Race Still Matters
Monday, February 27, 2006
Moral Amnesia in America
From The Christian Century, February 21:
In 1970, when Timothy Tyson was ten years old, a black man named Henry “Dickie” Marrow was murdered in Oxford, North Carolina, allegedly for making a sexual comment to a white woman. Despite the testimony of eyewitnesses, the killers, Robert and Larry Teel—known to be Klansmen—were acquitted by an all-white jury. Tyson’s father, Vernon, a United Methodist minister, was one of two white people who attended Marrow’s funeral and joined the funeral march to the cemetery. After pursuing degrees in African-American studies, Timothy Tyson wrote a book about events in Oxford. Blood Done Sign My Name (Three Rivers Press) combines history, moral passion and storytelling. Tyson teaches African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin. We spoke with him about his book and the civil rights era.
Many Americans seem to have the impression that the civil rights era occurred a long time ago and that the issues have long since been resolved.
Moral fatigue also plagued early 20th-century Christians, who watched largely without comment as two or three African Americans were tortured to death in public every week, and who cheered as black citizens lost the right to vote. There has never been a time when white Americans were not ready to declare the race problem solved. The largest elements of the church today have made an unspoken deal with the larger culture, sharing its preoccupations, prejudices and politics in exchange for power and respectability.
Legal segregation is dead, yet America is more segregated in some respects now than when I was a boy. The gap between rich and poor is many times wider than it was back then. The country’s inner cities are much harder places to live in than they were 30 years ago. More than 40 percent of African-American children today grow up in poverty. When a young black man and a young white man go before a court, charged with the same first-time offense, carrying the same clean record, the young black man is eight times more likely to see a prison cell; if they are both charged with a drug offense, the young black man is 49 times more likely to see a prison cell. We have given up on rehabilitation, and now the people we’re letting out of prison are more dangerous than the people we are putting in.
Things are better in other ways, especially for middle-class African Americans. Doors are open for blacks whose backgrounds permit them to accommodate themselves to traditionally white places like Yale and Princeton. But generally those are not the people whom Martin Luther King Jr. addressed when he was in Memphis, just before he was shot, trying to help the garbage workers win a living wage.
