Black America is in a permanent depression.

We look at the country and go "ohh golly, it's 5.6% unemployment, things are getting better!" And then Black Americans look at any day, ever, in the history of this country and go: "Welp, we're still fucked."

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tbm24 said:

It's combination of racial profiling, to the war on drugs, to the amount of prejudice and bias present in every step of the legal system. From arrest to sentencing, minorities are treated unfairly and sentenced unfairly, black America being the group suffering the most by it. What that leads people to simply assume is that crime is inherent to race and as such the circle of bullshit continues to spin.

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Yrael said:

There's a combination of reasons. When black men are jailed, it's usually for non-violent drug offences - black people are much more likely to be profiled and targeted by police. Plus, due to racial disparities in wealth, black people are much more likely to need to depend on court-ordered public defenders, which often don't provide adequate service. And that's not even going into racial and prejudicial bias. There are factors at essentially every step along the way that result in black people being much more likely to be incarcerated.

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mantidor said:

Are there any statistics that take into account poverty? Because poverty is the most important factor related to violence, and black people in the US are more on the side of poverty than wealth for obvious historical reasons. Depressed neighborhoods with mostly white people also have much more violence (and incarceration) than wealthy neighborhoods.

I think is important to give a thorough analysis to the issue, because it's complex and has many ramifications. Racial profiling exists, war on drugs exacerbates the problem, but if we remove both would it really reduce the number of black people going to jail in a significant amount?

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RedSwirl said:

I've started to think this by itself would make one of the biggest impacts, or at least some kind of change to housing in this country. People theorize LGBT rights are moving ahead faster than racial equality because any white person in power might have a gay friend or family member, but how many of them know more than maybe one black or latino person?

I sometimes wonder if I myself am an example of the change this can bring. My parents grew up in the Jim Crow south but had made it into middle class suburbs by the time I was born (mostly due to my dad joining the army as an officer). As a result nearly all of my lifelong friends are white. Hasn't helped me get a job though (since all those white friends are also jobless right now).

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Mumei said:

Just as a caveat, this is just an overview of the things I could think of by the time I stopped rambling at two in the morning (damn you, Ami!). I'm sure there's something important that I'll forget to mention, and Lord knows there's more I don't know about yet.

I'm currently reading Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863 - 1877, so out of inspiration I'll start ... just before there. The point that I made - that the gaps in wealth and imprisonment are not the product of individual choices so much as they are public policy and individual - isn't a story that starts in the twentieth century. It has to start with slavery. And while it is a truism that a slave is unpaid, the fact of the matter is that American chattel slavery made the textile-based industrial revolution possible, by providing nearly 90% of the cotton at their peak. It was American slaves whose individual production rate near quadrupled to match the increases of production at British textile mills. It was American slaves who were responsible for 60% of the value of all U.S. exports on the eve of the Civil War. And slaves weren't blind to this; from Foner:

We has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land. . . . And den didn't we clear the land, and raise de crops, ob corn, ob cotton, ob tobacco, ob rice, ob sugar, ob everything. And den didn't dem large cities in the North grow up on de cotton and de sugars and de rice dat we made? . . . I say dey has grown rich, and my people is poor.​

In fact, there were many slaves who believed that there would be division of land, because of arguments like this and because of experiences during the war such as Sherman's Field Order 15, which set aside the Sea Islands and a portion of the rice coast south of Charleston for the exclusive settlement of blacks. The freedmen believed that the land was theirs; Sherman said later that it was intended to be temporary. When the freedmen were finally told that they had to vacate the land, and were asked if they could "lay aside their bitter feelings, and to become reconciled to their old masters," the committee of freedmen responded:

General, we wants Homesteads, we were promised Homesteads by the government. If it does not carry out its promises its agents made us, if the government haveing concluded to befriend its late enemies and to neglect to observe the principles of common faith between its self and us its allies in the war you said was over, now takes away from them all right to the soil they stand upon save such as they can get by again working for your late and their all time enemies . . . we are left in a more unpleasant condition than our former . . . You will see this is not the condition of really freemen.

You ask us to forgive the land owners of our island. You only lost your right arm in war and might forgive them. The man who tied me to a tree and gave me 39 lashes and who stripped and flogged my mother and my sister and who will not let me stay in his empty hut except I will do his planting and be satisfied with his price and who combines with others to keep away land from me well knowing I would not have anything to do with him if I had land of my own - that man, I cannot well forgive. Does it look as if he has forgiven me, seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?​

And indeed, they saw things clearly. So, we have former slaves who have received none of the fruits of generations of labor without which this country would not have been possible. These same former slaves collectively have very little money with which to purchase land, even at depressed Reconstruction era prices, and this is such a cash poor region in the first place, and even good wages for agricultural work leaves workers desperately poor. The solution that worked for both sides at the time - though far better for the former masters - was sharecropping. But whatever the merits of sharecropping, its actual effect was to leave millions of black people in a state of debt peonage. By 1935, 77 percent of black farmers were landless (and half of white farmers, too). If you're interested in a lyrical, on-the-ground view of what life was like in the South at the turn of the twentieth-century, W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk is the place to start.

In spite of all of the obstacles arrayed against them achieving tenant farming, let alone ownership, black people still succeeded in acquiring land. By 1910, black farmers held title to approximately 16 million acres of land, and by 1920 there were 925,000 black farms in the country. This was the peak, and though there was a precipitous drop to 681,790 by 1940, this was attributable in part to ordinary causes. And yet. Between 1940 and 1974, the number of black farms dropped far more precipitously - by 93 percent - to 45,594. By 1997, it had dropped to a mere 18,000 black farmers who collectively owned less than 3 million acres - and if black farmers had left agriculture at the same rate as white farmers since 1920, there would still be 300,000 left. What's more, it was quite evident that this was not the result of ordinary market forces, but deliberate racial discrimination on the part of the USDA and the Farmers Home Administration. A Government Accountability Office report found that in 1994, 94 percent of all county committees had no minority or female representation, and had nearly 500 complaints, half of which were more than two years old. This was accomplished by preventing minority representation on county committees, by delaying, refusing, or preventing black loan applications; by giving enough black farmers enough rope to hang themselves financially, and then not the additional loans they would need to allow them to take advantage the opportunities they'd been presented with - in effect forcing them to sell to white farmers. There's extensive documentation of this discrimination, and the near total destruction of the black farmer is a product of that same obsessive Reconstruction-era desire to see black people as a landless, dependent class.

Of course, during the 1910s, a great many black people were traveling to the North. This is the Great Migration, when six million African Americans left the rural South for the North between 1910 and 1960. This did not go particularly well; read Douglass Massey's American Apartheid for first for an overview of the rioting and violence that took place. For illustrative purposes: Between 1917 and 1921, a black home was bombed every two weeks in Chicago. In additional to extralegal attempts at erecting new racial barriers, there were numerous methods through white-controlled institutions. As a measure of their success, I'd like to note at the outset that in the North before the migration, dissimilarity indices averaged 59.9 - and by 1940 this was 89.2. This means that 89.2 percent of African Americans would have to move in order to create complete (100%) integration (which as it turns out isn't what black people or white people say they want, but black people are interested in considerably more integration than white people have been willing to countenance). I also hasten to note the Taeubers' study, who found that contrary to the myths that white Northerners had told themselves about how the black migrants differed from the Northern-born black people, migrants post-World War II “were not of lower socioeconomic status than the resident Negro population. Indeed, in educational attainment, Negro in-migrants to northern cities were equal to or slightly higher than the resident white population.” Not only that, but they were also more likely to be married and to remain married, less likely to bear children out of wedlock, less likely to head single-parent households than Northern-born blacks, and more likely to be employed. The fault for the creation of the ghetto cannot be laid at the feet of black people who lacked the education, the desire to work, and the middle-class values necessary for them to succeed and integrate into the mainstream of Northern cities.

In 1917, at the same time that those bombings were happening, in response to the "invasion of white residence districts by the Negroes", the Chicago Real Estate Board resolved to confine such sales to blocks immediately adjoining areas which already contained black residents, in effect keeping black homeowners in a contiguous area. While this was blocked by the Supreme Court, CREB then organized (voluntary) block clubs in white neighborhoods to ensure that no homes were sold to black buyers; the National Association of Real Estate Boards adopted CREB's policies in 1924. This is what created a dual housing market in the U.S.; this is why out of 120,000 new homes built between 1946 and 1953 in metropolitan Philadelphia, only 347 were open to blacks. This is also what kept black people in ghettos which were incomparable to the experiences of other ethnic or racial minorities. For instance, in 1933 only half of the Italians in Chicago lived in "Little Italys", and only 3 percent of Chicago's Irish people lived in the Irish ghetto - but 93 percent of Chicago's black population lived in the black ghetto. What's more, the segregation experienced by those European immigrants tended to decrease as they became Americanized and as they became "White." This was not possible for black people, and there's something of a transference of permanent anti-immigrant stereotypes onto black people.

In addition to the policies and tactics chosen by CREB in order to create a unified bulwark against black entrance into white neighborhoods, they also had the support of the Federal Housing Administration through the practice of redlining, which indicated that whole communities would not receive insurance for their loans. This did not only affect black people, but people who lived near black people, including integrated communities. This was a direct and powerful incentive for white homeowners to strongly resist integration into their communities, and it helped to cause home values of those who were living near the color-line to depreciate. Prospective black buyers had no options but to buy from whites on the margins; they had emigrated in their millions from the South, and yet they were being crowded into tiny ghettos due to the refusal of whites to countenance their entrance into their neighborhoods and a lack of new homes being built. In Chicago, where similar conditions existed as in Philadelphia, this allowed unscrupulous contract-sellers to charge black people four to five times the value of the home, while the contract-seller kept the deed, and the buyer could be evicted upon missing a single payment and the equity would be kept by the contract-seller. This was not an accident; contract-sellers turned this into a racket of selling, evicting, and re-selling. You might be able to guess the long-term effects of this on the properties and the communities, let alone on the ability of black people to accumulate capital:

By the late 1960s, the system began to falter. Buildings were in such a sorry state that buyers were increasingly likely to put $100 down, make a few months of high payments, and then, overwhelmed by the avalanche of expenses necessary to make their new homes livable, abandon the properties. Without steady contract payments, Lawndale's contract sellers had no intention of continuing to pay their own mortgages.

Instead, they defaulted on their loans, dumping hundreds of crumbling, overmortgaged buildings back onto the lending institutions. Since the near-ruined buildings were now worth only a fraction of the original loans, the institutions essentially lost their loan money, amounting to millions of dollars. These losses pushed First Mutual to the point of collapse. Desperate to recoup something, the company offered the buildings for sale, at "rock bottom prices," to whoever would take them.

The scavengers who gathered to buy were often the same men who had dumped them in the first place. In one day alone, Moe Forman turned six slums over to First Mutual; five of the six ended up back in his hands, with Gil Balin as copartner. Al Berland dumped approximately sixty buildings onto First Mutual and then repurchased them at a fraction of their former worth.

By 1968, First Mutual was out of business, and 659 of its defaulted mortgages--worth $7.8 million--landed with the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), the governmental agency that insured savings and loan deposits. Many of these debts had been owed by Lawndale's worst contract sellers. They included $756,920 in delinquent mortgages owed by Berke, $280,000 by Berland, $502,323 by Forman's F & F Investment company, $28,945 by Forman himself, and $241,658 by Fushanis's estate.”​

And so the public ended up paying for the results of preying on black buyers who were locked out of the legitimate housing market.

Segregation was not an accident anywhere in the United States. It was both explicit public policy and private practice for many years, long after it was officially illegal, and there is good argument to make that it remains implicit public policy. As the Kerner Report so succinctly put it: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it.”

In effect, we created a two tier housing market - one in which black people were legally vulnerable (in fact it was argued that the protections of the law weren't meant to protect them) to the depredations of ne'er-do-wells offering contract sales at inflated prices - and 85 percent of black people who purchased homes in Chicago in the early 1960s did so on contract. They didn't possess other options. This is in addition to the effects of slavery, no reparations, the post-Reconstruction object of keeping black people as landless and dependent as possible, and the history of dispossession of the black farmer beginning in the 1940s.

In addition to this, Southern Dixiecrats worked hard in order to maintain white supremacy in the South in the midst of New Deal programs. They accomplished this through a variety of tactics. They sought to leave out as many African Americans as possible, by using provisions that were racially laden. For instance, by not including farmworkers or maids (60 percent of the black labor force in the 1960s, and nearly 75 percent in the South), they effectively blocked an enormous number of black people from benefiting from laws that set minimum wages, regulated hours of work, and from Social Security in the 1950s. They also insisted that the administration of those same laws, such as support for veterans (e.g. GI Bill) or assistance to the poor would be handled locally, by officials who were deeply hostile to black equality and worked to shield white supremacy. And they worked hard to prevent Congress from ever attaching anti-discrimination provisions to social welfare programs. Collectively, this meant that, as the NAACP said of the Social Security Act bill, these social welfare programs were like "a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through." You can see the effects of blocking enormous numbers of black people from participation in welfare, in Social Security, in the GI Bill, in the prevention of homeownership, and in forcing emigrants into ghettoes which were quickly destroyed by overcrowding, poor upkeep, constant turnover, incipient poverty, in a passage of a speech Lyndon Johnson made in 1965 at Howard University:

“Here are some of the facts of this American failure.

Thirty-five years ago the rate of unemployment for Negroes and whites was about the same. Tonight the Negro rate is twice as high.

In 1948 the 8 percent unemployment rate for Negro teenage boys was actually less than that of whites. By last year that rate had grown to 23 percent, as against 13 percent for whites unemployed.

Between 1949 and 1959, the income of Negro men relative to white men declined in every section of this country. From 1952 to 1963 the median income of Negro families compared to white actually dropped from 57 percent to 53 percent.

In the years 1955 through 1957, 22 percent of experienced Negro workers were out of work at some time during the year. In 1961 through 1963 that proportion had soared to 29 percent.

Since 1947 the number of white families living in poverty has decreased 27 percent while the number of poorer nonwhite families decreased only 3 percent.

The infant mortality of nonwhites in 1940 was 70 percent greater than whites. Twenty-two years later it was 90 percent greater.

Moreover, the isolation of Negro from white communities is increasing, rather than decreasing as Negroes crowd into the central cities and become a city within a city.”​

And these facts cannot be written off as ancient history. Just last year a study on the racial wealth gap by Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy found that it had increased by $152,000 in twenty-five years, which represented a near tripling of the previous difference. And contra inaccurate and uninformed stereotypes, the study authors write that, “Our analysis found little evidence to support common perceptions about what underlies the ability to build wealth, including the notion that personal attributes and behavioral choices are key pieces of the equation. Instead, the evidence points to policy and the configuration of both opportunities and barriers in workplaces, schools, and communities that reinforce deeply entrenched racial dynamics in how wealth is accumulated and that continue to permeate the most important spheres of everyday life.”

And if anyone is interested in additional details, context, or just really wants to feel angry at how awful people can be:

Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863 - 1877
The Half Has Never Been Told
Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights

Spoiler

If there are typos or weird editorial errors, I blame fatigue, being too lazy to proofread a post this long, and Amir0x

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Mumei said:

Just as a caveat, this is just an overview of the things I could think of by the time I stopped rambling at two in the morning (damn you, Ami!). I'm sure there's something important that I'll forget to mention, and Lord knows there's more I don't know about yet.

I'm currently reading Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863 - 1877, so out of inspiration I'll start ... just before there. The point that I made - that the gaps in wealth and imprisonment are not the product of individual choices so much as they are public policy and individual - isn't a story that starts in the twentieth century. It has to start with slavery. And while it is a truism that a slave is unpaid, the fact of the matter is that American chattel slavery made the textile-based industrial revolution possible, by providing nearly 90% of the cotton at their peak. It was American slaves whose individual production rate near quadrupled to match the increases of production at British textile mills. It was American slaves who were responsible for 60% of the value of all U.S. exports on the eve of the Civil War. And slaves weren't blind to this; from Foner:

We has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land. . . . And den didn't we clear the land, and raise de crops, ob corn, ob cotton, ob tobacco, ob rice, ob sugar, ob everything. And den didn't dem large cities in the North grow up on de cotton and de sugars and de rice dat we made? . . . I say dey has grown rich, and my people is poor.​

In fact, there were many slaves who believed that there would be division of land, because of arguments like this and because of experiences during the war such as Sherman's Field Order 15, which set aside the Sea Islands and a portion of the rice coast south of Charleston for the exclusive settlement of blacks. The freedmen believed that the land was theirs; Sherman said later that it was intended to be temporary. When the freedmen were finally told that they had to vacate the land, and were asked if they could "lay aside their bitter feelings, and to become reconciled to their old masters," the committee of freedmen responded:

General, we wants Homesteads, we were promised Homesteads by the government. If it does not carry out its promises its agents made us, if the government haveing concluded to befriend its late enemies and to neglect to observe the principles of common faith between its self and us its allies in the war you said was over, now takes away from them all right to the soil they stand upon save such as they can get by again working for your late and their all time enemies . . . we are left in a more unpleasant condition than our former . . . You will see this is not the condition of really freemen.

You ask us to forgive the land owners of our island. You only lost your right arm in war and might forgive them. The man who tied me to a tree and gave me 39 lashes and who stripped and flogged my mother and my sister and who will not let me stay in his empty hut except I will do his planting and be satisfied with his price and who combines with others to keep away land from me well knowing I would not have anything to do with him if I had land of my own - that man, I cannot well forgive. Does it look as if he has forgiven me, seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?​

And indeed, they saw things clearly. So, we have former slaves who have received none of the fruits of generations of labor without which this country would not have been possible. These same former slaves collectively have very little money with which to purchase land, even at depressed Reconstruction era prices, and this is such a cash poor region in the first place, and even good wages for agricultural work leaves workers desperately poor. The solution that worked for both sides at the time - though far better for the former masters - was sharecropping. But whatever the merits of sharecropping, its actual effect was to leave millions of black people in a state of debt peonage. By 1935, 77 percent of black farmers were landless (and half of white farmers, too). If you're interested in a lyrical, on-the-ground view of what life was like in the South at the turn of the twentieth-century, W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk is the place to start.

In spite of all of the obstacles arrayed against them achieving tenant farming, let alone ownership, black people still succeeded in acquiring land. By 1910, black farmers held title to approximately 16 million acres of land, and by 1920 there were 925,000 black farms in the country. This was the peak, and though there was a precipitous drop to 681,790 by 1940, this was attributable in part to ordinary causes. And yet. Between 1940 and 1974, the number of black farms dropped far more precipitously - by 93 percent - to 45,594. By 1997, it had dropped to a mere 18,000 black farmers who collectively owned less than 3 million acres - and if black farmers had left agriculture at the same rate as white farmers since 1920, there would still be 300,000 left. What's more, it was quite evident that this was not the result of ordinary market forces, but deliberate racial discrimination on the part of the USDA and the Farmers Home Administration. A Government Accountability Office report found that in 1994, 94 percent of all county committees had no minority or female representation, and had nearly 500 complaints, half of which were more than two years old. This was accomplished by preventing minority representation on county committees, by delaying, refusing, or preventing black loan applications; by giving enough black farmers enough rope to hang themselves financially, and then not the additional loans they would need to allow them to take advantage the opportunities they'd been presented with - in effect forcing them to sell to white farmers. There's extensive documentation of this discrimination, and the near total destruction of the black farmer is a product of that same obsessive Reconstruction-era desire to see black people as a landless, dependent class.

Of course, during the 1910s, a great many black people were traveling to the North. This is the Great Migration, when six million African Americans left the rural South for the North between 1910 and 1960. This did not go particularly well; read Douglass Massey's American Apartheid for first for an overview of the rioting and violence that took place. For illustrative purposes: Between 1917 and 1921, a black home was bombed every two weeks in Chicago. In additional to extralegal attempts at erecting new racial barriers, there were numerous methods through white-controlled institutions. As a measure of their success, I'd like to note at the outset that in the North before the migration, dissimilarity indices averaged 59.9 - and by 1940 this was 89.2. This means that 89.2 percent of African Americans would have to move in order to create complete (100%) integration (which as it turns out isn't what black people or white people say they want, but black people are interested in considerably more integration than white people have been willing to countenance). I also hasten to note the Taeubers' study, who found that contrary to the myths that white Northerners had told themselves about how the black migrants differed from the Northern-born black people, migrants post-World War II “were not of lower socioeconomic status than the resident Negro population. Indeed, in educational attainment, Negro in-migrants to northern cities were equal to or slightly higher than the resident white population.” Not only that, but they were also more likely to be married and to remain married, less likely to bear children out of wedlock, less likely to head single-parent households than Northern-born blacks, and more likely to be employed. The fault for the creation of the ghetto cannot be laid at the feet of black people who lacked the education, the desire to work, and the middle-class values necessary for them to succeed and integrate into the mainstream of Northern cities.

In 1917, at the same time that those bombings were happening, in response to the "invasion of white residence districts by the Negroes", the Chicago Real Estate Board resolved to confine such sales to blocks immediately adjoining areas which already contained black residents, in effect keeping black homeowners in a contiguous area. While this was blocked by the Supreme Court, CREB then organized (voluntary) block clubs in white neighborhoods to ensure that no homes were sold to black buyers; the National Association of Real Estate Boards adopted CREB's policies in 1924. This is what created a dual housing market in the U.S.; this is why out of 120,000 new homes built between 1946 and 1953 in metropolitan Philadelphia, only 347 were open to blacks. This is also what kept black people in ghettos which were incomparable to the experiences of other ethnic or racial minorities. For instance, in 1933 only half of the Italians in Chicago lived in "Little Italys", and only 3 percent of Chicago's Irish people lived in the Irish ghetto - but 93 percent of Chicago's black population lived in the black ghetto. What's more, the segregation experienced by those European immigrants tended to decrease as they became Americanized and as they became "White." This was not possible for black people, and there's something of a transference of permanent anti-immigrant stereotypes onto black people.

In addition to the policies and tactics chosen by CREB in order to create a unified bulwark against black entrance into white neighborhoods, they also had the support of the Federal Housing Administration through the practice of redlining, which indicated that whole communities would not receive insurance for their loans. This did not only affect black people, but people who lived near black people, including integrated communities. This was a direct and powerful incentive for white homeowners to strongly resist integration into their communities, and it helped to cause home values of those who were living near the color-line to depreciate. Prospective black buyers had no options but to buy from whites on the margins; they had emigrated in their millions from the South, and yet they were being crowded into tiny ghettos due to the refusal of whites to countenance their entrance into their neighborhoods and a lack of new homes being built. In Chicago, where similar conditions existed as in Philadelphia, this allowed unscrupulous contract-sellers to charge black people four to five times the value of the home, while the contract-seller kept the deed, and the buyer could be evicted upon missing a single payment and the equity would be kept by the contract-seller. This was not an accident; contract-sellers turned this into a racket of selling, evicting, and re-selling. You might be able to guess the long-term effects of this on the properties and the communities, let alone on the ability of black people to accumulate capital:

By the late 1960s, the system began to falter. Buildings were in such a sorry state that buyers were increasingly likely to put $100 down, make a few months of high payments, and then, overwhelmed by the avalanche of expenses necessary to make their new homes livable, abandon the properties. Without steady contract payments, Lawndale's contract sellers had no intention of continuing to pay their own mortgages.

Instead, they defaulted on their loans, dumping hundreds of crumbling, overmortgaged buildings back onto the lending institutions. Since the near-ruined buildings were now worth only a fraction of the original loans, the institutions essentially lost their loan money, amounting to millions of dollars. These losses pushed First Mutual to the point of collapse. Desperate to recoup something, the company offered the buildings for sale, at "rock bottom prices," to whoever would take them.

The scavengers who gathered to buy were often the same men who had dumped them in the first place. In one day alone, Moe Forman turned six slums over to First Mutual; five of the six ended up back in his hands, with Gil Balin as copartner. Al Berland dumped approximately sixty buildings onto First Mutual and then repurchased them at a fraction of their former worth.

By 1968, First Mutual was out of business, and 659 of its defaulted mortgages--worth $7.8 million--landed with the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), the governmental agency that insured savings and loan deposits. Many of these debts had been owed by Lawndale's worst contract sellers. They included $756,920 in delinquent mortgages owed by Berke, $280,000 by Berland, $502,323 by Forman's F & F Investment company, $28,945 by Forman himself, and $241,658 by Fushanis's estate.”​

And so the public ended up paying for the results of preying on black buyers who were locked out of the legitimate housing market.

Segregation was not an accident anywhere in the United States. It was both explicit public policy and private practice for many years, long after it was officially illegal, and there is good argument to make that it remains implicit public policy. As the Kerner Report so succinctly put it: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it.”

In effect, we created a two tier housing market - one in which black people were legally vulnerable (in fact it was argued that the protections of the law weren't meant to protect them) to the depredations of ne'er-do-wells offering contract sales at inflated prices - and 85 percent of black people who purchased homes in Chicago in the early 1960s did so on contract. They didn't possess other options. This is in addition to the effects of slavery, no reparations, the post-Reconstruction object of keeping black people as landless and dependent as possible, and the history of dispossession of the black farmer beginning in the 1940s.

In addition to this, Southern Dixiecrats worked hard in order to maintain white supremacy in the South in the midst of New Deal programs. They accomplished this through a variety of tactics. They sought to leave out as many African Americans as possible, by using provisions that were racially laden. For instance, by not including farmworkers or maids (60 percent of the black labor force in the 1960s, and nearly 75 percent in the South), they effectively blocked an enormous number of black people from benefiting from laws that set minimum wages, regulated hours of work, and from Social Security in the 1950s. They also insisted that the administration of those same laws, such as support for veterans (e.g. GI Bill) or assistance to the poor would be handled locally, by officials who were deeply hostile to black equality and worked to shield white supremacy. And they worked hard to prevent Congress from ever attaching anti-discrimination provisions to social welfare programs. Collectively, this meant that, as the NAACP said of the Social Security Act bill, these social welfare programs were like "a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through." You can see the effects of blocking enormous numbers of black people from participation in welfare, in Social Security, in the GI Bill, in the prevention of homeownership, and in forcing emigrants into ghettoes which were quickly destroyed by overcrowding, poor upkeep, constant turnover, incipient poverty, in a passage of a speech Lyndon Johnson made in 1965 at Howard University:

“Here are some of the facts of this American failure.

Thirty-five years ago the rate of unemployment for Negroes and whites was about the same. Tonight the Negro rate is twice as high.

In 1948 the 8 percent unemployment rate for Negro teenage boys was actually less than that of whites. By last year that rate had grown to 23 percent, as against 13 percent for whites unemployed.

Between 1949 and 1959, the income of Negro men relative to white men declined in every section of this country. From 1952 to 1963 the median income of Negro families compared to white actually dropped from 57 percent to 53 percent.

In the years 1955 through 1957, 22 percent of experienced Negro workers were out of work at some time during the year. In 1961 through 1963 that proportion had soared to 29 percent.

Since 1947 the number of white families living in poverty has decreased 27 percent while the number of poorer nonwhite families decreased only 3 percent.

The infant mortality of nonwhites in 1940 was 70 percent greater than whites. Twenty-two years later it was 90 percent greater.

Moreover, the isolation of Negro from white communities is increasing, rather than decreasing as Negroes crowd into the central cities and become a city within a city.”​

And these facts cannot be written off as ancient history. Just last year a study on the racial wealth gap by Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy found that it had increased by $152,000 in twenty-five years, which represented a near tripling of the previous difference. And contra inaccurate and uninformed stereotypes, the study authors write that, “Our analysis found little evidence to support common perceptions about what underlies the ability to build wealth, including the notion that personal attributes and behavioral choices are key pieces of the equation. Instead, the evidence points to policy and the configuration of both opportunities and barriers in workplaces, schools, and communities that reinforce deeply entrenched racial dynamics in how wealth is accumulated and that continue to permeate the most important spheres of everyday life.”

And if anyone is interested in additional details, context, or just really wants to feel angry at how awful people can be:

Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863 - 1877
The Half Has Never Been Told
Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights

Spoiler

If there are typos or weird editorial errors, I blame fatigue, being too lazy to proofread a post this long, and Amir0x

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Pinko Marx said:

Holee shit Mumei. Blew my mind. That's some eeeeeeevil shit right there.

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Lime said:

Mumei, do you write such long posts out from scratch every single time or do you actually have something to copy-paste from? Because they're super thorough and well-researched. Really appreciated.

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Slayven said:

He has it saved. It's been posted a lot, but sadly largely ignored by those that need to read it.

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Amir0x said:

Well it's in the OP now on the off chance that gives a small signal boost for that incredible work. I hope that even people who choose not to comment ITT about these issues still read the OP and maybe come away questioning some things...

...or am I being too optimistic about humanity?

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Lime said:

Mumei, do you write such long posts out from scratch every single time or do you actually have something to copy-paste from? Because they're super thorough and well-researched. Really appreciated.

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Mumei said:

Hm. Neither? I actually got into a rather lengthy discussion a few months ago with an aunt's friend at a family function, and I was having trouble putting it all together in order to explain how wrong she was. In any event, I suggested I could type something up since I thought I could explain where I was coming from better that way, and I ended up typing .... like fifteen pages. I'm bad at brevity.

Anyway, I did go back and look at that to jog my memory and double-check things without having to go back to the books and find the pages, but most of it was like. "Okay, so I know there were just under a million black farmers, and then about half a million, and then less then 20,000, but I don't remember the dates," or, "Right, an enormous proportion of black buyers bought on contract, but I can't remember if it was 70-something or 80-something."

Slayven is right that I've posted aspects of that before - the stuff about agriculture, about contract buying, about the discriminatory effects of the New Deal, though I don't think anything about Reconstruction or slavery's economics (?) - but that post was mostly newly typed.

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Zonar said:

As a black man with a bachelor's degree, I am constantly hurt and frustrated with how this country treats us. The more I succeed, the less minorities i see around me, and I'm not even a VP of my company yet. Just middle management.

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Ikael said:

Dafuck @Mumei's post O_O you need to write a book about about this subject, man!

Most of the people in my country are only aware of the slavery chapter of US racial relationships (plus some vague Martin Luther musings). The whole legal guerrilla warfare against blacks that came after the civil war (Jim Crow and his alikes) is far less known event, and needs far more exposure. It is impossible to understand the current state of modern African American communities without it.

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Mumei said:

I got a little further in Reconstruction, and I just came across this:

Simultaneously, Southern lawmakers moved to limit blacks' independent access to economic resources. Rights such as hunting, fishing, and the free grazing of livestock, which whites took for granted and many blacks had enjoyed as slaves, were now, in some areas, transformed into crimes. Planters resented hunting as a way blacks could obtain subsistence while avoiding plantation labor; it also involved trespass, thus flouting whites' property rights. Several states now made it illegal for blacks to own weapons, or imposed taxes on their dogs and guns. [...] Clearly these measures served more than one purpose - the ban on owning guns reflected, in part, white fears of black insurrection, and agricultural reformers had long complained of the expense of fencing large tracts of land to protect crops from roaming animals. But by limiting hunting and fishing and requiring fencing, the law made it more difficult for blacks to obtain food or income without working on plantations.

The entire apparatus of labor regulations and criminal laws was enforced by a police apparatus and judicial system in which blacks enjoyed virtually no voice whatever. Whites staffed urban police forces as well as state militias intended, as a Mississippi white put it in 1865, to "keep good order and discipline among the negro population." Although disorder was hardly confined to blacks, virtually all the militiamen patrolled black belt counties. Often composed of Confederate veterans still wearing their gray uniforms, they frequently terrorized the black population, ransacking their homes to seize shotguns and other property and abusing those who refused to sign plantation labor contracts. Louisiana blacks called the militia "the patrol," a reminder of slavery days, and could not understand "why men who but a few months since were in armed rebellion against the government should now have arms put in their hands."​

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"Now if you want to get into the essence of why certain groups are stopped more than others, then you only need to go to the crime reports and see which ethnic groups are listed more as suspects. That’s the crime data the officers are living with."

Blacks made up 73 percent of the shooting perpetrators in New York in 2011 and were 23 percent of the population.

A number of academics believe those statistics are potentially skewed because police over-focus on black communities, while ignoring crime in other areas. They also note that being stopped as a suspect does not automatically equate to criminality. Nearly 90 percent of blacks stopped by the NYPD, for example, are found not to be engaged in any crime.

The black officers interviewed said they had been racially profiled by white officers exclusively, and about one third said they made some form of complaint to a supervisor.

All but one said their supervisors either dismissed the complaints or retaliated against them by denying them overtime, choice assignments, or promotions. The remaining officers who made no complaints said they refrained from doing so either because they feared retribution or because they saw racial profiling as part of the system.

In declining to comment to Reuters, the NYPD did not respond to a specific request for data showing the racial breakdown of officers who made complaints and how such cases were handled.

White officers were not the only ones accused of wrongdoing. Civilian complaints against police officers are in direct proportion to their demographic makeup on the force, according to the NYPD’s Civilian Complaint Review Board.

Indeed, some of the officers Reuters interviewed acknowledged that they themselves had been defendants in lawsuits, with allegations ranging from making a false arrest to use of excessive force. Such claims against police are not uncommon in New York, say veterans.

STUDIES FIND INHERENT BIAS

Still, social psychologists from Stanford and Yale universities and John Jay College of Criminal Justice have conducted research – including the 2004 study "Seeing Black: Race, Crime and Visual Processing" - showing there is an implicit racial bias in the American psyche that correlates black maleness with crime.

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NoctisVsStar said:

well, I'm hispanic living in NYC ( Dominican ) and I've never had any negative encounter with Law enforcement. I do realize not everyone is lucky as me but i don't believe every single officer is out to get you like some believe. Granted they are bad cops just like you have shitty co-workers at any other job, that can be racists, psychos, etc.

Law enforcement is not an easy job and every move you make/action will be under scrutiny and certain citizens ( not all ) when stopped start getting all defensive ( aggressive at times annoyed at being stopped ) ,questioning,cursing, you name it and don't cooperate. Cops and citizens alike aren't free of blame.

Community leaders that speak the truth and call for change are needed. But guys like Al Sharpton instead of talking so negative all the time ( he does have good arguments at times ) try saying some positive since people gravitate towards you in the eyes of some you are charismatic so you use that power correctly.

Then you got shit cops who join the force that come from the middle of nowhere trying to work in the city and get easily spooked when dealing with African Americans, Latinos, and other backgrounds. They don't have the verbal nor interpersonal skills to deal with the melting pot that is NYC. Discretion is a key factor when you're an officer and should be used properly and not try to arrest people over pitty shit just to fill up your Quota.

Personally at times it all comes down to you're own personal values, morals and beliefs. Family plays a huge role in erasing negative preconceived notions that could determine your overall persona. All i can say a lot of cops ( not all of them ) lack interpersonal skills and need to learn how to address citizens because a first encounter with a cop can determine your overall view on them as whole.

Finally, I want to be involved in some capacity in Law enforcement but i don't want to be NYPD. i always wanted to do something with community affairs and try to interact with people on a personal level and not just look at them as stats in a hotspot zone. I dread at the fact that i have to at least do 2 years there in order to apply somewhere else, since most Law enforcement jobs require at least two years of experience in the field. I go to criminal justice school and i've always emphasized that just because you're part of an institution doesn't mean you have to turn into some robotic cop. Treat people like you want to be treated with respect, dignity and compassion. These are just my two cents.

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diggmcbadass said:

Those lifetime prison statistics are terrible for all the races. Fixing the horribly broken legal/prison system would probably fix 50% of the race issue right there.

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Otakumegane said:

Quick question, are Asians and Native Americans usually left out from these because these groups are so small? Some of these charts have them but most of them don't.

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Otakumegane said:

Quick question, are Asians and Native Americans usually left out from these because these groups are so small? Some of these charts have them but most of them don't.

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Figboy79 said:

I've finally managed to read through this entire thread, and would like to contribute my experiences.

Growing up, I was raised by a single mother who did the best she could with what she had to raise myself and my two older sisters. We went without many things, but we, at the least, always had a roof over our heads, and food in our stomachs, even if that meant we had to live with family/friends until we could find a new apartment. We've been evicted, had lights, gas, and water shut off, and vehicles repossessed.

I wouldn't say I had a hard life, or "grew up in the streets," because I didn't. I didn't always live in the best neighborhoods, but I often stayed out of trouble. I got decent to excellent grades in school, and it was drilled in me from a very young age to be the best person I could be, but especially so when interacting with white people and the police. I didn't know what it all meant back then, but as I got older, I understood that my mother was trying to protect me from, well, all of this.

She grew up in the 50's and 60's. She lived through the Civil Rights movement, and fought and protested and was profiled and abused so that I never would, and it's a damn shame that nothing has changed. I may have been allowed to marry my white wife, but we still get followed around, with people asking my wife if "she needs anything," or "is ok," when they see us walking down the street together. I've been profiled, called "nigger," and had purses clutched tight to chests as I walk by, and I'm a short, light brown skinned black/samoan. I'm about as intimidating as a puppy.

When it came to my peers, I was "too white," to hang out with my black school friends, but "too black," to spend the night at my white school friends. I've been called, "The whitest black guy I know," by nearly every single one of my white friends, like it was some kind of badge of honor. Like being educated, talented, articulate, and a decent human being is an exclusively white trait that my fellow blacks don't possess. It's insulting, and I raise an eyebrow every time I hear it, as well as being called "One of the good ones."

It's frustrating to be ignored. To have my people's cries for justice be met with apathy and indifference. It's frustrating to see the media constantly push an agenda that does nothing but serve to dehumanize blacks to the point where the average citizen can barely muster a "meh," when they hear about the latest injustice befalling us. The head in the sand attitude this country has concerning systemic and institutionalized racism is just as damaging as the institutional racism itself. No one is trying to point fingers at white people, or make them feel bad, but we are trying to raise awareness. We're trying to open people's eyes to these civil rights violations, because they are there. They are not just "isolated incidents," that can be waived away and dismissed. They are a sign of a much bigger element in our society that is so deeply ingrained that it's going to take more than just a few protests and sit ins to change.

I'd like to say that it's just the older generation that is affected by this, and that once they go away, things can change, but if my close friend circle on Facebook is any indication, that will not happen. I am 35 years old, and the past few months since many of these news stories have broke have shown me that many of the people I love and hold most dear, don't see my people as, well, people. I can't go a day without seeing some of the most hateful, vile, ignorant statements coming out of their mouths for all the world to see, and they stand by that ignorance like a badge of honor. When I attempt to have a conversation with them enlightening them with facts and stats to back up my arguments, they shut down.

I posted a link to this thread and got perhaps one like (my wife, actually). I post a link to something silly or fun, and I get a shit ton of likes and comments. Nobody wants to hear about racism. They'll gladly support my comments on the rights of women and the LGBT community (of which I'm a huge supporter as well), but when I try to bring attention to the plight of blacks in America, it goes largely ignored by all but a few people that I'm basically "preaching to the choir" to. As great as this thread is, the sad truth is that nobody that needs to care, cares at all, and those that do care seem so few, or go ignored by the majority that just doesn't want to be made to feel uncomfortable about things that don't personally affect them, or those they know. I can't even describe how awful it feels when the realization that your country that you've lived in your entire life, that you've loved and defended and supported for decades, doesn't even view you as a human being.

Lord knows I wish empathy could be taught in schools.

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"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."

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Measley said:

I saw a video of a cop telling a black kid to go inside his house. The black kid was just standing on the sidewalk waiting for a friend to pick him up in front of his OWN apartment complex. When the kid explains it to the officer, the cop goes apeshit on him and starts shoving him back inside while cursing at him ruthlessly.

Let me know when that happens to a white kid in the suburbs.

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ISOM said:

MLK summed up your thoughts right there decades ago.

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Amir0x said:

That sounds incredibly tough, Figboy79. Did you ever get into any deep discussions with your 'friends' who said things like 'you're the whitest black guy I know' or 'you're one of the good ones'? What came of it if so? Did they acknowledge how problematic that might seem?

I can only imagine what it would be like. Me and my siblings are 50% Hispanic/50% Italian/Jewish. But due to my complexion, I could always "pass for white" and so nobody ever makes any assumptions about me... they're usually quite surprised when I say I'm Spanish.

But now my sister has married a Black man. Great dude, really treats her with kindness and great with the family. But my sisters kids, well, they can't pass for white, their complexion is far too dark.

The type of shit she tells me about on a daily basis breaks my heart. One time she said she was at Wal-Mart and some lady wouldn't stop staring at her. Eventually the lady said "That's your son?" And my sister said "Yeah!" quite enthusiastically. And the lady responded: "But... he's black?" My sister just walked away in disgust.

I've always been conscious about this problem and have always been engaged in trying to figure out solutions, but with my Sister's husband and my niece and nephew in the mix now... I find myself even more cognizant about it.

Which goes to show, of course, that even someone like me who has always been aware of it and has always understood the reality of how much easier it is for myself STILL needs to have something impact his life directly to get even further engaged. So imagine what it's like for people who barely even interact with Black folk? It's a cruel cycle. Because people don't want to acknowledge they've been given a head start just for being white.

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mantidor said:

Are there any statistics that take into account poverty? Because poverty is the most important factor related to violence, and black people in the US are more on the side of poverty than wealth for obvious historical reasons. Depressed neighborhoods with mostly white people also have much more violence (and incarceration) than wealthy neighborhoods.

I think is important to give a thorough analysis to the issue, because it's complex and has many ramifications. Racial profiling exists, war on drugs exacerbates the problem, but if we remove both would it really reduce the number of black people going to jail in a significant amount?

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Eberhart’s words were no match for southern torches. As it became clear that black educators were prepared to run for office themselves, if necessary, in the cause of educational reform, whites across the South responded as had Charlestonians in 1822 when they razed the city’s AME church. Especially in rural areas, where few soldiers were stationed and where federal patrols were less frequent, schools turned to ashes at a frightening rate. In less than three months in 1866, North Carolinians set fire to four schools; two more, one in Greene County and another in Chatham, burned down the following year. Similar reports flooded into Washington from across the region. An agent in Mississippi wrote of numerous “schoolhouses, including churches used as schoolhouses,” being torched. Alvan Gillem, a Bureau operative also stationed in Mississippi, confirmed that arson in his district had destroyed a new building “capable of accommodating four hundred pupils.” Its loss, he added, “cannot easily be over-estimated.” Texas Republicans complained “that school houses were burnt nearly as fast as they could be erected,” and General Thomas Swayne informed his superiors that the “people of Mobile are violently opposed to colored schools. They have burned two buildings used for that purpose, one a Presbyterian Church.” Enough Alabama schools were burned to encourage Alvord to lament the declining number of federal soldiers in the South and suspect that “only military force for some time to come could prevent the frequent outbreak of every form of violence

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During the first six months of 1871, vigilantes burned twenty-six schools in one Alabama county alone. Waterbury prayed loudly during such moments, but “when the morning began to dawn”mshe reported the incidents to the authorities. “There is an eternal hatred,” one state investigatingmcommittee concluded, “existing against all men that voted the Republican ticket, or who belong to themLoyal League, or [are] engaged in teaching schools

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By the dawn of 1871, the Republican organization was in tatters in portions of the South. Party activists, one South Carolina freedman lamented, had been “scattered and beaten and run out.” Republicans had “no leaders up there [in Union County]—no leaders.” In Louisiana, Republicans charged that more than two thousand supporters had been “killed, wounded, or otherwise injured” in the final weeks leading up to Grant’s reelection. Polling numbers supported the allegations. Republican ballots in Louisiana fell from sixty-nine thousand in the previous election to thirty-three thousand, and in three Georgia counties that were home to black majorities, the president failed to garner a single recorded vote. Southern Democrats swore to carry “the election peaceably if we can, [but] forcibly if we must.” Authorities in Louisiana’s St. Landry Parish stumbled across a “pile of twenty-five bodies” of black Republicans dumped in the woods, and following that atrocity, the Klansmen marched the survivors to the polls “and made them vote the Democratic ticket.” When informed of the violence throughout the South, Senator Ames fretted that no party could have hundreds of its “best and most reliable workers” eliminated and yet remain a viable organization

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The South genuinely accepted the reality of the military defeat, stood ready to do justice to the emancipated slves, and desired above all a quick reintergration into the fabric of national life. Before his death, Abraham Lincoln had embarked on a course of sectional reconciliation, and during Presidential Reconstruction, his successor, Andrew Johnson, attempted to carry out Lincoln's magnanimous policies. Johnson's efforts were opposed and eventually thwarted by the Radical Republicans in Congress. MOtivated by an irrational hatred of Southern 'rebels' and the desire to consolidate their party's national ascendancy, the Radicals in 1867 swept aside the Souther governments Johnson had establisehd and fastened baclk suffrage upon the defeated South. There follwed the sordid period of Congressional or Radical Reconstruction, an eara of corruption presided over by unscrupulous 'carpetbaggers' from the North, unprincipled Southern white 'scalawags' and ignorant freedmen. After much needless suffering, the South's white community banded together to overthrow these governmens and restore 'home rule' (a euphemism for white supremacy). All told, Reconsturciton was the darket page in the sage of American history.

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And then, in the fall of 1934, when George was a teenager and old enough to take note of such things, perhaps the single worst act of torture and execution in twentieth-century America occurred in the panhandle town of Marianna, Florida, a farm settlement halfway between Pensacola and Tallahassee.

That October, a twenty-three-year-old colored farmhand named Claude Neal was accused of the rape and murder of a twenty-year-old white woman named Lola Cannidy. Neal had grown up across the road from Lola Cannidy’s family. He was arrested and signed a written confession that historians have since called into question. But at the time, passions ran so high that a band of more than three hundred men armed with guns, knives, torches, and dynamite went searching for Neal in every jail within a seventy-five-mile radius of Marianna.

The manhunt forced the authorities to move Neal across the panhandle, from Marianna to Panama City by car, to Camp Walton by boat, to Pensacola by car again, with the mob on their trail at every turn. Finally, the Escambia County sheriff, fearing that his jail in Pensacola was too dilapidated to withstand attack, decided to take Neal out of state altogether, to the tiny town of Brewton, Alabama, fifty-five miles north of Pensacola. Someone leaked Neal’s whereabouts, and a lynching party of some one hundred men drove several hours on Highway 231 in a thirty-car caravan from Florida to Alabama. There the men managed to divert the local sheriff and overtake the deputy. They stormed the jail and took Neal, his limbs bound with a plow rope, back to Marianna.

It was the early morning hours of October 26, a Friday.61 Neal’s chief abductors, a self described “committee of six,” an oddly officious term commonly used by the leaders of southern lynch mobs, set the lynching for 8 P.M., when most everyone would be off to work. The advance notice allowed word to spread by radio, teletype, and afternoon papers to the western time zones.

Well before the appointed hour, several thousand people had gathered at the lynching site. The crowd grew so large and unruly—people having been given sufficient forewarning to come in from other states—that the committee of six, fearing a riot, took Neal to the woods by the Chipola River to wait out the crowds and torture him before the execution.62

There his captors took knives and castrated him in the woods. Then they made him eat the severed body parts “and say he liked it,” a witness said.

“One man threw up at the sight,” wrote the historian James R. McGovern.

Around Neal’s neck, they tied a rope and pulled it over a limb to the point of his choking before lowering him to take up the torture again. “Every now and then somebody would cut off a finger or toe,” the witness said. Then the men used hot irons to burn him all over his body in a ritual that went on for several hours.

“It is almost impossible to believe that a human being could stand such unspeakable torture for such a long period,” wrote the white undercover investigator retained by the NAACP.

The crowd waiting in town never got to see Neal die. The committee of six decided finally to just kill him in the woods. His nude body was then tied to the back of a car and dragged to the Cannidy house, where men, women, and children stabbed the corpse with sticks and knives. The dead girl’s father was angry that Neal was killed before he could get to him. “They done me wrong about the killing,” the father said. “They promised me they would bring him up to my house before they killed him and let me have the first shot. That’s what I wanted.”

The committee hanged the body “from an oak tree on the courthouse lawn.” People reportedly displayed Neal’s fingers and toes as souvenirs. Postcards of his dismembered body went for fifty cents each. When the sheriff cut down the body the next morning, a mob of as many as two thousand people demanded that it be re-hanged. When the sheriff refused to return it to the tree, the mob attacked the courthouse and rampaged through Marianna, attacking any colored person they ran into. Well-to-do whites hid their maids or sent cars to bring their workers to safety. “We needed these people,” said a white man who sat on his porch protecting his interests with a loaded Winchester. Florida Governor David Sholtz had to call in the National Guard to quell the mob

Across the country, thousands of outraged Americans wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanding a federal investigation. The NAACP compiled a sixteen-page report and more files on the Neal case than any other lynching in American history. But Neal had the additional misfortune of having been lynched just before the 1934 national midterm elections, which were being seen as a referendum on the New Deal itself. Roosevelt chose not to risk alienating the South with a Democratic majority in Congress at stake. He did not intervene in the case. No one was ever charged in Neal’s death or spent a day in jail for it. The Jackson County grand jury, in the common language of such inquests, reported that the execution had occurred “at the hands of persons unknown to us.”

Soon afterward, it was learned that Neal and the dead girl, who had known each other all their lives, had been lovers and that people in her family who discovered the liaison may have been involved in her death for the shame it had brought to the family.63 Indeed, the summer after Neal was lynched, the girl’s father was convicted of assault with intent to kill his niece because he suspected that that side of the family had had a hand in his daughter’s death.

In sentencing the father to five years in prison for attacking the relative, the judge said, “I hate to pass this sentence on an old man such as you, but I must do it. To be perfectly fair with you, I don’t believe you have any too many brains.”

The father replied, “Yes, judge. I am plumb crazy.”

Thereafter, Florida continued to live up to its position as the southernmost state with among the most heinous acts of terrorism committed anywhere in the South. Violence had become such an accepted fact of life that, in 1950, the Florida governor’s special investigator, Jefferson Elliott, observed that there had been so many mob executions in one county that it “never had a negro live long enough to go to trial.”64

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liger05 said:

I don't live in the US but just wanted to ask when Obama was elected did people expect to see things change at all?

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Piecake said:

Granted none of this is really institutional or structural. Well, I think you could make the claim that violence was institutional/structural in the South during this period.

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Amir0x said:

There needs to be an ongoing series of youtube videos called "LESSONS WITH MUMEI"

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Amir0x said:

whoa Mumei, I read plenty of books! Don't kill me! I like informative videos too though!

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EmSeta said:

I think it's so weird that felons can't vote.

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Mumei said:

Oh, that wasn't directed to you; it was just a thing I wished would happen. That people who are interested enough in a subject to have an opinion on it would be interested enough in educating themselves about it to read a book about it.

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liger05 said:

I don't live in the US but just wanted to ask when Obama was elected did people expect to see things change at all?

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Mumei said:

No, there needs to be an on-going thing called, 'READ A GODDAMN BOOK"

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