Can someone hold my cappuccino for me, please?
To my white friends and colleagues, and maybe a few Black ones, we need to talk. Yes, I’m writing about race. Again. But you should take a few minutes to read this, lest someone lead you down some faulty garden path of disinformation. Seriously, if you know me or have Black friends or are even remotely concerned about the lives of Black people, you owe it to yourself, Black people in general, and every Black person you know to take a few minutes to sit with this.
Apparently, there are a few people on television touting various inaccuracies about “advantages” Black families held during the Jim Crow era. As a descendant of people who were once enslaved, let me be clear on this point: the period of Jim Crow was never nor can it ever be viewed as a period of benefit for Black families.
Jim Crow laws were in effect in the southern United States shortly after the post-Civil War Reconstruction period through 1965. Jim Crow laws paved the way for segregation, “separate but equal” policies, laws that kept Black people from voting, and more.
To refer to the Jim Crow era’s rampant lynching of Black men (fathers and sons) were routinely lynched; the sexual assault of Black women (mothers and daughters); the razing of Black communities (homes, churches, farms, land), along with running Black inhabitants out town by white supremacists who received no consequence for their acts of terror-based racism with no justice rendered to the Black victims or their families as commonplace is not hyperbole but well-documented and historical fact.
Tell me how any of that constitutes an environment for fostering “healthy” families. Of any ethnicity.
It doesn’t. And to set any portion of that notion as true or accurate is trafficking malevolent deceit.
Below are a few articles related to events that occurred during the Jim Crow the lives of Black people and events that occurred during the Jim Crow Era. You owe it to yourself to know the difference between the historical truth and bald-faced lies.
Love one another.
Clay Rivers
OHF Weekly Editor in Chief
And . . .