Mamie Kirkland, Witness to an Era of Racial Terror, Dies at 111

https://www.nytimes.com/20…/…/09/us/mamie-kirkland-dead.html

Mamie Kirkland, Witness to an Era of Racial Terror, Dies at 111

She endured the horrors of the African-American experience — lynchings, riots, the Ku Klux Klan — and worked to ensure that they never slipped from collective memory.

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Haunted by Memories for 100 Years

In 1915, Mamie Kirkland and her family fled Ellisville, Miss., in fear that her father would be lynched. She swore she would never return. But at age 107, she made the journey.

by Dan Barry

January 9, 2020

New York Times

PHOTO: In 1915, Mamie Kirkland and her family fled Ellisville, Miss., in fear that her father would be lynched. She swore she would never return. But at age 107, she made the journey.CreditCredit...Andrea Morales for The New York Times

Mamie Lang Kirkland died last month at her home in upstate New York. She was the mother of nine, the matriarch of another 158, a longtime  saleswoman for Avon Products, and, at the time of her death, at 111, the oldest resident of Buffalo.

That only begins to describe Ms. Kirkland.

She was also the embodiment of the African-American experience of the 20th century, her life’s long journey altered repeatedly by the racial  violence and bigotry coursing through the United States. Lynchings, riots, the Ku Klux Klan — she survived it all, and spent her centenarian  years working to ensure that these realities never slipped from collective memory.

Her life helped inspire the creation, in 2018, of the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Ala. Both document the country’s history of racial terrorism and encourage social justice.

Ms. Kirkland figures in two of the exhibits, said Sia Sanneh, a senior attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit that started the memorials. “Her life was such an inspiration to us,” Ms. Sanneh said. “It embodied all those things.”

Mamie Lang was born on Sept. 3, 1908, in the rural Mississippi town of Ellisville, the daughter of Edward Lang, a laborer and fledgling minister, and Rochelle (Moore) Lang, who minded the family’s rented home. Ms. Kirkland would remember the large peach tree in the yard, and the strange brew concocted by her grandmother that saved her from a typhomalarial fever when she was near death at age 5.

When she was about 7, her father awakened the family to announce that it was time to leave — some local white men were preparing to lynch him and his friend, John Hartfield. The two men slipped out of town that night; Rochelle and the five Lang children, including a nursing baby, escaped by train in the morning.

Ms. Kirkland, with family members and her supporters from the Equal Justice Initiative, prayed at the approximate spot where John Hartfield, her father’s friend, was lynched in 1919.

Ms. Kirkland, with family members and her supporters from the Equal Justice Initiative, prayed at the approximate spot where John Hartfield, her father’s friend, was lynched in 1919.Credit...Andrea Morales for The New York Times

The family friend, Mr. Hartfield, eventually returned to Ellisville, and in the summer of 1919 he was accused of raping a white woman. Some townspeople set a date for his lynching, a public event that the governor of Mississippi claimed he was powerless to prevent. At an appointed time announced in The Jackson Daily News, crowds gathered near a large gum tree beside the train tracks. There Mr. Hartfield was strung up and hanged, after which his body was riddled with bullets and burned. Body parts became souvenirs.

“Could have been my father,” Ms. Kirkland said in an interview with The New York Times in 2015.

Though the Lang family had fled to East St. Louis, Ill., they still could not outrun the racist violence. In 1917, white men responded to the pressures of changing demographics and job competition by rioting in black neighborhoods, burning down homes and shooting residents. Dozens died, thousands were left homeless, and 9-year-old Mamie was seared by the memory of seeing a deaf man shot dead because he could not hear an order to halt.

The family moved again, this time to Alliance, Ohio, reflecting another aspect of the black experience: the Great Migration of the last century, when six million African-Americans left the rural South for the urban Northeast and Midwest — some seeking economic opportunity, others hoping to escape racial terrorism.

Sometimes it followed them north.

In Alliance, in the 1920s, members of the Ku Klux Klan — whose rallies were casually announced in the local press — came to the family’s home, hoods donned and torches afire, to burn a cross on their lawn. The Langs always wondered what would have happened if armed white neighbors hadn’t arrived to chase away the aggressors.

At 15, Mamie married an itinerant railroad worker named Albert Kirkland, and the couple moved to Buffalo. He found work as a grinder at the Pratt & Letchworth plant; she gave birth to nine children, six of whom reached adulthood, and immersed herself in the First Shiloh Baptist Church, of which she was a foundational member.

After her husband died in 1959, Ms. Kirkland worked as a domestic helper and babysitter before becoming a door-to-door saleswoman for Avon. She never learned to drive, and often attributed her longevity to her faith and those many years walking the Buffalo streets selling beauty products. She was still taking orders until a few weeks before her death on Dec. 28, according to her son Tarabu Betserai Kirkland.

Mr. Kirkland, her youngest child at 70, said that his mother’s experience with Avon helped her to shed her shyness and embrace her ability to connect with people. Over time, he said, she became a kind of door-to-door life coach.

“Folks didn’t want her to leave the house,” Mr. Kirkland said in a phone interview this week. “She would help them figure out ways to manage.”

But there was one place that Ms. Kirkland refused to visit: the state of her birth, where the terror of racism had scarred her childhood. She often said that she didn’t even want to see Mississippi on a map.

Her son had been nudging her to tell her life’s powerful story, and in 2015 he showed her a report by the Equal Justice Initiative called “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.” It included an image of an old newspaper’s headline: “John Hartfield Will Be Lynched By Ellisville Mob at 5 O’Clock This Afternoon.”

“We had never seen anything documented about John Hartfield,” Mr. Kirkland said. “For a long time we didn’t know if it was fact or fiction. But then she pointed to my laptop and said, ‘That’s him.’ And chills went up my back.”

PHOTO: “I left Mississippi a scared little girl of 7 years old,” Ms. Kirkland said in 2016. “Now I’m 107 — and I’m not frightened anymore.”Credit: Andrea Morales for The New York Times

A few months later, Ms. Kirkland returned to Ellisville with her son, who has been working on a documentary film about his mother’s journey. It was an emotional visit to a place that seemed to have erased the Hartfield lynching from memory. Ms. Kirkland took time to pray at the approximate spot where a mob had killed her father’s friend.

“She always maintained this level of grace and forgiveness,” Mr. Kirkland said. “I’m not sure I could do that.”

In addition to her son, Ms. Kirkland’s survivors include her daughters Juanita Hunter, Beatrice Kirkland, Margaret Kirkland and Jeanette Clinton.

In 2016, the Equal Justice Initiative honored Ms. Kirkland at a fund-raising gala in Manhattan. She and her son worked for weeks on her short speech, in which she planned to tell the young people in the audience that stories like hers needed to be told again and again; that stories like hers were just as important now as they were a century ago; that she should know, because she had been there.

Her speech reflected a resilient optimism; a determination to triumph over tribulation. “I left Mississippi a scared little girl of 7 years old,” Ms. Kirkland said at the event. “Now I’m 107 — and I’m not frightened anymore.”

Organizers fretted about how their guest would ascend to the stage, and they offered her a wheelchair. She declined, saying that she intended to walk on her own.

And she did.

RELATED:

Horror Drove Her From South. 100 Years Later, She Returned.

Sept. 19, 2015

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dan Barry is a longtime reporter and columnist, having written both the “This Land” and “About New York” columns. The author of several books, he writes on myriad topics, including sports, culture, New York City, and the nation. @DanBarryNYT • Facebook

PHOTO: In 1915, Mamie Kirkland and her family fled Ellisville, Miss., in fear that her father would be lynched. She swore she would never return. 

But at age 107, she made the journey. Credit:  Andrea Morales for The New York Times

Isabel Wilkerson On the Great Black Migration and the History of White Supremacy And Systemic Racial Oppression in the Northern and Western Regions of the United States

All,

A great article by a great writer, the always profound (and Pulitzer Prize receipient) Isabel Wilkerson…please read and pass the word...

Kofi

ISABEL WILKERSON

(b. 1961)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/opinion/sunday/when-will-the-north-face-its-racism.html

Sunday Review | Opinion

When Will the North Face Its Racism?

By ISABEL WILKERSON

JANUARY 10, 2015

NEW YORK TIMES

Lily vendors in Chicago, April 1941. Credit Edwin Rosskam/Library of Congress

ATLANTA — THE groundswell of protests over police brutality in the closing days of 2014, when people dropped to the marble floor of Grand Central Terminal and shut down the Brooklyn Bridge, blocked Lake Shore Drive in Chicago and chanted “I Can’t Breathe” from Boston to Oakland, summoned ghosts not only of the marches of the civil rights era but of the larger forces that led to the arrival of so many African-Americans in the big cities of the North and West in the first place.

Dozens of cities would ultimately join in these demonstrations of discontent. But a map of the largest protests those first nights, and of the high-profile cases of police violence in recent months, lit up like a map of the Great Migration: New York, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Washington, Los Angeles, Oakland, all of them the major receiving stations of the movement. These were the places to which generations of African-Americans fled to escape the state-sanctioned violence their descendants have now faced in the North and West.

In matters of racial injustice, the South has been the center of attention since before the time of the Civil War. But the North, with its shorter history of a mass black population, has only more recently dealt with the paradox of an enlightened ideal coexisting with racial disparity. The protests have become a referendum on the black condition since the Great Migration. “The protests are beginning to wake people up to the idea that the problems are not only there but have been obvious all along,” the historian Taylor Branch told me. “It feels like the South in the 1950s.”

It was because of the Great Migration — six million black Southerners fleeing Jim Crow from World War I to the 1970s — that African-Americans now live in every state of the union. They were seeking political asylum within their own country in what was, in effect, one of the nation’s largest and longest mass demonstrations against injustice. It was barely recognized for what it was at the time, arising as it did organically, rather than from a single leader, much like the protests today. Both migrants and protesters were pleading with the world to take notice that something was terribly wrong in the places where they lived.

In the early decades of the 20th century, a caste system ruled the South with such repression that every four days an African-American was  lynched for some perceived breach or mundane accusation — having stolen 75 cents or made off with a mule. Those conditions forced most every black family to consider the best course of action to feel safe and free. “Where can we go,” a black woman in Alabama wrote in 1902, “to feel that security which other people feel?”

Generations later, police killings of African-Americans occur as often as twice a week for at times mundane infractions and at three times the rate as for whites, according to conservative estimates from recent studies. What happens in the moments after these encounters reveals a disregard for black life as disturbing as the shootings themselves. In the case of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old with a toy gun who was shot within seconds of a squad car’s arrival at a Cleveland park, new video released this week showed officers wrestling the boy’s 14-year-old sister to the ground and handcuffing her as she appeared to run toward her bleeding brother.

Such cases force black families again to consider how to safeguard their children and themselves from the violence they suffer at a disproportionate rate at the hands of authorities assigned to protect them. They are still giving a version of the same talk their ancestors gave their children back in the old country of the South, about answering yes, sir, and no, sir, and watching how they comport themselves around the upper caste and the police.

Now, as then, those kitchen table discussions signal a painful coming to terms with one’s tenuous condition in one’s own land. What was little understood at the time of the migration was that the refugees from the South shared the same dreams as the immigrants who stepped off the ships at Ellis Island, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. One of the few contemporaneous studies in the early years of the migration, published by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations in 1922, surveyed Southern migrants to determine why they had come north and what they had hoped to find. The migrants responded:

“Freedom in voting and the conditions of the colored people here.”

“Freedom and chance to make a living.”

“Freedom and opportunity to acquire something.”

“Freedom of speech, right to live and work as other races.”

“Freedom of speech and action. Can live without fear, no Jim Crow.”

Those desires went little noticed. Indeed, it was resentment toward the Southerners’ arrival and obstacles to their entering the mainstream of Northern life that helped create the current conditions. Northern cities had had limited exposure to African-Americans. These cities were ill-prepared to absorb large numbers of asylum seekers who stood out from the rest of the population.

And so the newcomers were met with suspicion. Often recruited as strikebreakers, they were denied access to some unions and trades and  were paid the lowest wages for the dirtiest work. They were roped off into overcrowded ghettos by means of redlining and periodic firebombings of homes purchased by black residents who breached the de facto wall of segregation.

Unlike the immigrants from Europe, they could not shield themselves from the assumptions about their heritage or blend into the majority just by Anglicizing their names or mastering the senator’s English. They stood out as the children of enslavement and Jim Crow, unable to escape the burden of a pained history.

It was a measure of how dire conditions were in the South that the Great Migration continued into the 1970s. When it began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the time it ended, nearly half of all African-Americans lived elsewhere.

Notably, however, high profile-cases of police brutality have recently come to be associated with the North rather than the South. And it is in the South that two recent cases of police shootings of unarmed black people resulted in more vigorous prosecution. Last month, as protests raged over the deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri, Eric Garner in New York and John Crawford and Tamir Rice in Ohio, Randall Kerrick, a police officer in Charlotte, N.C., made his first court appearance on a charge of voluntary manslaughter in the 2013 death of Jonathan Ferrell. Mr. Ferrell was an unarmed black motorist who was shot 10 times as he sought help after a car accident. In September, Sean Groubert, a South Carolina state trooper, was fired after shooting an unarmed man, Levar Jones, during a traffic stop over a seatbelt violation. In a widely circulated video of the incident, Mr. Jones asked the trooper with humbling composure, “What did I do, sir?” Then: “Why did you shoot me?” He survived his injuries. The trooper was arrested and charged with aggravated assault and battery, a felony that carries a possible 20-year prison term.

The nation still has far to go, but this, at least, seems cause for hope. It suggests that the South, after decades of wrestling with its history, is now willing to face injustice head on. And it suggests that the North, after decades of insisting that it was fairer and more free, could eventually do the same.

It is not known what will come of the current upheaval in the North. The protests are a response to unprosecuted police brutality but are also a plea for recognition of African-Americans’ humanity. How can success be measured when the goals are so basic and enduring? History tells us that enough people acting together can have an impact beyond what could be imagined. The Great Migration changed American culture as we know it, produced jazz and Motown, playwrights and novelists, and transformed the social geography of most every city outside of the South. At the start of the movement, one of its chroniclers put the migrants’ aims in perspective. “If all of their dream does not come true,” The Chicago Defender newspaper wrote, “enough will come to pass to justify their actions.”

If the events of the last year have taught us anything, it is that, as much progress has been made over the generations, the challenges of color and tribe were not locked away in another century or confined to a single region but persist as a national problem and require the commitment of the entire nation to resolve.

Isabel Wilkerson is the author of “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” and a former national correspondent and bureau chief for The New York Times.

Dr. Beryl Satter And Darnell L. Moore On the Insidious Racial Politics of Real Estate, Segregation, National Housing Policy, And Gentrification on Urban Spaces And Their Direct Impact On the Violent Oppression and Exploitation Of African Americans in the U.S.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/26015-the-price-of-blackness-from-ferguson-to-bed-stuy

“This is what happens when you have massive racial change in a community and the power structure remains in the hands of whites and the police force acts as this sort of mediating force between the white power structure and what is now a black community and has very little empathy or knowledge about that community.”

--Dr. Beryl Satter 

The Price of Blackness: From Ferguson to Bed-Stuy
Friday, 05 September 2014
By Darnell L. Moore,
The Feminist Wire | Op-Ed
 

The unsettling image of the lifeless body of 18-year old Mike Brown, the unarmed teen shot six times by Officer Darren Wilson, which laid prostrate before family and neighbors for hours in a pool of blood in the sweltering summer heat in Ferguson, MO, will surely haunt the collective conscious of the US for years to come.

Mike Brown’s murder, and the brutalizing way his killing was turned into a public spectacle, has much to do with the ways Black lives are literally and symbolically devalued in neighborhoods throughout the US The image of his lifeless body publicly displayed on the street is a heartrending reminder that Black bodies in the US are rendered valueless—so much so that even in death, particularly the kind sanctioned by the state, Black people, like Mike Brown and his family, are not afforded the right to humane treatment.

When commenting on the demographic changes in Ferguson for CNN, Beryl Satter, author of Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America, noted, “This is what happens when you have massive racial change in a community and the power structure remains in the hands of whites and the police force acts as this sort of mediating force between the white power structure and what is now a black community and has very little empathy or knowledge about that community.”

Ferguson, like many municipalities across the US, has experienced a dramatic shift in its racial composition. The municipality of roughly 21,000, which, according to the US Census, was comprised of a majority White populace (73.8%) in 1990, is now home to a majority Black populace (67.4%). Ferguson, thus, is more than the subject of a black teen’s death. It is the product of over five decades of “white flight.”

Changes in the racial composition of towns precipitate changes in the ways Black bodies are policed and valued in many neighborhoods. Anti-blackness—as evidenced through the enactment of inequitable laws, discriminatory policing practices, and economic exploitation disproportionately impacting Black people—is one of the threads that connects an individual tragedy, like Mike Brown’s death, to the broader structural issues of White racial supremacy, global capitalism, and gentrification impacting Black people and the working poor to middle class communities they hail from across the US Black lives and White lives are differently valued and are, therefore, differently impacted under the conditions of White racial supremacy across the country.

My brief time in Ferguson prompted me to consider the many ways Mike Brown’s death, and life, was warped by the structural conditions mentioned above—all emanating from what scholar George Lipsitz aptly calls the “possessive investment in whiteness.” Such investments in whiteness, which impacts everything from access to housing markets to points of educational access for Black people within communities across the country, must also be considered alongside the mundane incidents of police violence and hyper criminalization in the US.

Black death at the hands of the state is a consequence of the precarious structural conditions restricting Black life from Ferguson to Flatbush, Brooklyn. Flatbush is the neighborhood where 16-year old Kimani Gray was shot and killed by NYPD in March 2013. I live a short distance from Flatbush, in neighboring Bed-Stuy. Unlike Ferguson, which was a predominantly White space that experienced a decrease in its White populace, traditional black neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy are now experiencing an increase in its White populace.

Bed-Stuy is evidence that the investment in whiteness and divestment in blackness shapes the conditions in which Black bodies engage, and are engaged in, geographical spaces. White bodies in Bed-Stuy now seemingly signals safety and welcome, which is to say: White folk who would not otherwise perceive “Do or Die BedStuy” as safe and welcoming begin to finally perceive it as such because of the presence of other White people. Race shapes perceptions of space.

The problem with this misperception has less to do with the brutal truth that Black spaces like BedStuy or Ferguson are typically deemed “the hood,” as spaces that lack or are wholly violent until White folk increasingly begin trekking into, or back into, the very communities many people, white/black/brown/otherwise, imagined as terrifying. The more insidious problem is the belief that whiteness at all times and in all places signifies safety and bounty and, therefore, represents a site of investment: new stores selling expensive items begin emerging; the same stores stay open (the doors and not just side windows) twenty-four hours; realtors finally begin to take an interest in property sales; nameless and faceless “investors” begin leaving cheap flyers on stoops or in mailboxes promising cash for homes. Safety becomes a relative experience when gentrification occurs. The presence of White people almost always guarantees the increased presence of resources, like police, which does not always guarantee safety for Black people in those same spaces.

And here is what distinguishes the movement of White people into Black and Brown spaces from the movement of Black gentrifiers into those same spaces. Those Black folk, like me, who are afforded the privilege of choosing some of the locations we live are still considered valueless bodies in the same spaces we gentrify. Our presence does not always bring healthy food stores, cute eateries, and hospitable police; on the contrary, we are embattled by the very structural forces of White racial supremacy and capitalism that actually benefit White gentrifiers. And some of us might easily be stopped by police, harassed, or even shot whether we appear respectable or not in those same spaces.

So, if we are to ensure the end of state-sanctioned violence against Black people, we must be ready to think through and redress the socioeconomic and class underpinnings of anti-blackness and White racial supremacy. Until we do, whether we are bodies left to die without compassion in the streets or bodies read as deficits in communities across the US, Black people will continue to be treated as something other than human as whiteness continues to function as a sign for possession and asset.


This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

http://us.macmillan.com/familyproperties/berylsatter

 

Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America
by Beryl Satter
Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Company)
2009
 
How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America

“Gripping . . . This painstaking portrayal of the human costs of financial racism is the most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North.”

 —David Garrow, The Washington Post

The “promised land” for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation’s worst ghettos. In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true cause of the city’s black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: a widespread institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation.

BERYL SATTER
(b. 1959)

Part family story and part urban history, Family Properties is the riveting account of a city in crisis, involving unscrupulous slumlords and speculators pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney—the author’s father— who launched a crusade against the profiteers. Satter shows the interlocking forces at work: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country’s shameful “dual housing market”; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city’s most vulnerable population.

A monumental work, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America.

BERYL SATTER

Beryl Satter is the author of Each Mind a Kingdom and the chair of the Department of History at Rutgers University in Newark. She was raised in Chicago, Skokie, and Evanston, Illinois, and is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School and the Yale American Studies program. For her work in progress on Family Properties, Satter received a J. Anthony Lukas citation. She lives in New York City.

http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/race-family-and-real-estate-beryl-satters-family-properties

Race, Family, and Real Estate: Beryl Satter's Family Properties -

See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/race-family-and-real-estate-beryl-satters-family-properties#sthash.Xk38QzVK.dpuf

In her new book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (2009), historian Beryl Satter puts a human face on the often told story of racial discrimination in urban housing by following the career of her father, Chicago attorney Mark J. Satter, who was both an ardent defender of his mostly black clients who had been severely exploited by real estate speculators, and a property owner in an increasingly black neighborhood who some later accused of being a slumlord himself. Her account is a cautionary tale that reminds us that the ghettos of America's largest cities are the consequence of large impersonal economic forces and of hundreds of individual decisions driven by self-interest and, on occasion, by selfless motives as well.

Family Properties deals with one of the most contentious questions of recent American history –- why so many urban neighborhoods changed so rapidly from white to black, and then decayed into slums. Yet the book originated in something very personal -- my curiosity about my father, Mark J. Satter.

He was a Jewish Chicago attorney with a largely black, working-class clientele. He was 49 years old when he died from a heart ailment in 1965; I, the youngest of his five children, was six. As I grew older, I picked up oddly mixed messages about him from my relatives. They told me he had been a well-known crusader for the oppressed. But they also spoke in more whispered tones about properties he had owned in what was now a black ghetto. He’d hoped that they would provide for his family. Instead, they had become worthless. They were sold shortly after his death. By then they were worth so little that their sale hadn’t even covered that winter’s coal bills -- and I understood that somehow, my relatives felt that he was to blame.

There was a mystery here, and so, a decade ago, I finally decided to investigate my father’s story. I began by reading my father’s papers, which had been saved by one of my brothers.

I was shocked by the stories they contained.

I learned that my father had represented scores of African-Americans who had been unconscionably mislead and grossly overcharged by the real estate agents they’d turned to for help in buying homes. A typical example: in 1957 a white real estate agent, Jay Goran, bought a building for $4300. Soon after, Goran sold it to a black couple, Albert and Sallie Bolton -- for $13,900.

Goran never told the Boltons that he was actually the building’s owner. The Boltons signed some complicated documents that said that the building would remain the legal property of its current owner until they paid off the property in full. They made their high monthly payments for a year; they also spent a considerable sum for repairs. Then they missed a payment, and were evicted. Goran was now free to resell the property, keeping all that the Boltons had invested in it.

In part, the Boltons lost their home and their savings because of the policies of the Federal Housing Administration, which redlined -- that is, refused to insure mortgages -- in neighborhoods that contained even a few black residents. As urban historians have shown, FHA redlining made it impossible for most African Americans to buy homes with a mortgage. Instead, they were forced to deal with speculators, who bought low from whites and sold high to blacks. But these historians missed a critical point. Given that blacks could not get mortgages, how were they able to buy high-priced properties?

The trap that caught my father’s clients provides the answer. Unable to get a mortgage, the Boltons bought their building “on contract,” that is, on an installment plan. They made a down payment. They were also responsible for taxes, insurance, maintenance, and interest. However, they couldn’t get title to the building until the purchase price had been entirely paid off. With just one missed payment, the speculator could reclaim the building. If housing prices were inflated, a missed payment and subsequent quick eviction was practically guaranteed. And prices were wildly inflated. Speculators routinely sold to African Americans at double their properties’ values, but sale prices of triple to quadruple the properties’ values were not uncommon. The fact that approximately 85% of the properties sold to black Chicagoans were sold on contract – and that there were close to a million black people in Chicago by the mid-1960s – gives a sense of the scale of the exploitation.

Why were black Chicagoans willing to buy overpriced properties on contract? Consider the fact that between 1940 and 1960, Chicago’s black population almost tripled, from approximately 278,000 to 813,000. Most were squeezed into the South Side Black Belt -- a neighborhood that had been severely overcrowded even before World War II. Essentially, they were trapped. While homes were for sale at decent prices in nearby white areas, black people could not get mortgages to purchase property there. Landlords in surrounding white neighborhoods usually refused to rent to them as well. Those few black families who did escape the South Side ghetto and move to a less crowded white area were often attacked by their white neighbors, who would mass in front of their home, breaking windows and shouting death threats.

At the same time, black incomes rose nationally in the 1950s; the rise was particularly pronounced in Chicago, where tens of thousands of middle-income black people were paying high rents for inadequate spaces in the South Side Black Belt. Given this context, when a contract seller offered them housing outside of the ghetto, it made sense for them to grab it. Although the prices that the contract sellers charged were high, monthly payments often weren’t much higher than the rents that black families were already paying. Given the redlining policies of the FHA, buying on contract was one of the only means of escape from the high-rent, overcrowded ghetto.

But that didn’t mean that contract sellers weren’t wreaking havoc, fomenting racial division, and exploiting their black customers. “Blockbusting” contract sellers terrorized whites by going door to door, telling homeowners that “the blacks are coming.” If a white person’s house was worth, say, $8,000, they’d offer $7000 – adding that if the homeowner didn’t want to sell, the speculator would be back in month, but this time would offer $6500 – and if that wasn’t adequate, he’d offer the homeowner $6000 shortly after that. Facing this kind of pressure, the white homeowner would sell to the contract seller at $7000 – and the contract seller would then sell that property, on contract of course, to a black buyer – often a person of middle-class income – for, say, $15,000.

But even for a middle-income person, being forced to pay double or more than a property was worth hurt. In addition to being grossly overpriced, the buildings that contract sellers sold were often riddled with code violations. Some black buyers managed the payments and the high repair costs – others did not. And remember, if a contract buyer fell behind on even a single payment, he or she was out – the property reverted to the contract seller, who would resell it to another victim.

What happened to “racially changing” areas where contract sellers were active? While contract sellers became millionaires, their harsh terms and inflated prices destroyed whole communities. Because black contract buyers knew how easily they could lose their homes, they struggled to make their inflated monthly payments. Husband and wives both worked double shifts. They neglected basic maintenance. They subdivided their apartments, crammed in extra tenants, and, when possible, charged their tenants hefty rents. Indeed, the genius of this system was that it forced black contract buyers be their own exploiters.

The resulting decline of racially changing areas fed white racism. White people observed that their new black neighbors overcrowded and neglected their properties. Overcrowded neighborhoods meant overcrowded schools; in Chicago, officials responded by “double-shifting” the students (half attending in the morning, and half in the afternoon). Children were deprived of a full day of schooling and left to fend for themselves in the after-school hours. These conditions helped fuel the rise of gangs, which terrorized shop owners and residents alike. Ultimately whites fled these neighborhoods not only because of the influx of black families, but also because they were upset about overcrowding, decaying schools, and crime. They also understood that the longer they stayed, the less their property would be worth.

My father’s immersion in the heartbreaking details of his clients’ lives led him to embark on an impassioned crusade against Chicago’s real estate speculators – and against the white professionals, mortgage bankers, and politicians who enabled those speculators to thrive. He tried numerous cases against the city’s worst contract sellers, and gave countless speeches to any group that would listen denouncing their practices. At the same time he was also managing his own properties, four buildings that he had purchased in the 1940s and 1950s. All were located in Lawndale, a formerly Jewish neighborhood (my father was born and raised there) which was rapidly becoming black, and which also contained a high concentration of overpriced contract sales.

It was ironic but not surprising, then, that as my father urged others to protect their investments, his own deteriorated. He poured his money into maintaining the properties, but eventually it became nearly impossible to find either honest building managers or responsible tenants. His building managers stole from him. Some of the tenants they let in severely vandalized the property. The repair bills grew higher until they wiped him out financially.

Indeed, as my brother David later told me, that my father was “caught in his own trap.” When he rented to black tenants, he was called a “blockbuster.” If he were to refuse to rent to them, he would be a racist. Given his public posture, my father could not sell his buildings as blacks were beginning to move in; that would make him a hypocrite. If he sold after the neighborhood had become all black, he’d find no buyers except the speculators he was denouncing. Of course he would not participate in the plunder engaged in by these men and women. He decided to hold on, and try his hardest to maintain his properties while the surrounding area crumbled. But if his efforts to maintain them failed, then he was a slumlord. If tenants damaged the buildings, he would be called a slumlord as well.

Although the ironies were greater, my father’s situation differed little from that of any other white landlord in a “changing” urban neighborhood. Their choices were 1) to become contract sellers themselves; 2) to sell their property to a real estate speculator; or 3) try to “do the right thing” – that is, do what the liberals were preaching and stay in the neighborhood. But more often than not that meant to watch as one’s neighborhood became overcrowded, neglected, and crime-ridden, and to watch in horror as one’s property decline dramatically in value – until, defeated at last, the remaining whites exercised the one option that many of their black neighbors did not have – the option to leave.

My father died before he had to face the final indignity of selling his properties for nothing, but in the final months of his life, he suffered because of his powerlessness. There are lines from Herman Melville’s novel Pierre that perfectly express the tragedy of my father’s final year. Melville wrote that “in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;--nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.”

I had thought that my father’s untimely death in 1965 was also the tragic end of the battle against exploitative contract selling in Chicago. I would learn, however, that the battle he’d tried to ignite did finally take off -- but only after his death, when a black-led community organization called the Contract Buyers League arose to battle that practice. The struggles, losses, and ultimate triumphs of Chicago’s black contract buyers was a gripping drama that my father’s story led me to uncover, and one that would grant a measure of closure to what I had initially believed to be the tragedy of my father’s lonely battle.

Sources:

The above material is adopted from “Race and Real Estate,” a précis of Family Properties that was published in the July/August 2009 issue of Poverty & Race, the bimonthly publication of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington D.C. (www.prrac.org) and from the book Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America by Beryl Satter. Copyright © 2009 by Beryl Satter. Reprinted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company LLC.

Contributor(s):

Satter, Beryl
Rutgers University, Newark
See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/race-family-and-real-estate-beryl-satters-family-properties#sthash.Xk38QzVK.dpuf

A Historical Timeline of the Civil Rights Movement from 1960-1964

http://afroamhistory.about.com/od/civilrightsstruggle1/a/timeline1960_2.htm
 

Timeline of the Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1964

While the non-violent movement for civil rights started in the 1950s, it was during the early sixties that non-violent techniques began to pay off. Civil rights activists and students across the South challenged segregation, and the relatively new technology of television allowed Americans to witness the often brutal response to these protests.

By 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson was able to push through the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. This timeline of the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement reveals just what an impressive number of historic events happened between 1960 and 1964.

1960

On February 1, four young African-American men, students at North Carolina Agriculture and Technical College, go to a Woolworth in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sit down at a whites-only lunch counter. They order coffee. Despite being denied service, they sit silently and politely at the lunch counter until closing time. Their action marks the start of the Greensboro sit-ins, which sparks similar protests all over the South.

On April 15, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee holds its first meeting.

On July 25, the downtown Greensboro Woolworth desegregates its lunch counter after six months of sit-ins.

On Oct. 19, Martin Luther King, Jr., joins a student sit-in at a whites-only restaurant inside of an Atlanta department store, Rich's. He is arrested along with 51 other protesters on the charge of trespassing. On probation for driving without a valid Georgia license (he had an Alabama license), a Dekalb County judge sentences MLK to four months in prison doing hard labor. Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy phones King's wife, Coretta, to offer encouragement while his brother, Robert Kennedy, convinces the judge to release King on bail. This phone call convinces many African-Americans to support the Democratic ticket.

On December 5, the Supreme Court hands down a 7-2 decision in the Boynton v. Virginia case, ruling that segregation on vehicles traveling between states is unlawful because it violates the Interstate Commerce Act.

1961

On May 4, the Freedom Riders, composed of seven African-American and six white activists, leave Washington, D.C. for the rigidly segregated Deep South. Organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), their goal is to test Boynton v. Virginia.

On May 14, Freedom Riders, now traveling in two separate groups, are attacked outside Anniston, Alabama and in Birmingham, Alabama. A mob throws a firebomb onto the bus that the group outside Anniston is riding. Members of the Ku Klux Klan attack the second group in Birmingham after making an arrangement with the local police to allow them 15 minutes alone with the bus.

On May 15, the Birmingham group of Freedom Riders is prepared to continue their trip down south, but no bus will agree to take them. They fly to New Orleans instead.

On May 17, a new group of young activists join two of the original Freedom Riders to complete the trip. They are placed under arrest in Montgomery, Alabama.

On May 29, President Kennedy announces that he has ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission to enact stricter regulations and fines for buses and facilities that refuse to integrate. Young white and black activists continue to make Freedom Rides.

In November, civil rights activists participate in a series of protests, marches and meetings in Albany, Georgia, that come to be known as the Albany Movement.

In December, King comes to Albany and joins the protesters, staying in Albany for another nine months.

1962

On August 10, King announces that he is leaving Albany. The Albany Movement is generally considered a failure in terms of effecting change, but what King learns in Albany allows him to be successful in Birmingham, Alabama.

On September 10, the Supreme Court rules that the University of Mississippi must admit African-American student and veteran James Meredith.

On September 26, the governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, orders state troopers to prevent Meredith from entering Ole Miss's campus.

Between September 30 and October 1, riots erupt at over Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi or "Ole Miss."

On October 1, Meredith becomes the first African-American student at Ole Miss after President Kennedy orders U.S. marshals to Mississippi to ensure his safety.

1963

King, SNCC and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organize a series of demonstrations and protests to challenge segregation in Birmingham, Alabama.

On April 12, Birmingham police arrest King for demonstrating without a city permit.

On April 16, King writes his famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in which he responds to eight white Alabama ministers who urged him to end the protests and be patient with the judicial process of overturning segregation.

On June 11, President Kennedy delivers a speech on civil rights from the Oval Office, specifically explaining why he sent the National Guard to allow the admittance of two African-American students to the University of Alabama.

On June 12, Byron De La Beckwith assassinates Medgar Evers, the first field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi.

On August 18, James Meredith graduates from Ole Miss.

On August 28, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is held in D.C. Around 250,000 people participate, and King delivers his legendary "I have a dream" speech.

On September 15, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham is bombed. Four young girls are killed.

On November 22, Kennedy is assassinated, but his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, uses the nation's anger to push through civil rights legislation in Kennedy's memory.

1964

On March 12, Malcolm X leaves the Nation of Islam. Among his reasons for the break is Elijah Muhammad's ban on protesting for Nation of Islam adherents.

Between June and August, SNCC organizes a voter registration drive in Mississippi known as Freedom Summer.

On June 21, three Freedom Summer workers--Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman--disappear.

On August 4, the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman are found in a dam. All three had been shot, and the African-American activist, Chaney, had also been badly beaten.

On June 24, Malcolm founds the Organization of Afro-American Unity along with John Henrik Clarke. Its aim is to unite all Americans of African descent against discrimination.

On July 2, Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination in employment and in public places.

In July and August, riots break out in Harlem and Rochester, New York.

On August 27, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDM), organized to challenge the traditional state democratic party that had excluded African Americans, sends a delegation to the national Democratic convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They ask to represent Mississippi at the convention. Offered two seats at the convention in turn, the MFDM delegates reject the proposal.

On December 10, the Nobel Foundation awards MLK the Nobel Peace Prize.
 

Timeline of the Civil Rights Movement, 1963-1964:
afroamhistory.about.com

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/07/1963-defining-year-civil-rights

1963: The defining year of the civil rights movement

Fifty years on, we look back at the year that signalled the beginning of the modern era
 
by Gary Younge
The Guardian
6 May 2013
 

GARY YOUNGE

On 28 August, in the shadow of Lincoln's monument, Martin Luther King announced to the March on Washington during his famous "I have a dream" speech that "1963 is not an end, but a beginning". For legal segregation, it would turn out to be the beginning of the end. The year started with Alabama governor George Wallace standing on the steps of the state capitol in hickory-striped trousers and a cutaway coat declaring: "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation for ever." The civil rights leadership was ambivalent about the suggestion of a national march and President John F Kennedy was focused on foreign affairs. Within a few months Alabama would become internationally renowned as policemen turned dogs and high-pressure water hoses on children as young as six in Birmingham. Civil rights leaders were running to catch up with the militancy of their grassroots activists and the Democratic House majority leader told Kennedy: "[Civil rights] is overwhelming the whole programme".

This phase of civil rights activism did not start in 1963. Far from it. Until that point there had, of course, been many fearless acts by anti-racist protesters. On 1 February 1960, 17-year-old Franklin McCain and three black friends went to the whites-only counter at Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina, and took a seat. "We wanted to go beyond what our parents had done. The worst thing that could happen was that the Ku Klux Klan could kill us … but I had no concern for my personal safety. The day I sat at that counter I had the most tremendous feeling of elation and celebration," he told me.

But in 1963 the number who were prepared to commit such resistance reached a critical mass. "In three difficult years," wrote the late academic Manning Marable in Malcolm X, "the southern struggle had grown from a modest group of black students demonstrating at one lunch-counter to the largest mass movement for racial reform and civil rights in the 20th century".

The pace and trajectory of these changes were global. Two days after McCain's protest, British prime minister Harold Macmillan addressed the South African parliament in Cape Town with an ominous warning: "The wind of change is blowing through this continent," he said. "Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact." As the decade wore on, that wind became a gale. In the three years between Macmillan's and King's speeches, Togo, Mali, Senegal, Zaire, Somalia, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon, Nigeria, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika and Jamaica all became independent. "The new sense of dignity and self-respect on the part of the Negro," King argued in a 1960 essay, The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness, was due in part to "the awareness that his struggle is a part of a worldwide struggle".


Civil rights protestors are attacked with a water cannon. Photograph: Getty Images
 
In the US in May, events in Birmingham were transformative. The New York Times published more stories about civil rights in those two weeks than it had in the previous two years. Televised scenes of children campaigning against rigid segregation, being bitten by Alsatians and knocked off their feet by water fired with enough power to rip bark off a tree caused international outrage. Before, only 4% of Americans thought civil rights was the country's most pressing issue; afterwards it was 52%. According to the Justice Department, in the 10 weeks before King's "I have a dream" speech there were 758 demonstrations in 186 cities resulting in 14,733 arrests. "Birmingham became the moment of truth," argued Bayard Rustin, who organised the March on Washington. "Birmingham meant that tokenism is finished. The Negro masses are no longer prepared to wait for anybody … They are going to move. Nothing can stop them."

The march for jobs and freedom in Washington, which had aroused precious little interest just months before, now became the order of the day. It was a bold initiative. At the time marches in the capital were rare and this one was not particularly popular. A Gallup poll just a few weeks before the march revealed that 71% of Americans knew about it and of those only 23% were favourable while 42% were unfavourable, 18% thought it wouldn't accomplish anything and 7% thought it would end in violence. Kennedy, who was trying to get civil rights legislation through Congress, tried to talk them out of it. "We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the capitol," he said. Union organiser A Philip Randolph, who had called the march, told him: "The Negroes are already in the streets. It is very likely impossible to get them off."

Still, the march drew 250,000 people, roughly a quarter of whom were white and was deemed a great success by many. King's speech – which received no mention in the Washington Post the following day – would eventually become its most celebrated articulation of the period. "That day for a moment it almost seemed that we stood on a height," wrote James Baldwin in No Name in the Street. "And could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real, perhaps the beloved community would not for ever remain that dream one dreamed in agony."

It did not take long for the realities of southern bigotry to deflate the mood. "There was no way we could have known then that that afternoon would represent the peak of such feelings, that the hope and optimism contained in King's words would dwindle in the coming years," wrote Congressman John Lewis; "that in a matter of mere days after he stepped down from that stage a bomb blast in Birmingham would kill four little girls and usher in a season of darkness for the movement and for me."

• Gary Younge's The Speech, The story behind Martin Luther King's Dream Speech, will be published in August

1963: the defining year of the civil rights movement
www.theguardian.com