For March 28, 2022
Interlude
November 10, 1898. The Wilmington Massacre in NC, where a white supermacist mob kills dozens of Black people and destroys homes and businesses, preventing Blacks from running as city officials. [NB Charles Chesnutt wrote his 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition about these events.]
“Race Riot,” by Forrest Hamer. The poem addresses the lack of mention of the Wilmington in the history textbook and the unwillingness to address the racist past.
May 31, 1921. The Tulsa / Greenwood Massacre and the destruction of Black Wall Street. [The Smithsonian issue from April 2021 featured a crucial cover story on occasion of the 100th anniversary; NPR’s Codeswitch ran a story about the lack of appropriate memorialization]
“Greenwood,” by Jasmine Mans. The poem tells the story of the riot in vignettes, including the threatened lynching of the boy in the elevator, the attacks by airplane, the 35 blocks on fire, and the attempt of Black people to hold on to the memories of events white Tulsa tried to erase.
Chapter 11: Inheritance, by Trymaine Lee
Lee begins the essay with the story of a Black business owner in Lowdnesboro, near Montgomery, Elmore Bolling, an entrepreneur with a thriving gas station and catering company who started with fish fries and ice cream served out of a truck and had accumulated significant wealth by the 1940s–until the whites in the community who were jealous of his business success murdered him and forced his family to flee. Lee interviewed his daughter Josephine Bolling McCall about the story and the effect it had on her family–with many of Elmer’s children, specifically the sons, never quite “making it” (cf. end of the chapter) in the world.
Lee points out that this was not a “Jim Crow South” extreme case but part of a post-Reconstruction pattern of making it all but impossible for Black to hold on to any money they made, own property permanently, and thus pass on a material inheritance–after the Freedman’s Bureau was abolished in 1872, the bank associated with it failed to the detriment of 60,000 Black people who lost their savings, and the confiscated “Sherman Land” was mostly given back (2,000 out of 40,000 Black landowners were able to hold on to the land, the others became sharecroppers). When Blacks did succeed (Wilmington, Tulsa) this “often seemed to provoke the harshest response, especially from white people who felt threatened by a real or perceived rise in African American prosperity.” This got so extreme that, famously, Gov. Hugh M. Dorsey of Georgia actually spoke up against this kind of racial injustice and peonage regarding a prosperous Black farmer in 1921 [HE HADN’T BEEN WILLING TO DO THAT IN 1918, in the Mary Turner case, even though the NAACP tried very hard to convince him he should.]
Lee fast-forwards to the direct consequence: the racial wealth gap that exists today–her figure is median wealth increase when people in inherit ($104,000 vs. $4,000) [but I still think the most thought-provoking figure is median net worth (assets minus liabilities), which is $17,000 for a Black family and $170,000 for a white family for 2018 and projected to go down further for Black families]. Instead “millions of Black families have passed down something else from one generation to the next: the mental and emotional stress that results form the constant threat of white violence and financial insecurity.” The examples given are the stories of Elmore Bolling’s children–the family left for Montgomery, where Elmore’s widow worked as a domestic servant and where “the family would remain financially and emotionally adrift.” Some went North but of 7 children, only Josephine, the youngest, got a college degree, later becoming a school psychology, while several others dropped out of high school, and a trail of failed businesses, divorces, and, in the case of her brother Willie, who was with his father on the day white men took him away to murder him, mental illness and institutionalization. Of the 28 grandkids, 8 have graduated from college; others are unemployed or underemployed.
Interlude
1925. The publication of The New Negro: An Interpretation by Alain Locke, “father” of the Harlem Renaissance, who, unlike W.E.B. du Bois, believed that the arts were a creative force and not just useful as propaganda.
“The New Negro.” By A. van Jordan. Poem about the new ideas of the 1920s, including the insistence on capitalizing the word Negro.
1932. The Tuskegee study is begun on 600 male subjects, 2/3 of whom have syphilis that goes untreated, even as they were told they were being treated for “bad blood.” The study was not terminated until 1972, when the ethics violations were exposed, even though penicillin became available as treatment in the 1940s.
“Bad Blood” By Yaa Gyasi. A story about a woman in New York City, but with Alabama roots, who, despite a freak-0ut about her child having caught a disease from a tampon found in the playground, does not want to go to the doctor, partly because she might be accused of child neglect / having infected the child herself because she is Black, partly about not wanting to go to the doctor as a Black woman because of the distrust of white doctors, who “had no qualms about watching dozens of Black men die” for the Tuskegee study.
Chapter 12: Medicine, by Linda Villarosa
The chapter begins with Susan Moore, the Black doctor who died of Covid-19, leaving a very angry video behind that told of unprofessional and unempathetic treatment she received, and accusing the hospital of racial discrimination. Villarosa points to statistics re covid-19 and many other illnesses and conditions (eg. infant mortality, life expectancy) that demonstrate that Black Americans are more likely to get certain diseases and to die of them because “America’s history of racial violence and inequality is baked into the institutions and structures of our society”–not just in terms of the poverty that is part of the reason (“social determinants of health” and environmental racism that together explain a of the racial disparities between whites and others when it comes to health statistics) but also the stress factors that are related to the daily “coping with racism” and (her particular focus) the ways in which the medical establishment has not shed its legacy of racism.
She points to the beginning of racist medicine in 19th century scientific and medical experiments that were intended to “prove” that Black people were physiologically different from whites, for example experiencing less pain, having a literally thicker skin, different brains, etc. etc. Examples: Benjamin Moseely, 1787 (pain tolerance); Samuel Cartwright (lung capacity differences, “drapetomania”–the wish to escape slavery seen as mental illness); J. Marion Sims (gynecological procedure without anaesthesia); Thomas Hamilton (experimented on his enslaved people), Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in males, 1932-1972.
She points out that these were almost always not just pseudoscientific but also self-serving findings, proving Black inferiority and even assuaging white guilt / conscience, for example by reassuring enslavers that physical punishment didn’t affect Black enslaved people the way it would affect a white person. But although we now condemn these people and address the suffering they caused, some of these medical myths survive, including: the idea that Black people tolerate pain better, and the “race correction” that is made when spirometer readings are taken. The internalized racism and unconscious bias in the medical profession need to be addressed head-on, because, as she keeps repeating, the way the situation is now is “how Black people get killed.”