What was the Jim Crow/Civil Rights era like, really?

[Xarpho's Return]

The more I've learned how astroturfed the Civil Rights era was (Rosa Parks pre-planning to sit where she did, etc.) the more I'm curious how much of what was told about the Jim Crow era was distorted in an early pre-2000s example of "whitey BAD".

This isn't to say to that to say that "KKK = actually good" or that most blacks enjoyed a high standard of living, but at this rate I wouldn't be surprised if the "whites only" stuff was the exception, not the rule.

With how much history books are distorted, I can't be totally insane/racist for suspecting this, am I?

 

[Tony Vivaldi]

At this point, without oral histories, there's no separating the fact from the fiction without virtue signaling (even my own dad was not immune from it in his old age, bizarre considering he was a member of the John Birch Society for a short time).

It's better to just accept all the literature and 'history' books to be one sided and politically correct and outright wrong and go with your gut.

Niggers are a pain-in-the-ass now and probably were then. We KNOW they caused massive shit in 1921 St. Louis, 1964-65 Philly, and in 1968 Watts and other places and that was before most of us were even born. WTF are they doing now? Same shit, different day; 1921-1968-2015-2023-Forever

Over/Under on Blacks being pre-Niggerfied is percentage rarefied. Blacks are less than 13% of the population now, what were they then? Why were they so loud-mouthed when they did shit all?

 

[Swordsman]

Only one way to find out.

 

[Gog & Magog]

I knew a man who grew up through the tail end of the era. Told me his white high school would donate its old football gear to the black schools each semester. He felt a lot of pride at the time knowing he was giving them what the school district wouldn't pay for. At the time sending out boxes of cracked helmets and worn shoes didn't strike him or any of the other boys as anything other than generous. At the time.

 

[The Last Stand]

We KNOW they caused massive shit in 1921 St. Louis,

Incorrect. The '21 St. Louis riots was the result of White mobs attacking migrating African Americans looking for economic opportunity up North. Specifically, labor disputes with thriving factories of White and Black.

1964-65 Philly,

As a result of police brutality and fuming race relations. Not condoning rioting, you're just missing context. Same with the Watts riots.

 

[AnaphylacticShock]

Before the 1960s riots, blacks were mostly non entities, not thought about or interacted with much. They stayed on their side of the tracks or neighborhoods in the cities, and the whites stayed in theirs.

In the 20s, my grandfather's cousin was police chief of a small town, and he got in big trouble and lost his job for beating a drunk black man pretty badly.

My grandfather also told me if you had to walk through their neighborhood, they'd move out of your way. They were aware of the fact they were second class citizens.

They've always been trouble, but the communists choosing to use them as pawns to subvert the country back in like the 20s really did a number on them.

 

[behavioral swamp thang]

My grandma had a reoccurring tar baby character in her english textbook that was always doing ignorant shit.

 

[The Fountainhead]

Bottom line is that niggers never belonged in America.

 

[Tony Vivaldi]

Bottom line is that niggers never belonged in America.

I'm gonna caveat my statement with I've met tons of people, including many from Africa (Cameroon, mostly) and those men were cool as shit.

I'd also like to echo another sentiment I read here circa 2019...being a NIGGER is a state of mind, not a Race.

There's plenty of paleskin niggers, we just don't have any qualified names that really cut down to the marrow. Cracker, White Trash, etc. just don't have that ZING!
You call a Black dude a shithead, an asshole, a motherfucker, he just laughs. You call him a nigger and he wants to kill your ass.
You call a white dude a nigger and shame clouds his face, he quails, he shakes, he protests and knows that he's just a low-down, brutish, ignorant motherfucker.

 

[The Fountainhead]

I'm gonna caveat my statement with I've met tons of people, including many from Africa (Cameroon, mostly) and those men were cool as shit.

Cool or not, that won't stop a nigger's dick from making one of these:

 

[Tony Vivaldi]

Cool or not, that won't stop a nigger's dick from making one of these:

View attachment 5129180

True. Can't stop 'em and can't stop the ferals-- outside of your own life, that is.

 

[Soggy paper straw]

The more I've learned how astroturfed the Civil Rights era was (Rosa Parks pre-planning to sit where she did, etc.)

Why is that "astroturfed"? There were activist organisations, they knew what they were doing and they wanted to do it. It wasn't exactly coca-cola paying for it...

Next you will tell me the French revolution had nobles organizing it too!

It's like with slavery in the US or nazi camps - the people there still had a society, they had families and friends (as much as they could), had weddings, etc..

I think it is movies distorting the idea that unless it is hell on earth it was "not that bad". So many movies make it look like everyone involved must always be evil 100% of the time, these evil monsters are not capable of human compassion or any good deed. It's the same with abusive relationships, movies make it seems that the abusive spouse must chain you to the wall, not let you eat, and be constantly beating you while drunk to be considered "abusive".

 

[potato in mah painus]

At this point, without oral histories, there's no separating the fact from the fiction without virtue signaling (even my own dad was not immune from it in his old age, bizarre considering he was a member of the John Birch Society for a short time).

It's better to just accept all the literature and 'history' books to be one sided and politically correct and outright wrong and go with your gut.

Niggers are a pain-in-the-ass now and probably were then. We KNOW they caused massive shit in 1921 St. Louis, 1964-65 Philly, and in 1968 Watts and other places and that was before most of us were even born. WTF are they doing now? Same shit, different day; 1921-1968-2015-2023-Forever

Over/Under on Blacks being pre-Niggerfied is percentage rarefied. Blacks are less than 13% of the population now, what were they then? Why were they so loud-mouthed when they did shit all?

This brings up why there are so many people that don't believe the holocaust happened, the historians have been proven blatant liars at best, agenda pushers at worst. The books are rewritten to convince people to part with their hard earned cash or political power, its why in the last ten or so years in America suddenly everything is economic, environmental, systematic, or personal racism right down the roads you drive on:

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/17/1176753190/rep-cori-bush-introduces-bill-on-reparations-for-black-americans

Blacks want the cut the jews get, and they will all the more be hated for it.

 

[Tekken Enjoyer]

You know the saying "history is written by the winners" and how it implies that all the history that we know is changed to make one side look better than the other? I've been thinking about that while wondering how it could be possible that people not so distantly related to me could do some "abhorrent" things.

Ancient Greek graffiti shows that those people weren't so different from us. They made dick jokes and liked to write their names on stuff. Shakespeare's plays are still relatable hundreds of years later. Why, then, am I made to believe that everyone in America in the last couple hundred of years were all huge idiots and/or pure evil? Did they not have good reasons for doing what they did? I'll tell you that after dealing with niggers myself 3/5 of a vote would be generous.

To answer the OP's question, I don't think we can really know what actually happened during any important historical event, because there's just too much at stake for people not to fuck with the record. However, we have our eyes and common sense. These are the same people that we see breaking the law at staggeringly higher rates than average when in a society, and are basically unable to form a civilized society of their own when left alone. Why should we think that they've changed substantially between now and the civil rights era? I don't know what happened exactly, but the niggers deserved it and worse. Niggers delenda est.

 

[George Floyd Sneed]

Back in the Jim Crow south, preachers were often the black community leaders and for the most part, that hasn’t changed, which is why every Democrat leader tries to win (or buy off) the support of black preachers. Niggers back then aren’t much different than niggers now but there were consequences to their actions back then. Usually the white community leaders would meet with the black community leaders to tell them that Shitavious keeps causing problems on the white side of the tracks. If Shitavious kept causing trouble, he’d disappear and if anyone asked, he decided to move a couple towns over and everyone would know. Government gibs weren’t a thing so blacks would be more likely to shack up. They’d still fuck around on each other but they did have higher rates of marriage and intact families.

There’s quite a bit of documentation out there on how things are. We don’t see much of it because it’s very inconvenient to the narrative. Sometimes it exists out there in funny ways, go to Wikipedia and read up on various Mississippi Delta musicians and their biographies are similar: wandered around, had a bunch of kids with different women that they never supported, got into trouble with the authorities and often died young. Not much has really changed in 100 years.

 

[AgendaPoster]

This isn't to say to that to say that "KKK = actually good" or that most blacks enjoyed a high standard of living, but at this rate I wouldn't be surprised if the "whites only" stuff was the exception, not the rule.

You have an incredibly large, and very diverse country, and that was the case even before the 1960s.
Hence it's impossible to describe it in just a few sentences, it's likely that attitudes vs blacks in big, northern cities were far more amenable towards toleration, inclusion etc., while in the south old school white primacy and even supremacy were more common. The only way to approach these things is to ignore dramatic, explosive events like riots or the Tulsa race conflict, as they tend to put an emphasis on emotions and graphic violence, but are very rare and definitely not the norm.
One should instead focus on data, i.e. statistics. Thing is, it's quite hard to produce them from that era, and modern statistics tend to have ideological contamination.
Overall, I think one thing is clear, not just from the US, but from the entire planet.
Ethnic and racial groups tend to fight over supremacy and resources all the time (there's not one single period of racial harmony in history). Diversity is more often a danger and detriment than ethnic cohesion, with caveats. If you import the best scientists from other ethnic groups, it often works towards the advancement and wealth of your own, if they can be persuaded to assimilate and work. Also, scientists, medics, engineers etc. are tiny groups, which get lost in the masses. So this diversity is quite desirable. If you import masses of unskilled workers and shelter the lowest IQ of the planet, they will not assimilate and instead create conflicts with the native demographics. This is not a desirable type of diversity at all.
Too much ethnic cohesion is also problematic; you want to regularly import some new blood and learn from other groups, have commercial and cultural exchanges. But all has to be controlled and monitored. And you want the new blood to be high quality too.
Some finesse is required when dealing with these issues.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

If you don't want to read any of the spoilered posts, just read these:

In 1920s Knoxville, the Tennessee National Guard machine gunned a crowd of Whites that was trying to lynch a Black man in jail.

In 1950s Athens, TN ("Battle of Athens" like Count Dankula covered), the sheriff shot down a Black man who was trying to cast a ballot and the mostly White population took up arms and violently overthrew the Democratic Party government.

Quite a few of the activists came out of Appalachia, in particular they had a school (Highlander Folk School) near the Tennessee-Kentucky border that trained a number of famous Civil Rights activists in mixed-race programs.

Spoiler: Ku Klux Klan

I've posted before about the Klan, they underwent three major periods (disappearing and reappearing). The relevant ones here are the Second Klan, which was essentially the Old Stock American version of a fascist movement - militantly anti-Communist, anti-Catholic, anti-ethnic-minorities including White ethnics - and the Third Klan, which carried those same attitudes over but was specifically aimed at supporting segregation. The Second Klan was the largest Klan, peaked around the 1920s, and was nationwide. It tended to form up in urban centers first, formed by elites, and used its elite connections to conduct terror campaigns free of obstruction. It had national scope, with some of its heaviest presences in California and Illinois. It used slick marketing and falsified tradition to boom, and probably was modeled on earlier American secret societies like Know-Nothings (which it was basically a revival of in a lot of ways) and Masons. It crashed and burned when the leader turned out to be a degenerate. The Third Klan was narrowly focused on segregation (the other ideology was still there, but unimportant) and Southern in focus.

The Second Klan is best understood as the product of the North and South reapproaching each other, enabled by the Civil War generation dying off and encouraged by Black mass-migration to the North, along with the world upswing in fascism. Instead of an earlier nationalism rooted specifically in an anti-Southern pro-Northern ideology (like Lincoln's nationalism), the US shifted to a broader nationalism that could use elements of both.

Media likes to portray the Klan as Southern, rural, and uneducated/poor trash. Two of these are outright wrong (urban and elite) and, while disproportionately Southern, again, firmly national. They were also frequently used to suppress the White labor movement, in Appalachia they'd trot them out to both terrorize and propagandize the union workers.

The Klan killed very few people in the big picture. Don't remember the name, but it's like, less than Blacks kill of each other in Detroit every day. Doesn't mean it wasn't a legitimate terrorist organization. The point of lynchings is to act as intimidation, which requires relatively little.

Spoiler: Lynching

Lynching had something like four main victims that I know of, and I'll discuss each (later) because I think it's an important part of American history that gets totally ignored in favor of Black guilt porn. Blacks were lynched nationally but especially in the South, Mexicans were lynched in the Southwest, Chinese were lynched in the 1800s (before Chinese Exclusion) in California, Whites were lynched in Appalachia and the Ozarks.

What is fascinating is that the areas that lynched lots of Whites had few Blacks around to lynch at all, and the areas that lynched lots of Blacks lynched few Whites. This puts to the lie the notion that Black lynching was just about crime, they were systematically treated different. In Appalachia and the Ozarks, lynching came from a culture that still had blood feuds and little effective law enforcement, sometimes no law enforcement except a single sheriff per county in very rugged, low population density terrain. So lynching is just the default means of execution in that society.

With Blacks, lynching could be motivated by accusations of crime, accusations of violating the social order, or just because the White population was agitated and wanted to do an epic gamer moment. Earlier on, from about WW1 through the 1920s, Blacks were usually the victims (nationwide) of pogroms. Later on, by the 1960s, Blacks had become so militant (emboldened by military service, by outside agitators, by the spread of liberation theology through their preachers) that it flipped around and they became the main source of destructive race riots, which remains the case till today. One thing to note is that White race riots tended to be very well-organized campaigns of destruction, Black race riots less so and riots now are just orgies of indiscriminate violence and looting. Most of the lynching took place in the 1920s Mississippi River Valley, where it was associated with attempts to keep sharecroppers bound to the land.

Regardless of motivation, however, lynching of Blacks was always implicitly racial because it showed a willingness to disregard their human right to a trial that Whites were extended. What was more significant in day to day life wasn't lynching, though, it was just regular, mundane police brutality.

Spoiler: Mass support?

The business class had a mixed relationship to segregation. In general they actually wanted Blacks working there. In earlier periods minorities were useful to play off each other in the workplace. In the coal fields, they would try to manipulate Italians, Hungarians, Blacks, Appalachians against each other. (This actually tended to fail.) In later periods, the businesses were a major source behind the push for opening up. They didn't like missing out on business and potential workers. They felt beholden to White commercial and social pressures, didn't want to be boycotted.

An economic historian named Timur Kuran wrote a book where he talked about how people strategically lie about what they believe, and how it can cause entire societies to commit to a position nobody really wants. You do often hear about these survey results that most Americans would rather lose WW2 than end segregation. Kuran found a big discrepancy between people's beliefs on segregation and what they'd publicly pose. It came down to that a small core of militant segregationists had the rest of society intimidated to speak up, and since nobody spoke up people felt isolated within their own view. This is one way to explain the explosive change that happened after Civil Rights was forced through. (Kuran goes on to talk about how we then built the exact opposite afterwards, where Blacks were set up with massively unpopular affirmative action that, after half a century, still hasn't been overturned).

I have seen very little evidence of Blacks supporting segregation, outside of some extremists like the Nation of Islam who were basically pursuing their own nationalist goals.

Spoiler: Towards the beginning and end of segregation

In the end, I think segregation was largely a product of White people's fear more than anything else. In the South, there had always been a deep fear of slave revolts, and there was uncertainty that even if slaves were freed peacefully there would still be purges of reprisal. Before the Civil War, travelers like Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the South had less hatred of Blacks than the North. It had a lower opinion of them, but Southerners actually lived around and were familiar with Blacks, whereas Northerners tended to believe more in racial equality while having venomous xenophobia, bordering on hysteria, towards them, except for a small chunk of bleeding-hearts that were their time's equivalent of SJWs. I have a long effortpost somewhere else in Deep Thoughts about this.

One way to think of it may be this, to a slave their master is their enemy. But to a master, their slave is not their enemy.

After the War, Whites were thrown into a crisis and fought a hard terror campaign (Reconstruction was the original Afghanistan) to get back control. By now they no longer had a subservient population, they had the shame and resentment of defeat. They had an enemy and they were psychologically primed to take out their rage on them. This is when Southern racial hatred takes off like a rocket. And throughout the segregation period, Southerners remain convinced (or, at least, publicly do) that if they ever let Blacks achieve equality, it will destroy them, if not physically then culturally.

Then what happened when the Civil Rights Act passed? The world went on.

It took some time and there were obviously some places more backwards than others where it went slower, but in a fairly rapid way Whites and Blacks began interacting, with almost a sort of relief that it was over. It would have helped that in many places segregation would have actually reduced abuses by putting them in different social spheres.

Teens played a major role in this, I think, and music. Music made Black culture attractive, nationwide. Dudes like Elvis Presley were hanging out with Blacks at a time when that wasn't okay. An appreciation of their cultural products made them sympathetic. Youths hung out and saw their system was bullshit.

If you want to see a good show set in the 1970s South, "The Wonder Years" reboot (Blacks in Birmingham) is surprisingly fair and one thing I like about it is that it depicts Black and White children playing together, which as I take it is accurate. (Jimmy Carter's sympathy for Blacks came from that.)

The integrationists also had a major advantage in their commitment to civil disobedience. If the Whites let them carry on, it was a de facto surrender. If they beat the shit out of them, it looked absolutely awful on camera.

Spoiler: Everywhere has its Blacks: Northerners, Mexicans, Indians, and Chinese

It often gets overlooked that Jim Crow was just as pervasive in much of the North, it was just informal and decentralized. Instead of being instituted in law, people did discriminatory measures through backhanded means, and people did it for social convention, which in some ways is worse than doing it out of obedience to the law. Blacks often observed a more overtly hostile atmosphere in the Northern cities (particularly from White ethnics like Poles and Italians, who at the bottom of the pyramid saw Blacks as enemies) and faced a greater atmosphere of uncertainty. The difference was that the hostility was not uniform, there were possibilities of better.

Blacks don't have a monopoly on suffering, either. No, I'm not talking about mUh IrIsH. Mexicans in the Southwest were treated like Blacks in the North in terms of underhanded discrimination (segregation de facto), and they were lynched in similar numbers to Blacks in the South. Ever heard of Mexican lynchings? I didn't either until about a year ago when it randomly came up in a book. In Texas, racial strife got so out of hand at one point that the Texas Rangers was in a state of war with the Tejano population (the Cortina Troubles). In the West, Indians got the same treatment; the American Indian Movement that took Wounded Knee in 1973 was formed from a large Indian proletariat in Minneapolis. California, obviously, had its Chinese, same story.

So everywhere had a minority that was kicked around by the locals, the only difference being the manner in which it was done and the sheer intensity of it. On a global scale, when you look at the 1800s British Empire you find segregation arising, naturally, everywhere from Australia (aimed at Chinese) to South Africa (aimed at Blacks) to India, and it's always the same shit in those cases, usually coming from some people like miners trying to shut competition out.

 

[Local Fed]

I certainly don't think that it was a good time or anything, but it probably wasn't as bad as how things are portrayed (I'm talking in general day to day life, not that really bad things didn't occur.) As others have pointed out, a lot of things get overdone by the media, etc. Furthermore, there's no incentive for certain groups and ideologues to present the Jim Crow era or other things in history as anything other than something out of a dystopian novel, 24/7.

Additionally, in a contemporary context, there's literally zero incentive for the black populace to even entertain the idea that the Jim Crow era and even early US history was anything other than hell on earth for blacks. The most powerful tool that they and other minorities in the west have is an always overflowing well of white guilt. It's a similar thing with the Holocaust: if you even entertain the idea that the six million number might actually "only" be 5,999,999 then you're instantly a denier and should be considered persona non grata. You really see this idea play out online with many topics where wanting to discuss nuance or context is met with scorn and mockery because everything has to be black and white like a superhero movie or 0mph or 100mph and nothing in between.

 

[Otterly]

@Ughubughughughughughghlug a very interesting and nuanced post. Could you recommend any books?
People mention Rosa parks and are surprised that her action was planned - but I am pretty sure I was taught that at school. She was chosen because she was a respectable, neat looking lady of slightly older years. She would be very sympathetic. No one likes to see a respectable mum type manhandled, it’s bad optics. You can’t demonise them as a young Jezebel either.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

@Ughubughughughughughghlug a very interesting and nuanced post. Could you recommend any books?
People mention Rosa parks and are surprised that her action was planned - but I am pretty sure I was taught that at school. She was chosen because she was a respectable, neat looking lady of slightly older years. She would be very sympathetic. No one likes to see a respectable mum type manhandled, it’s bad optics. You can’t demonise them as a young Jezebel either.

I'm afraid not, most of my knowledge on this stuff comes from a bunch of little things I've read here and there and not a single source. Kuran's book was called Private Truths, Public Lies, he also talks about the caste system in India and support for Communism in the Soviet Union. A lot of it is common sense dolled up in economics, but his interesting insights are that very small things (like a single celebrity bucking the trend) can cause a snowball effect of public opinion, massive changes can happen overnight, and of course this idea that a population can be in a situation where everybody is unhappy, everybody knows everybody is unhappy, and the equilibrium still prevails because everyone's individual survival strategy relies on suppressing dissidents.

De Tocqueville talks in Democracy in America about Black hatred. Note that he otherwise strongly prefers New England culture (what a fag).
The Devil is Here in These Hills has parts where it talks about the Klan's use as a tool of business to suppress proletarian interests (and their failure). United States of Appalachia talks about Highlander Folk School.
The lynching actually comes from my own exploration of Historical Lynching Project data, the explanation was my own guesswork but it's common knowledge that blood feuds were common and Appalachia was the sort of lawless place that people imagine the West was.
Mistreatment of Mexicans comes from El Norte: The Forgotten History of Hispanic North America. There's other interesting things to say about Mexicans too, the earliest Texan settlers and Tejanos got on well together, it was only when the mass of Tennessean and other Southern volunteers flooded in that Texas went to shit and they became abusive. It got worse as time goes on. (Basically, Texas radicalized against Mexicans like the South did against Blacks, but for different reasons.)


I forgot something huge in my big post, there was a system of industrial slavery in the Jim Crow South. This one, I do know where I read it, Slavery by Another Name. What they'd do is pass bullshit "vagrancy laws" where they made it illegal to do things like sit on your own porch without a pass, then arrest Blacks. English tradition was that sheriffs often were paid very little but could collect fines/fees for legal services, which obviously created perverse incentives for law enforcement to make unnecessary arrests. This was usually constrained by public sentiment (remember, sheriffs are elected officials), but in the Jim Crow South, they could get away with charging exorbitant fees to the "vagrants." Then, a White businessman, sometimes a farmer but often a manager for a coal mine, iron mine, steel mill, or turpentine plantation (turpentine is made from tree sap like rubber is) would pay the man's fee.

Whereas slaves were valuable property and so had a strong incentive to keep them in good health, these industrial slaves-but-we're-not-calling-them-slaves were relatively cheap and so would be fed into terrible conditions where they died. And unlike slavery, this system was easily extended to Whites as the bottom of the social pyramid too.

Teddy Roosevelt tried to crush it, but every time they'd just got stonewalled, like they did in the Mississippi Burning cases. It wasn't until FDR that they finally got that shit shut down. Slavery was actually perfectly legal as a legal punishment, so they went at it from the direction of debt peonage (same thing they used against the slavery of Indians/Mexicans in the Southwest).

It's also interesting, Mississippi actually had an (informal) state secret police dedicated to surveilling the Black population.