr. Charles Drew</a>. Never mind that Nazi Germany had its own Aryan-only blood policy or that America’s principal rhetorical war aims concerned democracy and freedom.</p>
<p>To what extent military commanders segregated blood in the field was, during the war and afterwards, a matter of some debate. Officially, at least, the distinction between bloods remained in place for years. It was not until 1950 that the Red Cross stopped requiring the segregation of so-called Negro blood. And it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that Southern states such as <a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMbkrev0804702">Arkansas and Louisiana</a> overturned similar requirements. </p>
<h2>A forgotten civil rights struggle</h2>
<p>In one internal memorandum, <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/jahist/97.1.63">the Red Cross called its donor program</a> democratic, since “the point of view of the majority … ” – which its leaders assumed demanded blood segregation – “must be taken into account in a democracy.” </p>
<p>But many blacks and their allies had a very different idea about democracy, one that required all citizens be treated equally and without regard to race. They fought tirelessly throughout the war years to make that idea a reality, not simply in the military, in the workplace and in Hollywood films but also in the blood program. </p>
<p>These many battles constituted a nascent, surging, and, today, too-often-overlooked civil rights struggle that helped pave the way for the more famous movement of the postwar years.</p>
<p>Nearly all the major civil rights organizations of the day, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the March on Washington Movement and even the upstart Committee (later, Congress) of Racial Equality, made changing blood policy a top priority. <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/jahist/97.1.63">One statement</a> from a group of the nation’s most prominent black leaders put it this way:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“In justice to what we know to be the practically unanimous sentiment among Negroes in America, we affirm the need for alteration of the segregated blood plasma policy.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Black newspapers, enormously popular and important at time, also protested blood segregation and exclusion, regularly featuring front-page stories, boldface headlines and blistering editorials on the subject. </p>
<p>In January 1942, for example, the African-American weekly the Cleveland Call and Post published an “editorial in rhyme”: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The cross of Red, that burned so bright<br>
In fire, storm and flood<br>
Is now the crooked Nazi sign<br>
That spurns a Negro blood!” </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Wide-ranging activists</h2>
<p>Activism on this issue extended well beyond these traditional places. </p>
<p>Labor unions, Christian and Jewish groups, local interracial committees, scientific organizations and the New Jersey State Legislature all spoke out against blood segregation. </p>
<p>The Communist Party of Cuyahoga County in Ohio held a rally of 3,500 people, <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/jahist/97.1.63">condemning</a> blood policy as “Barbarian Hitlerism.” </p>
<p>An interracial group of precocious junior high schoolers at Harlem’s Public School 43 <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/jahist/97.1.63">tested</a> (with the help of their science teachers) the blood of a black student and of a white student. Finding no difference, they wrote an article in the school paper, made and distributed hundreds of posters, and held a public meeting – all in opposition to the Red Cross policy. </p>
<p>The most widespread form of protest, however, came from thousands of ordinary African-Americans who refused to donate blood and money to the Red Cross. </p>
<p>While roughly 10 percent of the U.S. population at the time, blacks made up less than 1 percent of all blood donors. </p>
<p>African-Americans contributed generously to the Treasury Department’s Defense Bonds: It is not a lack of patriotism that explains their halfhearted response to blood drives. The reason was a determined opposition to race-based exclusion and segregation. </p>
<p>Expressing these feelings best was a high school student from Cleveland named Geraldyne Ghess. Her poem <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/jahist/97.1.63">appeared</a> in the local black newspaper:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Had I wealth, I’d burn it all;<br>
Not one cent for the Red Cross call.<br>
Our money is good … our blood is bad.<br>
But, still that shouldn’t make us mad.<br>
Are they afraid they’ll all turn black?<br>
Is that why our blood they lack?<br>
Their skins are white as snow … it’s well.<br>
Their souls are tarnished, black as hell. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the end, this wide-ranging activism may have failed to democratize the blood program fully – at least during the war. </p>
<p>But African-Americans did – in the end – force the Red Cross to include them as donors. </p>
<p>Full-fledged integration, which took a few more years, owed everything to their work.</p>
<p><em>Editor’s note: This is an updated version of a story originally published Feb. 12, 2015.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/37480/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Thomas A Guglielmo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Until 1950 the Red Cross segregated blood. It was thousands of African-Americans during World War II who forced the Red Cross to include them as donors and helped pave the way for activism of the 1960s.
Thomas A Guglielmo, Associate Professor of American Studies, George Washington University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/36876
2015-02-10T11:19:15Z
2015-02-10T11:19:15Z
Gordon Parks exhibit offers intimate glimpse into segregation-era life for African Americans
<p>In the spring of 1950, Gordon Parks, the first African-American photographer for Life Magazine, returned to his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas. On assignment for the magazine, Parks photographed his middle school classmates, who were dispersed among Fort Scott and other Midwestern cities and towns.</p>
<p>The resulting images – while quite personal to Parks – offer a glimpse into a community and a set of experiences shared by many African Americans of his generation. Depicting the realities of discrimination without the veil of nostalgia, it’s a body of work that captures the resiliency of a community at a significant point in American history – just prior to the Civil Rights Movement.</p>
<p>But for reasons unknown, Life never published the series. </p>
<p>Now, the powerful exhibit of over 40 segregation-era images is on display at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.</p>
<p>One of the first photographs confronting the viewer is of a weathered, middle-aged Caucasian man wearing overalls and a wide-brimmed hat. He’s standing, stone-faced, by the railroad tracks, and his eyes, though obscured by shadow, seem fixated on the viewer. He holds a large stop sign by his side, and his foot pivots out, as if to welcome us into the frame – but with only a shred of tolerance.</p>
<p>This photograph, in particular, sets the tone for the entire exhibit because it positions the viewer squarely in Parks’ shoes. He is an African-American man returning to his hometown – a place with a history of segregation, but a place he nonetheless calls home. In this photograph, Parks cleverly sets up the dichotomy of home as both a site of comfort and trauma. </p>
<p>Only one of Parks’ former classmates, Luella Jones, still resided in Fort Scott at the time of the shoot. In another image, Parks photographed her – along with her husband, Clarence Hill, and daughter, Shirley Jean – gathered around the family’s piano.</p>
<p>The warmth of the home’s interior light contrasts with the wet, cold environment of the town center shown in a subsequent image of Shirley and her boyfriend, James Lewis. In the photograph, the young couple waits outside a movie theater, where their full-priced tickets still only qualify them for seats in the back. It’s an image that underscores the prejudice that permeates the time period and place, and Parks’ portrayal of a strong African-American family unit – alongside the discrimination they encountered daily – is a striking juxtaposition.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the intimacy of Parks’ portraits is palpable. Uncle James, who Parks noted as being his true mentor, is shown hunched over in quiet contemplation. A soft light falls over James and the still, bucolic scene around him. His hand grips the hook of his cane as he stares off frame with a gaze of certainty. Parks’ portrait of his blind, elderly uncle conveys the admiration that he had for this particular family member and steers the viewer away from any feelings of pity. </p>
<p>Furthermore, Parks – with his insider’s perspective – is able to transform banal moments into sacred ones. There’s an appreciation for ritual that’s pervasive throughout the collection. “Untitled, Kansas City, Missouri” depicts Peter Thompson, his wife Ada, and their 13-year-old daughter Marilyn Jane sitting around the dining room table enjoying a meal together. A light shines down from the high ceilings – the family glows – and an everyday moment is elevated to myth. The floral wallpaper, ornate rugs, and carved furnishings fill every inch of the frame and surround the family, who seem to find refuge from the decorative noise at the dinner table with one another. </p>
<p>In a different photograph, Parks captures another family meal. Fred and Mary Wells are shown saying grace sitting at a worn, small wooden table for two under a bare light bulb in their kitchenette-style apartment. The Wells’ home is stark compared to the Thompson’s, but it’s clear that Parks is drawing a parallel, emphasizing the intimacy of family and the notion of communion among his subjects.</p>
<p>Parks welcomes his viewers into his classmates’ warm inviting homes, but an atmosphere of emotional ambivalence exists throughout. In his portrait of the Wells couple, the two stand comfortably poised in front of their modest apartment. Their eyes confront the viewer exhibiting a secured, unified front. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71364/original/image-20150206-28608-pz3vb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71364/original/image-20150206-28608-pz3vb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=708&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71364/original/image-20150206-28608-pz3vb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=708&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71364/original/image-20150206-28608-pz3vb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=708&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71364/original/image-20150206-28608-pz3vb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71364/original/image-20150206-28608-pz3vb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71364/original/image-20150206-28608-pz3vb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Untitled, Chicago, Illinois, 1950.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph by Gordon Parks. Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ultimately, Park’s exhaustive attempt to track down each of his classmates and tell their respective stories exemplifies a devotion to his subjects that he practiced throughout his career. While Parks would go on to photograph icons like Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, it was a return home that allowed him to convey complex themes that are both personal and universal: a reverence for routine, the tension of segregation, the grind of time’s gears – and, with it, the inevitability of loss: of childhood, of family, and of friends. </p>
<p><em>Gordon Parks: Back To Fort Scott will be on display at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts until September 15 2015</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/36876/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Toni Pepe Dan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In the spring of 1950, Gordon Parks, the first African-American photographer for Life Magazine, returned to his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas. On assignment for the magazine, Parks photographed his middle…
Toni Pepe Dan, Lecturer in Art, Boston University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/37137
2015-02-05T06:20:15Z
2015-02-05T06:20:15Z
The ‘nuts and bolts’ heroes of the civil rights movement
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70971/original/image-20150203-25528-1imiino.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Civil_Rights_March_on_Washington,_D.C._(Former_National_Basketball_Association_player,_Bill_Russell.)_-_NARA_-_542073.jpg">US National Archives and Records Administration </a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Black History Month provides an opportunity to pull back the curtain and turn the spotlight on individuals who made a difference in the successes of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. I had the privilege of working with these individuals while participating in the many demonstrations and rallies that occurred in Chicago between 1963 and 1968.</p>
<p>The men and women who organized the nuts and bolts of the Chicago Civil Rights Movement may not be as well remembered but it was they who provided its essential vision and energy. They expressed their leadership by handling the “nitty gritty”. Their dedication gave the movement “legs” and the ability to move beyond speeches and good intentions.</p>
<h2>Being ready to be ‘hit over the head’</h2>
<p>Consider Al Raby. He quit his job as a teacher in the local school system, enabling him to devote his full energies to shaping the strategy and tactics as the movement tackled discrimination in education, employment and housing. </p>
<p>In 1965, after two years of demonstrations and marches with no change in the policies of the Chicago school board, Raby signaled his commitment: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We have come to the point where we have to be ready to go to jail. This business of orderly demonstrations is not going to do a blessed thing. We have to be ready to get hit over the head and to be jailed for our beliefs”. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Raby was indeed jailed – several times. </p>
<p>Raby’s leadership took another turn during the riots that occurred during the summer of 1965. At the height of trouble a police car was dispatched to the headquarters of the movement to bring Raby to the west side. He felt it necessary to work with the “establishment” in an effort to stop the violence that undermined the image of the movement. At considerable risk to himself he spoke to the rioters.“I understand your anger but your actions are hurting what we are fighting for: ending all forms of discrimination in this community” </p>
<p>Al Raby’s leadership and service to the community did not end when the civil rights movement passed from the scene in the late ‘60s. He served in the Peace Corps and played a key role in the election and administration of Mayor Harold Washington. Like the mayor he died far too early in his career. Chicago has not forgotten him - in 2004 <a href="http://www.alraby.org/">a high school</a> was named for him.</p>
<h2>'Walking history’</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.uchicago.edu/features/a_lifetime_championing_civil_rights/">Tim Black </a>is a special hero of mine. Today at age 93, Tim is still active, speaking and writing about the unfinished civil rights agenda.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70975/original/image-20150203-25524-oi0qxz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70975/original/image-20150203-25524-oi0qxz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70975/original/image-20150203-25524-oi0qxz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70975/original/image-20150203-25524-oi0qxz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70975/original/image-20150203-25524-oi0qxz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70975/original/image-20150203-25524-oi0qxz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70975/original/image-20150203-25524-oi0qxz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Timuel Black.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.chicagoreader.com/imager/b/magnum/10723764/d53b/TimuelBlack-magnum.jpg">Chicago Reader</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Tim has been referred to as “Walking History”. He has no peer in his grasp of the civil rights scene. As a teacher, as the leader of the former Chicago branch of Negro American Labor Council (the national organization founded by A. Philip Randolph) and as a writer and commentator on race relations and the social agenda facing our country, Tim continues to be an incomparable resource. </p>
<p>Despite his age, he maintains a full schedule and is completing a major oral history project, <a href="http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/titles/bridges-memory-volume-2-0">Bridges of Memory</a>, that presents the life stories of several generations of blacks, starting with those who grew up in the South and moved to Chicago. </p>
<p>I worked closely with Tim as we planned campaigns to increase employment for minorities at large corporations. </p>
<p>On one occasion Tim had to make a difficult decision. The logistics for a major demonstration at Motorola’s show room were in place when the company agreed to meet. Against the wishes of the militants who wanted to go ahead with the protest, Tim agreed to call it off, observing that the goal of the movement was change -— not punishment.</p>
<h2>The chief of staff</h2>
<p>The third leader who “needs an introduction” is the Rev Al Pitcher. He held a faculty appointment at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and worked tirelessly as chief of staff, first for Al Raby and then later for Jesse Jackson. </p>
<p>I was able to observe him first hand since he lived with us one summer during the height of the Chicago campaign. He outlined his philosophy of not creating new institutions but, rather, working within existing organizations to help them become more effective. </p>
<p>As a white person in a movement that required leadership from the African American community to be calling the shots, Al viewed his role as supportive and staying as much in the background as possible. At the same time the planning of scores of events needed his attention. I asked Al whether he enjoyed his role as manager of all details. He responded, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“No job is too small for me. I am the person who has the only key to the storeroom. If I didn’t keep control of it, we’d never have any supplies on hand. My job is to serve, whether it’s a small assignment of disciplining rambunctious youngsters or making important policy recommendations to Al Raby.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>His willingness to tackle the nitty-gritty was illustrated by the role he played in planning for a visit by Martin Luther King. </p>
<p>Al had to organize transportation so people could travel from their communities to the center of Chicago for what was hoped to be a massive march that King would lead. This meant contacting bus companies, assessing the transportation needs of many different communities and merging those of certain localities in order to conserve expenditures. This was an operation as complex as a military invasion. It did not require much imagination. What it needed was attention to detail and many hours of work and endless phone calls. </p>
<h2>A proving ground for ‘diamonds in the rough’</h2>
<p>These vignettes of three leaders who played key roles, but today half a century later, might not be remembered, illustrate the potential of the civil rights movement to bring forth talent waiting to be developed. </p>
<p>Similar to the labor movement, the civil rights movement was a proving ground for “diamonds in the rough.”</p>
<p>Where else in our society could people with this leadership potential find expression for their energies? </p>
<p>Many activists without substantial formal education wrote brilliant letters of protest -— letters filled with anger but also containing valid points and persuasive arguments. </p>
<p>Their lives are an inspiration and a call to those willing to work on today’s unfinished civil rights agenda.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/37137/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert McKersie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Black History Month provides an opportunity to pull back the curtain and turn the spotlight on individuals who made a difference in the successes of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. I had the…
Robert McKersie, Professor Emeritus of Management Institute for Work and Employment Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/36829
2015-02-04T11:16:23Z
2015-02-04T11:16:23Z
Humans are wired for prejudice but that doesn’t have to be the end of the story
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70886/original/image-20150203-9187-kmh1eu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">All people have prejudices, but learning more about them could help keep them in check.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-213008221/stock-photo-multiethnic-group-of-people-with-colorful-outfit.html">Crowd image via www.shutterstock.com.</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Humans are highly social creatures. Our brains have evolved to allow us to survive and thrive in complex social environments. Accordingly, the behaviors and emotions that help us navigate our social sphere are entrenched in networks of neurons within our brains. </p>
<p><a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00126">Social motivations</a>, such as the desire to be a member of a group or to compete with others, are among the most basic human drives. In fact, our brains are <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2012.10.017">able to assess</a> “in-group” (us) and “out-group” (them) membership within a fraction of a second. This ability, once necessary for our survival, has largely become a detriment to society. </p>
<p>Understanding the neural network controlling these impulses, and those that temper them, may shed light on how to resolve social injustices that plague our world.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70979/original/image-20150203-25516-5uyng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70979/original/image-20150203-25516-5uyng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70979/original/image-20150203-25516-5uyng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70979/original/image-20150203-25516-5uyng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70979/original/image-20150203-25516-5uyng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70979/original/image-20150203-25516-5uyng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=560&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70979/original/image-20150203-25516-5uyng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=560&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70979/original/image-20150203-25516-5uyng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=560&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Our brains can almost instantly assess in-group or out-group status.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/29487767@N02/6836936038">Daniela Hartmann</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Prejudice in the brain</h2>
<p>In social psychology, <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrn3800">prejudice</a> is defined as an attitude toward a person on the basis of his or her group membership. Prejudice <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1556/JCEP.2.2004.3-4.4">evolved</a> in humans because at one time it helped us avoid real danger. At its core, prejudice is simply an association of a sensory cue (e.g., a snake in the grass, the growling of a wolf) to an innate behavioral response (e.g., fight-and-flight). In dangerous situations time is of the essence, and so human beings adapted mechanisms to respond quickly to visual cues that our brains deem dangerous without our conscious awareness. The rub in all of this is that our brains have inherited the tendency to erroneously deem something dangerous when it is in fact benign. It is safer to make false-positive assumptions (avoid something that was good), than to make false-negative assumptions (not avoid something that was bad).</p>
<p>Neuroscience has begun to tease out the neural underpinnings of prejudice in the human brain. We now know that prejudiced behavior is controlled through a complex neural pathway consisting of cortical and sub-cortical regions.</p>
<p>A brain structure called the amygdala is the seat of classical fear conditioning and emotion in the brain. Psychological research has consistently supported the role of fear in prejudiced behavior. For this reason, the vast majority of brain research on this topic has focused on the amygdala and the cortical regions that influence it.</p>
<h2>Focus on the amygdala</h2>
<p>In one study by Jaclyn Ronquillo and her colleagues, eleven young, white males underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while being shown photographs of faces with varied skin tones. When they <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsl043">viewed black faces</a>, it resulted in greater amygdala activity than when they viewed white faces. Amygdala activation was equal for light and dark black faces, but dark-skinned white people had greater activation than those with lighter skin tone. The authors concluded that Afrocentric features drove an unconscious fear response in white participants.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70707/original/image-20150201-25921-1l81hso.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70707/original/image-20150201-25921-1l81hso.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70707/original/image-20150201-25921-1l81hso.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=177&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70707/original/image-20150201-25921-1l81hso.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=177&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70707/original/image-20150201-25921-1l81hso.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=177&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70707/original/image-20150201-25921-1l81hso.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=222&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70707/original/image-20150201-25921-1l81hso.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=222&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70707/original/image-20150201-25921-1l81hso.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=222&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Darker faces elicited more amygdala activity when white subjects were fMRI scannned.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://10.1093/scan/nsl043">The effect of skin tone on race-related amygdala activity: an fMRI investigation, Ronquillo (2007)</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More recent imaging research has supported the intractable nature of prejudice in the human psyche. <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsr052">Chad Forbes</a> and colleagues found that even self-reported non-prejudiced subjects could be prejudiced in some situations. White study subjects had increased amygdala activation while viewing images of black faces when they were listening to violent, misogynistic rap music, but not when listening to death metal or no music. Interestingly, they found that a region of the frontal cortex – an area of the brain expected to tamp down amygdala activation – was also activated.</p>
<p>The researchers speculated that the music reinforced a negative stereotype about black subjects, creating a situation in which the white subjects were not able to temper their prejudiced emotions. In fact, the authors speculated that the frontal cortices – generally thought of as areas of “higher” brain function – were instead recruited to help justify the feelings of prejudice felt by the participants listening to rap music. </p>
<p>Other research has shown that the amygdala <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02214.x">response to out-group faces</a> is not strictly bound to characteristics such as race. The amygdala responds to any out-group category, depending on whatever someone deems is salient information: your sports team affiliation, gender, sexual orientation, where you go to school, and so on. </p>
<h2>Brains can control bias too</h2>
<p>The Forbes <em>et al</em> study highlights that our ability to control reactionary implicit bias is dependent on the frontal cortices of the brain. A particularly important region of the cortex is the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). </p>
<p>The mPFC is the seat of empathy in the brain. It forms impressions about other people and helps us consider other perspectives. A lack of mPFC activity is associated with prejudice marked by dehumanization and objectification of others. For example, it is known that <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsl037">mPFC activation increases</a> when we view a person of high esteem or prestige – for example, firefighters or astronauts – but not when we view someone marked with disregard or disgust, such as a drug addict or homeless person. Men with highly <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2010.21497">sexist attitudes</a> have less mPFC activity when viewing sexual images of female bodies. These men also believed sexualized women have “less control over their own lives.” </p>
<p>Taken together, it seems that though the frontal cortices are able to reduce our innate prejudices about certain people, they are greatly influenced by context. In other words, our desire to not be prejudiced may sometimes get trumped by exposure to media supporting stereotypical portrayals of certain groups. Moving forward, it is essential to take into account not only the neural architecture of prejudice, but also the context in which we humans live. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70980/original/image-20150203-25554-j639i6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70980/original/image-20150203-25554-j639i6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70980/original/image-20150203-25554-j639i6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70980/original/image-20150203-25554-j639i6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70980/original/image-20150203-25554-j639i6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70980/original/image-20150203-25554-j639i6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70980/original/image-20150203-25554-j639i6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70980/original/image-20150203-25554-j639i6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Babies aren’t born with prejudices.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-144900358/stock-photo-group-of-multiethnic-babies-crawling-isolated-on-white-background.html">Babies image via www.shutterstock.com.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Current questions being addressed in this field of research include whether or not amygdala activation in response to those of other races is something we’re born doing or a learned phenomenon. So far, research suggests that amygdala activity in response to out-group members is <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00311">not innate</a>, and develops later in adolescence. Also, studies support the notion that childhood <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00605">exposure to diversity</a> can reduce the salience of race in adulthood.</p>
<p>In today’s world people are more connected than ever – from social media to Skype, to the never-ending news cycle – people are exposed to increasing diversity. Due to these advances, we as a global community are also faced with the knowledge that prejudice-based discrimination and violence still exist. It’s become a human imperative to transcend divisive impulses which no longer serve our survival. Neuroscience has started to educate us about innate human drives. It’s now up to all of us how to use this information.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/36829/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Caitlin Millett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Humans are highly social creatures. Our brains have evolved to allow us to survive and thrive in complex social environments. Accordingly, the behaviors and emotions that help us navigate our social sphere…
Caitlin Millett, PhD candidate in Neuroscience, Penn State
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.