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GROWING UP UNDER JIM CROW MADE ME FEEL A RESPONSIBILITY TO THE PAST
AND FUTURE  
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Douglas H. White
February 25, 2025
Tom Dispatch
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_ As I witness the resurgence of white supremacy under Trump, I
remember the segregation and Jim Crow of my youth. _

A Black Lives Matter (BLM) activist holds a BLM flag in his
wheelchair alongside another activist connecting with him while
holding an Afro-American flag in front of the Ohio Statehouse during a
protest against police brutality in Columbus, Ohio, on May 1, Stephen
Zenner / AFP via Getty Images

 

Today, racism remains a poisonous force in America. Fascism and
authoritarianism are on the rise and President Donald Trump is giving
voice to such hate, making it state policy and central to his
presidential agenda. Recently, he tried to ban
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birthright citizenship by executive order to limit the number of
babies of color born in the United States, though such an act is
clearly unconstitutional. Currently, at least two federal judges have
blocked Trump’s executive orders to redefine birthright citizenship.
He has also issued [[link removed]]
executive orders seeking to roll back diversity, equity, and
inclusion. He clearly does not want Black, Brown, and Asian people to
be on an equal footing with Whites.

All his most recent efforts are consistent with his longstanding
attempts
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to limit voting rights for people of color. Trump has voiced the most
vicious comments over the years: he says
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that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”; he
slammed
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Haitian migrants for trying to enter the United States by claiming
hundreds of thousands of them flowing into the country “probably
have AIDS”; Haiti, El Salvador, and African lands are “shithole
countries
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migrants are “animals
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and, as he also put it, there has to be “some form of punishment
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for women who have abortions. Finally, Trump has repeatedly stated
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his admiration for dictators and strong abusive rulers.

TRUMP’S PROTECTION OF AFRIKANERS

Trump, his enablers in the Republican Party, and his Make America
Great Again (MAGA) supporters should really be called Make America
White Again (MAWA). He and those groups have generated a blueprint for
increasing authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia. It’s crystal
clear that this enmity toward Black and Brown people is driven in part
by demographic changes in the United States that threaten to place
Whites in the minority. On the subject of race, Trump is sensitive
only when it comes to discrimination against White people. Recently,
he signed
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an executive order that would protect White South Africans from
discrimination and allow them to resettle in the United States.

As I witness the rise of White supremacy in America (again) and the
president’s ever-growing list of unconstitutional and illegitimate
acts, I remember the segregation and Jim Crow
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of my youth in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. And yet, being a
member of the last generation of Black Americans to live under Jim
Crow and the culture of racism that accompanied it left me, then, with
a certain hope and belief in the future. The history of my
generation’s efforts to make change lent credence to the idea that
all of us have the power to eliminate racism. It’s just a question
of doing the necessary work.

On any day of my youth, sitting in our living room in a housing
project in Kinston, North Carolina, I could pick up a copy of _Jet_
magazine, _Amsterdam News_, the _Pittsburgh Courier_, or _Ebony
Magazine_, and the headline would scream something like: “Another
Colored Person Dies on the Highway.” The reason: a “White-only”
hospital wouldn’t treat them. This happened with alarming frequency
and left me with many visions of Black people bleeding to death on the
black tarmac of highways in Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and
elsewhere in the South. I imagined loved ones or even myself having an
accident and not being able to get treatment because no Black doctors
could be located. Mostly, though, I worried about my father because as
a professional gambler — his cardplaying was the total source of
economic support for our family — he sometimes found himself in
remote areas of the deep South, far from medical facilities that would
treat Blacks.

The most notorious such case occurred in North Carolina when I was
eight years old. On April 1, 1950, Doctor Charles Drew
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a Black man who was the internationally famous inventor of the blood
bank, was in an auto accident near city of Burlington. The rumor was
that Doctor Drew had bled to death because a “White-only” hospital
wouldn’t treat him (though, in fact, he had received a transfusion
at an all-White hospital). Black people believed such rumors then
because they knew of segregated hospitals that would indeed not treat
them. I can still feel the heat of the rage of many Black friends who
came to our home and could talk of little else. The fact that
segregation was state-sponsored only made such a disregard for human
life worse.

Segregation and Jim Crow laws were designed to take from Black people
our ability to function as anything but mere appendages of the ruling
White society. There were significant attempts to change such laws and
locally enforced customs through demonstrations, direct action,
litigation, and legislation in the 1950s and 1960s, but they didn’t
succeed in fully correcting the damage of racism in our society,
which, as the Trumpian moment indicates, remains pervasive and
unyielding.

But within the Black community, my family, friends, and many others
taught me about life and survival, offering me attention and love. Mr.
Peter G. Fuller (and yes, we did use “mister” then), a favorite of
mine and an older friend of my parents, worked as a farm agent,
teaching Black farmers how to grow corn, beets, peas, tobacco, and
other produce. He was six feet tall and 66 years old, with a brown
complexion, an open, bright-eyed face, bushy eyebrows speckled with
grey, and slightly protruding teeth. He walked with a loping gait,
always chewing a twig as he worked. When I was with him, he was direct
and to the point, talking to me as if I were a grownup and listening
to what I had to say.

Looking back, I still admire Mr. Fuller for his patience. My mother
would later tell me that, when I was six, some adults avoided me
because I asked too many questions, but not Mr. Fuller. His wife Loise
called him “Peter G” and he was usually in his garden in the early
morning hours just off the road that led to our project. I always knew
I could find him there. On the day I have in mind, Mr. Fuller was
hitched to a mule that was pulling a plow, the reins on his broad
shoulders, his hands on that plow. As he turned over the soil in his
large garden, I walked behind him in the space between the plowed rows
and asked him questions. He was such a favorite of mine because he had
time for children. He never rushed you, listened very closely to your
questions, and gave you detailed answers, as in the first talk I
remember us having:

“Mr. Fuller, are you afraid of the mule?”

“No,” he answered smiling, “this mule is better behaved than
most people.”

“Mr. Fuller, why don’t you say horse?”

“Well, Douglas, I believe you call a thing or animal by its rightful
name. But that is a good question — a mule is a mule, and a horse is
a horse. A mule is part donkey and part horse.”

“Really!!” I exclaimed, this being news to me.

“That’s right, Douglas.”

“Mr. Fuller, do you plow with a horse?”

“I don’t — mules are better work animals than horses.”

“Why are you plowing?”

“Well, if you want to eat well, it’s a good idea.”

“You plow to eat?”

“Well, you plow so you can turn over the rich soil and plant corn
seeds. When the corn grows you eat the corn.”

“How did you learn to plow?”

“My daddy taught me when I was a boy like you.” Then he added
after a pause, “It’s important to plow to grow stuff, just like
school is important to learn things.”

“Mr. Fuller, would you teach me how to plow?”

“Yes, of course,” he answered, pulled back on the reins, and
shouted, “Whoa mule! Whoa mule!” The mule stopped. He then
instructed me to stand right behind the plow while he stood behind me.
He held the reins in his right hand, lifted me up under his left arm,
and placed my hands on the handle of the plow. He made a clicking
sound toward the mule and off we went. After a few minutes, the mule
slowed down, lifted its tail, and grunted, making a bowel movement.
The foul smell hit us in the face. Mr. Fuller and I laughed. He
didn’t seem to mind the smell of the manure, and when we saw that he
was also stepping in it, we stopped to laugh some more.

“Will it hurt the garden plants?”

“No, it will help the plants,” he answered. “It’s what’s
called fertilizer. The fertilizer and the nutrients in the soil help
the plants to grow. Sometimes we think something is a waste, but it
helps us live.” Mr. Fuller put me down as we talked.

“How did you learn all this stuff, Mr. Fuller?” I asked, intrigued
and curious.

“I went to college, but I learned a lot of it from my daddy. College
is the place you go to learn things and it is important for colored
people.”

A few years later Mr. Fuller told me he had attended the Hampton
Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, a school established by
White people in 1868 to train Native Americans and Blacks to become
teachers and learn trades in agriculture, cabinetmaking, printing, and
tailoring. He graduated in agriculture.

On every visit, after that first talk, Mr. Fuller would make a
clicking sound and off we would go to continue plowing until I got
tired. Then we’d stop under a shady tree overlooking the garden and
discuss what seemed to me like everything in the world. Mr. Fuller
always had a lunchbox with a mason jar of water, grapes, an apple, a
sandwich, and cake. He always seemed to have food for me, too, and
when I asked how come, he responded, “I just do,” then adding,
“I thought you might come by to see me.”

When I became more knowledgeable about my place in the world during my
teen years, I began to ask Mr. Fuller about his past. Did he remember
slavery? “No,” he responded with a laugh, “I am not that old,
but my parents were slaves as children — I learned a lot from them,
yes, I did.” He gazed at me intently.

Born in 1881, in Kinston, North Carolina, he was in his mid-sixties
when, at five and six years old, I visited him in his garden plot. So,
although he spoke to me of many things, he did not disclose parts of
his story which I imagine he thought might frighten me. He left out,
in fact, certain fearful, seminal events of his youth that I now know
occurred in the nearby city of Wilmington, North Carolina, before he
reached the age of 20.

THE WILMINGTON MASSACRE OF 1898

Wilmington is a mere 87 miles from Kinston. On November 10, 1898, a
mob of 1,500 White supremacists marched into
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of town, burned down the Black newspaper office building, and killed
up to 100 Black people.

White-supremacist-directed violence was increasing there for two
significant reasons then: growing Black political power and editorials
written by Alex Manly for the local Black newspaper, _The Daily
Record_, condemning miscegenation laws. Manly was on the list of
Blacks to be killed that day. However, he had been warned and so
escaped a few days prior to the mob violence. Manly had written that
it was no worse for a Black man to be intimate with a White woman than
for a White man to be intimate with a Black woman. In reaction, the
White racist community distributed his editorial widely and used it as
a pretext for the mass killing of Blacks that followed.

Mr. Fuller was 17 at the time of those murders. Living in Kinston, he
couldn’t have escaped the fear and tension. If you were Black and so
close to atrocities committed by Whites, fear traveled and spread
fast.

RECONSTRUCTION — VIOLENCE AGAINST BLACK PEOPLE AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

Mr. Fuller was born a few years after Reconstruction (1865-1877), the
period following the Civil War during which the United States sought
to reintegrate the southern states into the union and deal with the
status of Black people. It was also a time when White supremacist
groups like the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Councils used extreme
violence against Black people to keep them from becoming full
citizens, a time when
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than 2,000 Blacks were lynched, the ultimate form of terror.

Like my grandparents during their young adult years, Mr. Fuller,
inspired by the lives of Frederick Douglass
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and others, began to see glimmers of hope in the views of W.E.B.
DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Carter G. Woodson, the poetry of Paul Lawrence
Dunbar, and the exhortations of Ida B. Wells
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and Mary McLeod Bethune. Activists of that era were developing ideas
about community, education, organizing, survival, and being
responsible for others that would bode well for future Black
generations. The accomplishments of Blacks of that era fed the
development of much that was to come in politics, education, and the
arts, and remain part of a centuries-long struggle to move this
country toward the sort of authentic democracy that Donald Trump
stands strongly against.

As I grew in years and understanding, my memories of talking with Mr.
Fuller enabled me to feel far more deeply my closeness to my ancestors
and the horrors of slavery that they endured. Donald Trump’s most
recent acts and his unending attacks
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on “diversity” have only brought such conversations back ever more
strongly.

MARTIN LUTHER KING DEFINING THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

I was born in 1942, only 77 years after the 13th Amendment formally
abolished slavery. The recentness of slavery, my unbroken connection
to enslaved people through my heritage, being a member of the last
generation of Blacks to live and grow to adulthood under segregation
and Jim Crow all created in me a feeling of responsibility to the past
and to the future. Along with my family, Mr. Fuller was the central
person who sparked my dedication to my ancestors and to learning about
our collective past.

Now, the xenophobic, bigoted, and cruel policies of the Trump
administration are bringing back traumatic memories of American racism
and all the nightmares that went with it. Yet the words
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Martin Luther King — “_the arc of the moral universe is long, but
it bends toward justice_” — continue to inspire me during such
dangerous, increasingly dismal times.

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Douglas H. White is a civil rights activist, lawyer and government
official whose career [[link removed]] has centered on
human and civil rights and labor law. He was human rights commissioner
for the State of New York, city personnel director/commissioner of the
City of New York and deputy fire commissioner for New York City. He
recently completed a memoir entitled _Unbroken: The Last Generation of
Black Americans Under Jim Crow and the Culture of Racism in America.
_The memoir is represented by Marie Brown Associates.

* Trump's Racist Policies ; American Racism; Black History;
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