5 Civil Rights Movement Myths You Learned In History Class
The human brain doesn’t handle complexity very well. You can see this most dramatically in how we read and understand history.
#5. Myth: Slavery Ended In 1865
We mean, of course it did. The Civil War ended that year, while the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect and spin-kicked slavery right in the dick, and that was that. You learn that shit in kindergarten.
The thing is, simply winning a war and saying “Slavery is abolished, assholes!” doesn’t make it stop any more than telling your cat not to use your shoe as a toilet stops her from doing it. The South’s economy (and occasionally geography) was in ruins after the war, and they weren’t exactly thrilled about giving away a significant chunk of their workforce. As such, they didn’t so much do away with slavery after the end of the Civil War as they did something much more American: They justrebranded the operation, albeit on a smaller scale.
'forced independent contractors.’
The years after the war saw both black and white criminal activity increase, which was a problem, because most prisons had been destroyed during the war. The states took a look at the massive influx of prisoners in their hands, surreptitiously glanced at each other … and started leasing them to wealthy planters and industry big shots as free, forced labor.This system, known as convict lease, quickly became one of the most lubed-up loopholes in history. Some of the criminals caught up in the machine were white, but an estimated 80 to 90 percent were black, because of fucking course they were. Many former slaves found that freedom was the worst thing that could have happened to them, as the police got hold of them and piled on enough arbitrary charges to put them into “totally not slavery” forced labor for years, toiling under essentially the same assholes who had owned them during their slave days.
“If you love someone, set them free. If you force them to come back shackled, kicking, and screaming, it was meant to be.”
The conditions were generally much worse, too. There was a lot less financial incentive to keep a prisoner alive than a slave, so living conditions of prisoners under convict lease tended to be abysmal. In some cases, the death rate was as high as 40 percent. But the public was okay with it, because hey, that’s what they get for committing crimes! We’re not exploiting a racial and economic class, we’re punishing the bad guys!
We can say that convict lease ended precisely fucking never. Establishments like the Louisiana State Penitentiary are still employing the model today, and are cool enough with what they do that they let a camera crew record their operation in 2015.
#4. Myth: Malcolm X Was A Violent Radical, While Martin Luther King, Jr. Was All About Pacifism
History sees Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. as two sides of the same coin. Malcolm X was the violence-preaching militant radical, and Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Gandhi-like pacifist, though both were pushing for the same outcome. These days, we always tend to put activists into one of those two molds, and only offer public approval for the latter.
Reality, however, is always more complicated. For all of his militant talk, Malcolm X did not advocate attacking the government. He urged that black people should be ready to defend themselves violently if need be, but never once by initiating violence. Sure, he used scary-sounding rhetoric, but it was never “Kill the whites to affect change”. Rather, it was, “We’re not afraid to fight back,” or in his own words, “Put your hands on us thinking that we’re going to turn the other cheek – we’ll put you to death just like that.”
Meanwhile, Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn’t quite as averse to guns as his popular legacy would have us believe. While he certainly did organize all of those nonviolent protests you know him for, he fully bought into the idea of “just in case” firepower. Remember, King was a man of the South, fighting against acts of terrorism against his person and his people. In the early period of his leadership, his household could be accurately called an arsenal. It wasn’t unheard of for a visitor to sit on a chair, only to be warned at the last second they were about to place their ass on a couple of guns. After his house was bombed in 1956, King even tried to get a concealed carry permit, though this went about as well as you’d expect. King also preached what he practiced, incidentally; his writings acknowledge the right to armed self-defense.
Once again, please don’t take this as some kind of simplistic “So King was the violent one, and X was the peace-seeker!” switcheroo.
#3. Myth: The Black Panthers Were A Bunch Of Armed Male Radicals
Since they are best known for showing up at the California Assembly carrying rifles or for getting into a shootout with the police four days after a police raid killed one of their leaders, many people assume the Black Panthers were hyper-radical armed terrorists who wanted nothing more than to fill the streets with rivers of white men’s blood.
And sure, the Panthers loved their guns. Their views on guns would make today’s NRA membersknock themselves out with a thunderous agreement orgasm. But as was the case with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, we tend to remember activists by their single most headline-grabbing traits. For example, when you picture a black panther, you’re probably imagining a guy in a beret and paramilitary garb:
So the fact that, by the end of the 1960s, women made up the majority of the Black Panther movement would blow most people’s minds. They even had a female leader in Elaine Brown, who took over in 1974. While it would be wildly inaccurate to claim that her gender was never an issue, sexism did little to dampen her success. Under Brown’s watch, the Panthers not only continued their famed resistance against police brutality, but also helped elect the first black mayor of Oakland, CA and built 300 houses for displaced people.
Oh yeah, that was the other thing. The papers love those photos of panthers standing around looking scary with guns, and there was certainly no shortage of “Kill the cops” rhetoric. But in black neighborhoods, they were known for their “survival programs” – providing health clinics and handing out food, encouraging members of the community to volunteer and supply services that the government had no interest in supplying. Among the more famous of their many volunteer-based projects was the “breakfast in schools” program in the 1960s, which fed about 10,000 kids every day for a decade before the government got around to implementing the same thing nationwide.
#2. Myth: Segregation Was Solely A Southern Issue
The story goes that after slavery was abolished in the South, there was another century of segregation in those states until that practice also begrudgingly ended. But throughout, it’s seen as a problem that exists below the Mason-Dixon Line.
“In the South, the white man doesn’t care how close you get, as long as you don’t get too high. In the North, he doesn’t care how high you get, as long as you don’t get too close.”
The North earned the saying by truly jumping on the systematic segregation train in the 1930s. The federal government built a phenomenal amount of public housing all across the North, to the point where the suburbs this created became the most popular housing in the country. But there was one tiny problem with the project. It didn’t matter if it was Pittsburgh, New York, Baltimore, Chicago, or San Francisco, the rules were always the same: Black people were forbidden from buying. Instead, they found themselves shoved in increasingly large numbers into the overcrowded inner-city confines which white Americans were evacuating.
Places like Chicago used blockbusting, a process whereby real estate agents would use the threat of incoming African Americans as a tool to get white tenants to leave their city blocks as quickly and cheaply as possible. The local governments introduced redlining, a practice in which a literal red line is drawn around a predominantly black neighborhood, which then gets filed into the “never offer financial services to these people” folder. Ghettos are always man-made.
Predictably, the housing segregation created segregation in pretty much every aspect of life – schools, playgrounds, grocery stores, clinics, and more all tended to be of lower quality where they lived. Thus, migrants from the South quickly found that the North was little more than a slightly different flavor of terrible.
#1. Myth: The Civil Rights Movement Was A Resounding, Permanent Victory
Yes, the changes were huge and profound. Segregation is now illegal. We have a black dude in the White House. If a celebrity says something racist, their career is over (for a couple of years, anyway, depending on their performance at the box office). Sure, you get a questionable police shooting every once in a while, but if anything, that emphasizes the horrible shit they used to get away with.
But there is a very good argument to be made that while overt racism went out of fashion, the actual elements which made life harder for minorities are all still there – they just once again rebranded themselves to be less overt.
Black people are still much more likely to live in poverty, be the target of police brutality, and have higher mortality rates. African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites for the same offenses. It’s a system that has evolved to the point where every example can be hand-waved away as having nothing to do with race while continuing to ruin black lives with brutal efficiency.
For a breakdown of how it works, let’s look at the most damning metric of all: education. The good news is that graduation rates for black students have increased hugely since the groundbreaking Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, which declared that separate schools for black and white students were unconstitutional. The bad news is that this decision, which was perhaps the biggest victory of the Civil Rights Movement, has been neutered and robbed of its power at every single turn.
Immediately after the ruling, private “segregation academies” started popping up, carefully priced so that they were inexpensive enough for white kids while being juuuuuust a tad too expensive for African Americans (incidentally, many of these schools are still thriving today). Meanwhile, channeling black populations into poor neighborhoods meant channeling them into underfunded schools (only this time everyone can say, “But no one is forcing them to live there!”).
How much of the school desegregation work has been undone? Well, in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement in the early ‘70s, only about a quarter of black kids in the South attended all-black schools (where minorities are at least 99% of the student body). Today it’s 53 percent. Nobody had to pass a law forcing it; they merely had to step aside and quietly let the market price them out.
So there remains a huge racial discrepancy between students’ graduation rates, minorities wind up with lower-paying jobs and thus end up in poorer neighborhoods, ensuring that their kids end up going to those same underfunded schools. And on and on it goes. But if you bring this up, invariably the first response will be, “Ugh, are you guys still complaining about this?”
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