Racism in American Public Life

A Call to Action

Johnnetta Betsch Cole

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813945620
• eBook ISBN: 9780813945637
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education
• Index: History

For some in our society, diversity is a threat. Others feel society should be more inclusive, if only out of fairness. But as Johnnetta Cole argues in her new book, embracing diversity and inclusiveness is more than a virtuous ideal; it is essential to a healthy, productive society.

Focusing on higher education and other arenas of cultural development, Cole explores our institutions' vulnerability to the influence of racism and the wider implications for American society. At the core of Cole's argument is the belief that increasing the representation of historically marginalized groups on college campuses, and in museums, media, and other institutions is, like the liberal arts, vitally important to social progress. Accompanying Cole's urgent calls to implement social change are vividly rendered experiences from her own remarkable life. Cole issues a challenge for courageous conversations about race and racism and places unique responsibility and accountability on institutions of higher education in leading these conversations.

1

Race and Racism in American Public Life

Lessons from My Life and from Anthropology

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

—Nelson Mandela

AS I GREW UP in Jacksonville, Florida, during the days of legal segregation, the awareness of race was an ever-present reality in my life. Deeply etched into the practices of most White southerners was the belief that all Black people were inferior to all White people. These beliefs were often the byproducts of “scientific racism.”

Throughout its long history, scientific racism attempted to give credence to the belief that some races are superior to others. While there was never anything scientific about this brand of racism, it became the mainstay of some of the world’s leading philosophers. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, English physician Charles White suggested that races were distinct from one another via “The Great Chain of Being,” a hierarchy ordained by God. During this same time, Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a leader in the American Enlightenment, positioned Blackness as a hereditary disease. Future U.S. president Thomas Jefferson, a scientist, politician, and slaveholder, opined at length about racial theory in his Notes on the State of Virginia, arguing that African Americans, and to a lesser extent Native Americans, were less intelligent than White people, less endowed with the gifts of beauty and foresight, and more prone to caprice and impulsiveness.

These notions about race may sound strange today. But it is important to remember that they formed the basis of the writings of many scholars, including the much-revered Friedrich Hegel and Immanuel Kant. The theories of scientific racism were common until World War I, when many theories of racial difference became discredited. However, the notion of racial differences in intelligence was certainly being promoted in 1994 in the popular text The Bell Curve, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray.

Theories of racial difference also undergirded the so-called “separate but equal” laws that codified racist beliefs in the South. Under slavery, African Americans frequently lived and worked in close proximity to those who regarded them as mere property. However, once slavery ended, the majority of White people insisted that wherever possible the two races should remain apart. Such thinking enjoyed legal sanction when in 1896 the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was constitutionally sound. Thereafter, states began to adopt Jim Crow laws and practices that provided for segregated education, accommodations, recreation, and travel. In some places, Mexican Americans and Asian Americans were subjected to similar laws and practices. However, at times, theories about racial differences positioned Mexican Americans and Asian Americans closer to the White end of a continuum, far away from Black people. Added to the widespread disenfranchisement of Black people in the South, all of these practices had the effect of reinforcing stereotypes. As Black Americans became relegated to poorer and under-resourced neighborhoods and schools, they became more readily stamped with the badge of inferiority. Historically, and today, Black Americans are associated with high rates of crime, disease, and all that is bad, while White people are more closely associated with progress, cleanliness, and all that is good.

As a child in Jacksonville in the 1940s and ’50s, I lived in an all-Black neighborhood and attended all-Black schools. In public places, I was forced to drink from “colored” water fountains, and I ate at similarly designated lunch counters. I could occupy seats only in the back of the bus. When traveling by train, I was forced to ride in cars reserved for “colored” people. A sign in a Jacksonville park said, “No Negroes, Jews, or dogs allowed.” That was life under Jim Crow.

When White children received new schoolbooks, my school for “colored children” was given their old ones. The textbooks were filled with the stories of White people who were called heroes and heroines, such as Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Years later, I wondered why women and men were being revered when they had promoted racist ideas and practices.

However, my parents, family, teachers, and civic and religious leaders taught me a radically different message about race than the one that was promulgated in racist narratives. There is no such thing as a superior or inferior race, they insisted. Indeed, they drilled into me the belief that my potential was as great as that of any White youngster. Even as a child, my intuition led me to believe that I was not fundamentally different from people who possessed less melanin in their skin than I did.

My religious upbringing, which included attending a Black church, helped to reinforce this belief. Black churches have long been a voice for liberation. In Sunday school I was taught to sing “Red and yellow, Black and White, they are precious in His sight, for He loves the little children of the world.” And I remember my teacher explaining that this song meant that although God created people in different colors, they were all equal in His eyes.

In the early years of my education in segregated schools, I learned that Black people had made great contributions to our nation and our world. Stories of heroes and sheroes like Crispus Attucks, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and George Washington Carver were lifted up in my classrooms throughout the year, not just during Black History Week—which much later became Black History Month. These heroes and sheroes continued to inspire me as I became active in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

As a youngster, I was especially fortunate to know Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, a shero we read about in my segregated school who became one of the most important Black educators and civil and women’s rights leaders in the United States. Born in Mayesville, South Carolina, in 1875, she was one of seventeen children of parents who had been enslaved. Mary Jane McLeod walked five miles to and from a segregated school where she fell in love with the power of education. Years later, as Dr. Bethune, she founded the school that is today Bethune-Cookman University. She served as the only woman in President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet;” she was a co-founder of the United Negro College Fund; and in 1935 she founded the National Council of Negro Women, the organization I have the extraordinary privilege of serving as chair of the board and seventh president.

Dr. Bethune and my great-grandfather, Abraham Lincoln Lewis, were close colleagues and friends. A. L. Lewis, as he was known, was Jacksonville’s most prominent Black citizen and Florida’s first Black millionaire. He had a strong influence on me when I was young. Every Sunday after church, when my sister and I would go to his home for supper, he would ask us the same question: “What are the three ‘B’ books that will carry you to where you need to go?” We would recite in unison: “The Bible, the schoolbook, and a bankbook.” Without minimizing the challenge of being born Black in America, my great-grandfather continued to emphasize that faith, a good education, and financial security would take us a long way.

A. L. Lewis was born in Madison, Florida, in 1865, the year the Civil War ended. Highly influenced by his upbringing in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, he emerged from a position of poverty to become a leading institution-builder and philanthropist.

My great-grandfather was forced to leave school after the sixth grade due to his family’s precarious finances. After the family moved to Jacksonville in 1880, he began working as a water boy at a sawmill. He was quickly promoted and became a foreman, a position he held for twenty-two years until he saved enough money to invest in Jacksonville’s first Black-owned shoe store.

In 1901, A. L. Lewis joined six other Black men to establish the Afro-American Industrial and Benefit Association, which later became the Afro-American Life Insurance Company, the first insurance company in Florida. Most White-owned insurance companies would not insure Black people, so “the Afro” grew and became profitable.

My great-grandfather’s civic engagement was also noteworthy. He helped found the Negro Business League, and he contributed substantially to two historically Black institutions—Edward Waters College and Bethune-Cookman College—and served on their boards of trustees. In 1926 he founded the Lincoln Golf and Country Club, offering African Americans recreational opportunities they were denied at clubs that welcomed only White members.

In 1935, while he was president of the Afro-American Life Insurance Company, A. L. Lewis used funds from the firm’s pension bureau to purchase stretches of beachfront property on the Atlantic Ocean forty miles north of Jacksonville. He named the development American Beach. The plan was for the company employees to have a place to vacation, and some would also own homes there. A. L. Lewis said Black people needed and deserved a place where they could enjoy recreation without humiliation. Throughout the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, American Beach was a popular vacation spot for African American people.

As youngsters, my sister and I—and later my brother, who is nine years my junior—would spend most weekends at American Beach. In 2011, American Beach was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, thanks in large measure to my late sister, MaVynee Osun Betsch, who was known as “the Beach Lady” because of her close association with American Beach.

When I was growing up in Jacksonville, many years before researching one’s ancestors became popular, I was told about my maternal lineage, the lineage that connected me to Abraham Lincoln Lewis. Today, dissertations and books are written about my maternal family.

A. L. Lewis married Mary Frances Kingsley Sammis. Mary was the great-granddaughter of Zephaniah Kingsley, a slave owner and trader, and Anta Madjiguene Ndiaye. Anta was born in 1793 into a royal family of the Wolof people, the largest ethnic group in Senegal, West Africa. When she was thirteen she was captured, enslaved, and bought in Havana, Cuba, by Kingsley. Anta Ndiaye became Kingsley’s common-law wife, and over time she became manager of his plantation and then a planter and slaveholder as a free Black person in early nineteenth-century Florida. The National Park Service protects and manages the Kingsley Plantation on Fort George Island, where Anta Ndiaye and Zephaniah Kingsley lived. The plantation is a part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve.

As the great-granddaughter of the highly respected A. L. Lewis, and as one of three children in an upper-middle-class Black family, I was shielded from some of the racism that other Black youngsters endured on a daily basis. I had access to a good education, which my great-grandfather had been denied but which he nevertheless promoted throughout his life. And because of my family’s economic status, I had health care and a full stomach every night, unlike so many Black children of the time—and sadly, unlike many Black children today. However, I quickly discovered that money could never really protect me from racism. In the final analysis, race always trumped class, especially in the deeply segregated South. And this is as true now as it was then.

Racism is grounded in power and privilege, specifically the power and privilege that come with being White in America. If we hope to ever achieve what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described as a “Beloved Community,” we must move beyond surface-level discussions about racism that involve simply how people feel about one another and engage in courageous conversations and difficult discussions about power and privilege.

Courageous conversations about race and racism in our country must go back to the period when African people were enslaved and brought in chains to what was to become America. In 1619 the first slave ship arrived in Virginia, then a British colony, carrying between twenty and thirty enslaved Africans. That moment in history set in motion a series of processes and events that would have an enduring impact not only on race relations in the United States, but on how power is unevenly distributed between White Americans and other historically disenfranchised groups.

What a difference it would make if every American would read and examine the 1619 Project—a Pulitzer Prize–winning (and admittedly controversial) interactive initiative guided by New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones that examines the legacy of slavery in the United States—and then engage in discussions about race and racism.1

As Jake Silverstein writes in his introduction to the 1619 Project: “Out of slavery—and the anti-Black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain.”2

Silverstein’s words help to underscore the direct relationship between slavery and systems of power. For this reason, in our conversations about race we must include a reckoning of how these systems of power were reified during this same period in places that benefited from slavery even as they sought its abolition. For example, while various states in the North outlawed slavery in the decade or so following the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, they continued to profit from their investment in the system through the manufacturing of slave-produced products, such as cotton. It is important to point out that although segregation was not legally sanctioned in the North in the post-Emancipation years, the earliest use of the term “Jim Crow” to denote separate accommodations appeared in the Salem Gazette of Massachusetts in 1838.3

Anti-Black violence was also common in the North, as well as in western states. The attacks on the school that White abolitionist Prudence Crandall established for African American girls in Connecticut during the 1830s stand as a prominent example. Anti-Black violence was also the basis for the New York City draft riots in 1865, when mobs of working-class Whites attacked and killed scores of African Americans, whom they blamed as the principal reason for their being drafted into a war that wealthier Whites could pay to avoid. Additionally, some of the most seemingly resolute White abolitionists in the North held racist beliefs that caused them to consider the mingling of Blacks and Whites as an impossibility, thus leading them to prioritize Black colonization outside of the U.S.

On May 31 and June 1, 1921, mobs of White residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma—many of whom had been deputized and given weapons by city officials—attacked Black homes and businesses in the city’s Greenwood district, known as Black Wall Street. What many have called a massacre left between thirty and three hundred people dead, almost all of whom were African American. More than fourteen hundred homes and businesses were burned, and almost ten thousand people were left homeless.

The cause of the race riot was the following: Dick Rowland, a young African American shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a White elevator operator. The following day a newspaper reported that Rowland had tried to rape Page and that a lynching was planned for that night.

That evening at the courthouse, where Rowland was being held, a confrontation occurred between an African American man who was trying to protect Rowland and a White protester, leading to the death of the latter. A White mob was incensed, and thus the Tulsa massacre began.

Following the Civil War, African Americans who resided in the North and elsewhere in the country experienced “separate and unequal” access to affordable housing, adequate education, and sustainable employment. Then as now, there was a thin line between de facto and de jure segregation. Historically, de jure describes legal forms of discrimination, such as those sanctioned by Plessy v. Ferguson, while de facto describes a type of racial discrimination that operates according to custom or seemingly haphazard practices that emerged as the remnants of legally sanctioned discrimination.

As in the South, the type of institutional and structural racism that African Americans faced in the North was made evident by patterns of unequal funding for schooling, especially in the wake of White flight, when opponents of Brown v. Board of Education and desegregation fled the cities and carried with them their tax dollars.

The fine line between de facto and de jure segregation was also reflected in unfair housing patterns, which were supported in great part by government agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration, along with banks and private citizens who refused to loan money, rent, or sell houses to African Americans. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled against the racially restrictive covenants that White residents used to bar African Americans and other groups from exclusively White neighborhoods. However, this practice continued long after 1948, which helps to explain the White racial homogeneity of suburbs like Levittown, Pennsylvania, beginning in the 1950s.

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, a social justice organization founded by attorney Bryan Stevenson, as late as 1970, sixteen years after Brown v. Board of Education and more than twenty years after the Supreme Court ruled against discriminatory housing practices among banks and private ci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by David A. Davis
• Introduction
• 1 | Race and Racism in American Public Life: Lessons from My Life and from Anthropology
• 2 | The Need for Courageous Conversations about Race and Racism in American Public Life
• 3 | Imagine Our Nation without Racism: A Call for Action in the Academy
• Afterword by Tikia K. Hamilton
• Notes