November 19, 2004

Jim Crow stories: personal narratives, in audio and text. [via mefi]
posted by jb 20 years ago
  • What?! A cross-post?! The MonkeyEmpire is displeased!! and/or - cool post. Anyone have the original minstrel song of "Jim Crow"?
  • Sorry - I just thought this was so fascinating - the audio is AMAZING - people telling stories of their every day lives - that it deserved being reposted. It's been in my bookmarks for a few weeks. Unless you were joking - but I did worry a bit about it
  • How wonderful to be reminded. We shouldn't forget out history, especially when it shows our worst side. Yhanks, jb.
  • *yhanks path's pinkie* Gotchyer second postcard, path! It's beaut. Thankee kindly :)
  • yeah just kiddin' jb - there was a great NPR series on minstrelsy (-cy?) in which one part was all about the Jim Crow show/song/character. I think it was the Tavis Smiley show, it should be archived somewhere . . . /laaaaa-Zee!
  • Sounds like petebest is referring to the two-part report on The Legacy of Blackface. The page has an photo gallery of the legacy in art, including an actor who popularized the Jim Crow character. Thanks, jb. The interactive maps are interesting and I plan to listen to some of the audio clips at home.
  • "Jim Crow" (1829)
  • ...and what seems to be a derivative work from a 1917 operetta.
  • Alnedra, could you resend your address to the gmail account in my profile? I have another postcard, my favorite, for you, but some of the info in my printout of your Yahoo message disintegrated. And I tossed the Yahoo account since it was being spoofed so regularly.
  • Humph. Goddamn activist judges and their goddamn Brown v Board. Won't be allowed under *this* administration, no sir.
  • For anyone with kids who wants to empart just how exclusionary and vicious this shit was, get a copy of Anne Moody's "Coming of age in Mississippi."
  • ... elephant in the room? where? what elephant?
  • The part that i find really scary about the stories is how the people had to worry that the most minor of infractions against the rules of segregation could result in death. Truly truly frightening.
  • Doing research for a paper on William Faulkner, I discovered that the last anti-miscegenation law was repealed only six years ago. And the vote was only 60/40.
  • Wow.
  • Retrospective sketch for benefit of younger US folks who probably didn't learn a diddly-damn about this in school: Way back, white Democrats from the Southern states, previously known as the Solid South, reacted against the Democratic party's support of desegregation, and declared themselves Dixiecrats. They turned away from the Democratic party and joined the GOP. Where they've remained a bastion of American racial prejudice and religious conservatism/fundamentalism. The Old South didn't have to rise again: it never lay down.
  • It wasn't auctully much of a loss for the Democrats since the Southern Democrats were Democrats in name only. They tended to vote with the Republicans on almost every issue.
  • Wasn't always the case, though, Berek. Came a day when Eisenhower sent troops into Little Rock. Eisenhower was a Republican president. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus was a Democrat using the Arkansas National Guard to prevent black students from entering the schools in Little Rock. Eisenhower nationalized the National Guard and sent in the 101st Airborne to support the students. Since the nineteen-fifties the American South's done a complete flip-flop.
  • Divided Court Rejects School Diversity Plans "Simply putting students together under the same roof does not necessarily mean that the students will learn together or even interact. Furthermore, it is unclear whether increased interracial contact improves racial attitudes and relations."