Lest We Forget by Velma Maia Thomas

Author:Velma Maia Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

At black-owned barbershops like this one in Harlem, black folks gathered to share the news of the day.

For my people, violence ushered in the 1920s. During the Red Summer of 1919, race riots erupted in twenty-six cities; the newly revived Ku Klux Klan lynched at least eighty-three blacks. In 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, white mobs burned black homes and killed sixty black residents. The National Guard, called in to restore peace, dropped bombs that completely leveled a once-thriving black community. Similar riots broke out in Springfield, Ohio; Rosewood, Florida; and East St. Louis, Missouri, leaving scores of dead, hundreds homeless. Segregation was so entrenched that few whites gave it a second thought. Southern whites felt they had a firm hold on “their” Negroes, many of whom had worked for them or their families for two or three generations.

Somehow, in the midst of its economic upswing, the nation must have forgotten my people. Somehow it must have thought that all was well with us. But it wasn’t. And the waters of discontent kept stirring. In the decades that followed, black folks would speak out en masse. There was a new spirit of fight in our eyes and our souls. Black men would fight back when attacked by an angry mob. Black lawyers would argue landmark civil rights cases. My people would successfully challenge and bring an end to Jim Crow laws. “Law abiding” blacks stubbornly refused to give up their seats on segregated city buses. Black youth faced jail and angry mobs. Death took to the streets—becoming part of both peaceful demonstration and violent rebellion. College students of all colors would give up their education to travel to Mississippi to help register black voters. Day laborers, domestics, churchgoers, and black elite joined hands and forces to battle two hundred years of segregation and discrimination. It was time, they said, for America to give us our due.

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