Growing Up Under Jim Crow Made Me Feel a Responsibility to the Past and Future

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 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 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 to limit voting rights for people of color. Trump has voiced the most vicious comments over the years: he says that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”; he slammed 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”; migrants are “animals“; and, as he also put it, there has to be “some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. Finally, Trump has repeatedly stated 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 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 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, 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 the Black section 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 an estimated more 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, Harriet Tubman, 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 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 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 of Reverend 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.