Having always lived in diverse communities where many languages are spoken and many cultures practiced it was a curious position I found myself in. I’m a white male in my mid-30s and the America that existed when race was a prerequisite for using certain water fountains seems distant. Then last week, I was sitting across the table from a woman who lived her childhood partially according to Jim Crow. Growing up in Southern Georgia, Gayle was always reminded of the color line. “Whites lived on the East side, and we blacks lived on the West side”, and everything was separate; schools, restaurants, etc. Her father had been a sharecropper and together with Gayle’s mother raised her and two sisters and a brother there in their small Georgia town. Knowing better than to ask a Southern woman her age, I did get her to admit that “Integration finally arrived when I was in 7th or 8th grade in the late 1960s” but change was slow and “we still had separate proms in high school.” Two Supreme Court decisions stand as de-facto bookends of the segregation era, Plessy vs. Ferguson and Brown vs. Board of Education. The former, in 1896 solidified “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites giving credibility to what became known as the Jim Crow laws that codified segregation (Schaefer p. 181). However, as a practical matter it gave the green light to inexcusable policies where property and services provided to blacks were inferior until 1954 and Brown. It chipped away at Plessy by allowing seven year-old Linda Brown admittance to a “white” school four blocks away, rather than having to attend the “black” school miles away (Schaefer p. 185). Segregation still leaves a legacy of broken down schools and inadequate economic opportunities that exist today. Gayle’s story however, is about the Black family emerging from that legacy, tenuous as that might be at times. After high school Gayle would be the first to attend college at Fort Valley State, a land grant institution and historically black college in Fort Valley, Georgia achieving a Bachelor’s degree in Social Work. She would work in an orphanage in Atlanta and then move to Kansas where she worked with prostitutes at a jail in Junction City, just outside of Fort Riley. She met her husband while he was stationed at Fort Riley as a sergeant and today they both work in human services while their daughter major in Music at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Professionally, Gayle says that like many African Americans she still carries some of the effects of segregation. “Black people have this fear factor” she remarks shrinking a bit in her chair, “that we are not seen as equal and that for fear of being scrutinized, our work has always got to be above and beyond. Or, the inferiority complex causes us to not reach as high we should.” This complex she says contributes highly to the high unemployment rate among blacks since 1940 that ranges from 6.2 percent to 11.4 percent, while whites unemployment rate is roughly half, fluctuating from 3.3 to 5.2 percent (Schaefer, 2011). But, she says that the election of Barak Obama to the White House can help that. “It gives the younger generation of black people hope that they can strive for something.”
She adds that however he is not a miracle worker and is everyone’s president, and that true change in the black community has to come from them taking the responsibility to make their lives better.
References:
Fort Valley State University, (2011). History. Retrieved March 21, 2011 from: http://past.fvsu.edu/about/history

Schaefer, R.T. (2011). Racial and ethnic groups (12th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.