{"id":2163,"date":"2017-01-18T15:27:28","date_gmt":"2017-01-18T20:27:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/mission-and-identity\/?p=2163"},"modified":"2019-09-18T16:47:22","modified_gmt":"2019-09-18T20:47:22","slug":"jan-18-jim-crow-signs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/2017\/01\/18\/jan-18-jim-crow-signs\/","title":{"rendered":"Jan 18 – “Jim Crow Signs”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wednesday January 18 \u00a0–\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The signs that divide us \u2013 both literal and metaphorical \u2013 have often targeted people of color.\u00a0\u00a0 This was especially true during the era of segregation.\u00a0 Wherever one went, particularly in the South, placards reading \u201cfor White only\u201d or \u201cfor Colored only\u201d identified racially-segregated spaces.\u00a0 In the following segment from her autobiography\u00a0Brown Shoes<\/em>\u00a0(1956), Pauli Murray recounts the pervasiveness of these signs and their effects on African Americans.\u00a0 She also points to the influence of less overt \u201csigns\u201d of the color line.\u00a0 Murray (1910-1985) spent much of her life fighting against the race and gender divide \u2013 as a civil rights lawyer, college professor and administrator, deputy attorney general of California, and a founder of the National Organization for Women.\u00a0 Late in life, she was ordained as an Episcopal priest.<\/p>\n

What \u201csigns\u201d target people of color today?<\/p>\n

Roy E. Finkenbine and the Martin Luther King Week\/Black History Month Planning Team<\/p>\n

\"MartinLutherKingJr\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s post:\u00a0 Pauli Murray, Excerpt from\u00a0Brown Shoes<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I saw . . . the signs which literally screamed at me from every side \u2013 on streetcars, over drinking fountains, on doorways:\u00a0 FOR WHITE ONLY, FOR COLORED ONLY, WHITE LADIES, COLORED WOMEN, WHITE, COLORED.\u00a0 If I missed the signs I had only to follow my nose to the dirtiest, smelliest, most neglected accommodations or they were pointed out to me by a heavily-armed, invariably mountainous red-faced policeman who to me seemed more a signal of calamity than of protection.\u00a0 I saw the names of telephone subscribers conspicuously starred \u201c(C)\u201d in the telephone directory and the equally conspicuous space given to the crimes of Negroes by the newspapers, the inconspicuous space given to public recognition and always with the ignominious and insulting \u201cnegro\u201d and \u201cnegress.\u201d<\/p>\n

Each morning I passed white children as poor as I going in the opposite direction on their way to school.\u00a0 We never had fights; I don\u2019t recall their ever having called me a single insulting name.\u00a0 It was worse than that.\u00a0 They passed me as if I weren\u2019t there!\u00a0 They looked through me and beyond me with unseeing eyes.\u00a0 Their school was a beautiful red-and-white brick building on a wide paved street.\u00a0 Its lawn was large and green and watered every day and flower beds were everywhere.\u00a0 Their playground, a wonderland of iron swings, sand slides, seesaws, crossbars and a basketball court, was barred from us by a strong eight-foot-high fence topped by barbed wire.\u00a0 We could only press our noses against the wire and watch them playing on the other side.<\/p>\n

I went to West End [School] . . . on Ferrell Street, a dirt road which began at a lumberyard and ended in a dump.\u00a0 On one side of this road were long low warehouses where huge barrels of tobacco shavings and tobacco dust were stored.\u00a0 All day long our nostrils sucked in the brown silt like fine snuff in the air.\u00a0 West End looked more like a warehouse than a school.\u00a0 It was a dilapidated, rickety two-story wooden building which creaked and swayed in the wind as if it might collapse.\u00a0 Outside it was scarred with peeling paint from many winters of rain and snow.\u00a0 Inside the floors were bare and splintery, the plumbing was leaky, the drinking fountains broken and the toilets in the basement smelly and constantly out of order.\u00a0 We\u2019d have to wade through pools of foul water to get to them.\u00a0 At recess we herded into a yard of cracked clay, barren of tree or bush, and played what games we could improvise like hopscotch or springboard, which we contrived by pulling rotten palings off the wooden fence and placing them on brickbats.<\/p>\n

It was never the hardship which hurt so much as the constant contrast between what we had and what the white children had.\u00a0 We had the greasy, torn, dog-eared books; they got the new ones.\u00a0 They had field day in the city park; we had it on a furrowed, stubbly hillside.<\/p>\n

They got wide mention in the newspaper; we got a paragraph at the bottom.\u00a0 The entire city officialdom from the mayor downward turned out to review their pageantry; we got a solitary official.<\/p>\n

Our seedy run-down school told us that if we had any place at all in the scheme of things it was a separate place, marked off, proscribed and unwanted by the white people.\u00a0 We were bottled up and labeled and set aside \u2013 sent to the Jim Crow car, the back of the bus, the side door of the theater, the side window of a restaurant.\u00a0 We came to know that whatever we had was always inferior.\u00a0 We came to understand that no matter how neat and clean, how law abiding, submissive and polite, how studious in school, how church-going and moral, how scrupulous in paying our bills and taxes we were, it made no essential difference in our place.<\/p>\n

It seemed that there were only two kinds of people in the world \u2013\u00a0They<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0We<\/em>\u00a0\u2013\u00a0White<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Colored<\/em>.\u00a0 The world revolved on color . . .<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The MLK Week\u00a0and Black History Month Planning Team:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Roy Finkenbine,\u00a0Ph.D.,\u00a0Professor of History and Director of the Black Abolitionist Archive
\nLanae Gill, Director, Residence Life
\nFr. J. Timothy Hipskind, SJ, Director of Service-Learning, Institute for Leadership and Service
\nAdam Hollmann, Assistant Director, Student Life Programming
\nAnita Klueg, Director, University Ministry
\nDrew Peters, Assistant Director, Student Life Office
\nDorothy Stewart, Associate Dean of Students
\nMonica Williams, Dean of Students
\nAlex Zamalin, Ph.D., Director of African American Studies
\nInvited Guests: \u00a0Jillian Stewart,\u00a0Campus Kitchens Manager; Rafael Cruz-Serrano, Professional Mentor I, King-Chavez-Parks (KCP); and Janice Strickland,\u00a0Professional Mentor II, King-Chavez-Parks (KCP)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wednesday January 18 \u00a0–\u00a0 The signs that divide us \u2013 both literal and metaphorical \u2013 have often targeted people of color.\u00a0\u00a0 This was especially true during the era of segregation.\u00a0 Wherever one went, particularly in the South, placards reading \u201cfor … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11641],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2163"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2164,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163\/revisions\/2164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}