Memories don’t just vanish overnight.
Slavery effectively ended in 1865 with the close of the Civil War and constitutional amendment, but state governments in the South, and many local governments in the north, perpetuated a lesser form of segregation and discrimination through so-called Jim Crow laws and other ostensibly “legal” strategies and practices. That regime persisted for nearly another century until a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1950s and the 1964 Civil Rights Act (employment, schools and public facilities), 1965 Voting Rights Act and 1968 Fair Housing Act finally put the basic legal protections in place that should have been enacted 100 years earlier. While incrementalimprovements in racial equality and access had occurred during the preceding century – for instance desegregation of the armed forces, black players in Benny Goodman’s jazz orchestra, Jackie Robinson in baseball– it was the 1960s legislation that propelled the most thoroughgoing changes. But even these legal protections didn’t change practices and opinions immediately. Despite some improvement, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee and other cities remain about as segregated as before, income and educational gaps remain, and legal enforcement of rights remains necessary.
1964, 1965 and 1968 weren’t so long ago. I was born in 1956 and have personal memories and experiences of the segregated south. Anyone over 50 lived before most of those legal protections were operative, and the following generation was raised by people who had had that experience. And children do learn from their parents and their memories. Across the world events are shaped by historical memory - Israel and Palestine, Armenians and Turks, Northern Ireland, Russian suspicion of the West. Korea and Japan. A quick look at a flag pole tells you Alabama and Mississippi aren’t forgetting the Civil War just yet.
Baltimore, Ferguson, Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, Cincinnati. 100 years from now historians should write that in the early 2000s, the racial history of the United States remained a raw sore and the nation was not long removed from 400 years of racial oppression. In 2015 many people weren’t sure those 400 years were quite over. You didn’t have to look far to find the evidence. Most of the time people got along peacefully but, beneath that surface, much work remained to do and the memories still had power.