[ Where can African Americans find this lost golden age? Do we
discover it during the first centuries of the Republic when slavery
was the law of the land? Do we fast forward to the Red Summer, Jim
Crow laws, “strange fruit” hanging from poplar trees?]
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OUR SUPPOSEDLY GLORIOUS PAST EXISTED ONLY FOR SOME  
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Esau McCaulley
September 10, 2023
New York Times
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_ Where can African Americans find this lost golden age? Do we
discover it during the first centuries of the Republic when slavery
was the law of the land? Do we fast forward to the Red Summer, Jim
Crow laws, “strange fruit” hanging from poplar trees? _

Segregated signage marked Lewis Mountain as a “black only”
facility; Picture from National Park Service, circa 1939-1950,,
[Shenandoah National Park: Segregation in the American South’s
Public Lands; Colorado State University, Public and Environmental
History Center]

 

Many of us are familiar with “the talk.” I have in mind the
African American version in which we outline for our kids how to
engage with law enforcement. This is not an instruction on the nuances
of legal rights. Instead, Black children receive tools to survive the
moment.

But there is another talk that exists largely in the states of the
former Confederacy. It’s a lesson in Southern geography.

I knew two maps as a teenager. One revealed the quickest way from,
say, Huntsville, Ala., where I lived, to Jackson, Miss., where I
sometimes visited family and friends for the weekend. But overlaying
that map was a racial one depicting the detours we had to make as we
journeyed through the land of Dixie in Black bodies.

My mother informed me of this second map the first time I planned a
trip outside the confines of our hometown. She explained that I needed
to fill up my gas tank before leaving and was not to stop in any small
towns. “Under no circumstances are you ever to go to Cullman, Arab
or Boaz,” she said.

Her advice transcended this particular journey, transforming it into a
lesson on the nature of Black life in the South. During those years, I
never heard of any official Green Book
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Black travelers to safe stops in the South. This was just local
knowledge passed down from mother to son. I vowed to obey her on all
my journeys, to make sure that I never crossed into those forbidden
hamlets.
 

“The Negro Motorist Green-Book” steered Black travelers in the
South to stops that were safe for them.  (Credit: Victor Hugo Green,
via the New York Public Library  //  New York Times)
I was an adult when I finally did some research into the places she
outlawed. I learned that Cullman, Ala.
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was said to be a sundown town
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place where Black people were not allowed to live or be found after
dark. Cullman schools remained segregated
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the 1970s, the years of my mother’s childhood.

The racism that plagued those places is not merely a remnant of
a long-forgotten past
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haunts them. In 2021, a video of two Cullman High School students
spewing
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power slogans and threats of violence against African Americans was
posted online.

Of course, not every small town in the South is racist. Small and
Southern does not mean evil. The wealthy often show equal disdain
toward white small-town poverty and Black urban poverty. There is a
kinship and possible cooperation born of shared suffering that is yet
to be actualized. When Wendell Berry
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of small-town life, I can lament with him about what has been lost.
When John Denver sings of country roads
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we can share.

People unfamiliar with the idea of a racial map may have been
surprised by Black responses to Jason Aldean’s country song “Try
That in a Small Town [[link removed]],”
which became a hit this summer. The song describes stomping on the
flag, disrespecting the police and armed robbery. If you try those
things in a small town, the song goes, “See how far you make it down
the road / Around here, we take care of our own.” Later in the song
Mr. Aldean warns that he’s got a gun and that small towns are
“full of good ol’ boys, raised up right / If you’re looking for
a fight.”
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The suggestion that this song could be deeply problematic received the
expected condemnation from certain quarters as another example of woke
cancel culture. But the song’s story of “good ol’ boys” taking
the law into their own hands stirs up a particular history for me and
many Black listeners. I wonder how often vigilante groups were formed
to protect Black Southerners from harm rather than inflict it upon
them.

Aldean strongly disagreed that there were any racial undertones to his
song. After all, the song doesn’t mention African Americans or race
at all. According to Mr. Aldean,
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is simply about the traditional values of small-town America. Some
people think this set of values is drifting away in a rapidly changing
country.

Where can African Americans find this lost golden age? Do we discover
it during the first centuries of the Republic when slavery was the law
of the land? Do we fast forward to the Red Summer
[[link removed]], Jim Crow
laws and “strange fruit
[[link removed]]” hanging from poplar
trees?

The small-town song, in the end, is about a return to a glorious past
that existed only for some. It is a fresh creation cobbled together
from a mishmash of half-truths and long-cherished myths. It is a 1950s
with a booming economy and picket fences but no whites-only water
fountains. It leaves out the rampant racism, tosses aside rural and
urban poverty and focuses on manners without examining the threat of
violence lingering underneath the surface.

It is the same kind of false remembering that makes a plantation
wedding sound picturesque when in reality it’s marriage at a site of
horrors. Small Southern towns, in this mythic America, are all sweet
tea and thank you, ma’ams.

Black history
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the legacy of slavery
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contested, not because we lack information about what occurred in
America, but because it’s all too real. And it has the power to
destroy false nostalgia.

A path remains open for this country, but it is rarely trod. We can
fully own our national sins, a pursuit of a genuine reconciliation
rooted in truth and the righting of wrongs. Following such a course
might allow for a genuine miracle: a truly multicultural society
marked by understanding and forgiveness. To create that America, we
are going to have to learn to sing better songs.

One summer in the late 1990s when I was on my way home from college in
Mississippi, I stopped in a small town to buy gas. My mother’s
instructions had slipped my mind. The gas station had a hamburger spot
attached to it. After I stepped inside, I noted that everyone was
white and that all their faces turned toward me with expressions of
surprise and hostility.

Black Southerners know the meaning of certain looks and the best way
to survive when we have wandered into places bubbling with danger.
Rather than fill up, I said to the guy behind the counter, “Can I
have $15 on number four, please?” I handed him a $20 bill and told
him to keep the change. Fifteen dollars would buy enough fuel to take
me to a major town and a safer exit.

I returned to my car calmly but quickly and began pumping the gas. As
I was finishing, a few people came out of the gas station and got in
their pickups. They turned on their engines but did not move until I
got into my car. As I pulled out, they followed close behind until I
returned to the highway. My heart raced until I reached the safety of
being among other travelers on the interstate.

There will undoubtedly be some who question my interpretation of this
interaction, if I was really at risk. No one at the gas station
mentioned race, and the Confederate flag on the license plates could
have simply been a matter of Southern pride rather than outright
racism.

But that instinctive feeling of doubt that arises in the hearts of so
many Americans is a fear that recognizes that some forms of nostalgia
must finally be put to rest.

_[ESAU MCCAULLEY (@esaumccaulley [[link removed]])
is a contributing Opinion writer, the author of the forthcoming book
“How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope
and Survival in the American South
[[link removed]]”
and an associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College.]_

* Racism
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* African Americans
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* South
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* slavery
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* jim crow
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* Strange Fruit
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* hanging
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* Ku Klux Klan
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* KKK
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* racial murders
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* Try That in a Small Town
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* Black urban poverty
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* Confederacy
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* Donald Trump
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* MAGA
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* GOP
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* Republican Party
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* 2024 Elections
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* Education
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* segregation
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* Supreme Court
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