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THE
OPEN WOUNDS OF RACISM IN THE UNITED STATES
Manuel E. Yepe
FIVE years ago, in June 2009, 146
years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation
Proclamation, and 150 days after Barack Obama took
his oath as President, the U.S. Senate passed a
resolution formally apologizing to the Black
citizens of the United States for the suffering they
and their ancestors experienced under slavery and
Jim Crow. In July 2009 the House of Representatives
did the same.
Both apologies acknowledged the
inhuman nature of the slavery system and “Jim Crow”
practices – the name given to the period of intense
racial discrimination which followed the formal
abolition of slavery in 1865 – the marks of which
were felt as the U.S. version of apartheid until the
decade of the 1960s.
That was a period of infamous
racial discrimination – more violent and inhuman in
the Southern states than in the North – which kept
millions of African- American citizens legally
segregated from the white population, limited their
civil rights, and did not allow them to vote.
The name Jim Crow came from a
comedian who, in 1828, wrote and sang the song
“Jump, Jump, Jim Crow,” about a black slave who
danced while brushing his master’s horse.
The term Jim Crow was used to
identify activities and places where rigid
segregation was in place: marriage, the professions,
schools, sports, neighborhoods, churches,
cemeteries, universities, taxis, trains, boats,
buses, bars, restaurants, hotels, hospitals,
asylums, jails, drinking fountains, bathrooms,
parks, barbershops, circuses, fairs, theatres,
movies, elevators, libraries, beaches, public
telephones, workshops, and brothels; this apartheid
was even practiced in police line-ups.
In some cities there was Jim Crow
martial law which prohibited Blacks from being in
the streets after a certain hour in the evening.
Under Jim Crow laws, they were excluded from unions
and were not admitted to “white” brotherhoods,
societies or clubs. The Ku Klux Klan, the White
Citizens Councils and the John Birch Society, among
other American extreme right-wing organizations,
added violence to insult.
During the 1960’s and 70’s, FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover, who viewed the Black
Panther Party as “the greatest domestic threat,”
designed the COINTELPRO program to repress the Black
liberation movement and frequently fabricated crimes
to frame activists with false accusations. To
dismember this radical tendency, all kinds of
tactics were used, including the assassination of
its leaders, who were described as criminals and
placed on a level with those persons who opposed the
Vietnam War, supported the independence of Puerto
Rico, or showed solidarity with revolutionary Cuba.
In response, the African-American
civil rights struggle was intensified. Leaders such
as Malcolm X and the Reverend Martin Luther King,
Jr. emerged. In the 1960’s, the struggle for racial
equality produced hundreds of martyrs.
The internal struggle for
justice was encouraged by the consolidation of the
Cuban Revolution and the growth of anti-imperialism
and ideas of social justice in Latin America; but
fear of retaliation by the empire and its control of
the media restricted the international denunciation
of these actions and limited global solidarity.
Nevertheless, a revolutionary
situation was being generated and with this came the
need to recruit black soldiers for the Vietnam War.
This forced the system to bury Jim Crow practices,
still strong in the South.
In the interests of national
security, the empire made reforms and concessions on
the issue of interracial relations. These included
the advent of Black police agents, judges and
mayors. On TV and cinema screens, African-American
actors and actresses no longer represented
necessarily subservient and complacent beings. A
kind of doctrine of formal equality was maintained,
albeit with separation, given that in reality, since
the times of slavery, racism concealed a profound
system of class division in American society.
In the early 21st century, there
was an historical achievement in the United States:
the election of a President of African descent
although, of course, this has not sufficed to erase
– far less repair– the human rights deprivations and
the millions of wounded lives of people whose
alleged emancipation had been proclaimed a century
before.
The forms of persecution,
arbitrary injustices, and racist affronts which
lacerated human dignity were many. Some of these
shamefully survive as cruelly open wounds. •
CubaNews translation, edited by
Walter Lippmann.
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