From 1950 to 1980, before the personal computer revolution and the birth of the Internet, a vigorous and pervasive paper media flourished in America. The underground press — as it was called then — included not only thousands of newspapers, but literary gazettes and alternative periodicals.
Hippie Rescues Drowning Child. Michigan legend, Denny Preston, illustrated this famous cover from the Underground Press.
Historian Ken Wachsberger is now working with libraries and publishers to find, rehabilitate, and digitize hundreds of underground publications that otherwise will be lost to history as they decay to dust in closets and basements across America.
Not on my watch, Kenny has pledged.
Historian Ken Wachsberger is the Director of the Digitizing our History Project
The task is enormous. [ click on link above to see how big ] The number of publications is in the thousands.
The underground press got its energy from millions of people who opposed war during a period when the United States raged racist wars in countries like Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Countless men and women of conscience opposed segregation in America; they dedicated big chunks of their lives to helping our country come to grips with its sordid racial past.
The underground press injected energy into a cultural revolution that brought hope to women, gays, racial minorities, the poor, the disadvantaged, and the physically and mentally challenged.
During the thirty years between 1950 and 1980 the underground press brought a fresh point of view, which changed not only America but the world. The earth became a better place to live for hundreds of millions of people who had been burdened and locked-out by discrimination and prejudice — the ravages of war and scarcity — brought by the greed and power of men, mostly, who didn’t give a care about who they hurt.
Today it seems like if it’s not on the internet, people think it never happened. If a PDF, Word file, blog, or web-site doesn’t write about it — or a YouTube video doesn’t feature it, people give up looking for records from past that exist only in the memories of folks too old to understand the internet enough to preserve their experience for the folks who will come after.
The risk to everyone — to the people who lived and suffered these changes — is that everything the smartest generation learned and accomplished will be forgotten.
Civilization will slide back into old the habits and ways that have wrecked society after society over the entire history of humankind. The politics of exclusion will push back the politics of inclusion. Peace will give way to war. Open and free-living will give way to gated communities and a fortress mentality.
The lessons learned from the struggle to save America will be lost, and our country will have to relearn them, at great loss to our national momentum toward a better life for all. Should totalitarianism take root, freedom will disappear, forever.
It’s a risk every thinking person is wise to take seriously.
The project to digitize the legendary past is big and important. I am grateful to Ken Wachsberger and his team for the effort they are making to save our history when so many seem ready to put it behind at great peril to future generations.
If might makes right, America is the most righteous nation to ever exist.
Most Americans — if asked before 911 — would say that nothing is wrong with America. America is where everyone wants to be. People risk everything to come here. End of story. And by the way, if you don’t like it, leave.
The attitude of most Americans before September 11, 2001 was to willfully and blissfully ignore the many blunders for which the United States is renowned in the rest of the watching world.
These screw-ups include but are not limited to:
Codifying slavery in our Constitution (Article IV, Sec. 2)Southern States fighting the Civil War to preserve slavery.Conducting genocidal wars against native Americans.Depriving Negroes of their freedom after fighting a bloody civil war to give them their freedom.Permitting our country to slide into a Great Depression while doing almost nothing to fix it. (Free coffee and donuts?)Dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities.Killing 20% of the population during a senseless war in Korea.Allowing gangsters to run our cities.Unleashing a bloodbath of assassinations against politicians and entertainers in the nineteen-sixties and seventies.Executing foreign leaders (among them, Che Guevara, pictured above) while launching Bay-of-Pigs style military operations against small countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Chile.Conducting a genocidal war in Vietnam — simply to test a new generation of weapons. Jane Fonda, pictured above, was among the first who said it wasn’t right.Exploiting migrant agricultural workers.Overturning sixty years of tax law in the 1980s to allow undemocratic concentrations of wealth.
In 2001 Americans believed these idiocies lay in our past; our distant past. They were symptomatic of nothing; not worth noticing, analyzing or fixing. They had nothing to do with now. Nothing was going on now that we needed to fret about or repair. Like Alfred E. Neuman of Mad Magazine, Americans could say, What, me worry?
World Trade Center Twin Towers.
In 2001 the Twin Towers came down. Buried in the rubble lay two-hundred billion dollars of 99.997% pure gold ingot (allegedly recovered).
The oil-rich Bush family‘s first reaction was to take the world to war. The ramp-up was egged on by profiteers, as war always is. And Wall Street insiders, under the cover of the War on Terror, began to deploy contrived financial instruments like bundled sub-primemortgage derivatives (which obfuscated risk) to better suck dry the deep pools of the world’s wealth unaware.
Blunders came fast and furious. By 2008 the leaders of the United States had made so many mistakes they created a financial meltdown. Millions of people lost their homes and jobs. The middle class lost fifty-five percent of its accumulated wealth — much of it in retirement accounts. The situation became dire, causing some people to believe God was punishing the USA for its sins.
Before he made his Nobel Prize winning run for the presidency, Barack Obama’s pastor was Jeremiah Wright. During the early years of Obama’s term, hundreds of retired Chicago police officers set up a perimeter defense around Jeremiah’s church each week to protect congregants from death threats. Obama eventually resigned his membership to protect from harm his friends-in-Christ. It worked. Over the years the threats decreased; the church survived.
People decided to turn around and do the unthinkable: elect the nation’s first black president. His pastor, Jeremiah Wright, screamed, the chickens have come home to roost, on all the news shows. Some people thought, maybe Barack Obama can calm down our angry God.
But as of 2014 — six years after the near-fatal financial meltdown — the USA continues to hover on the precipice of a Soviet Union style collapse.
It’s time to ask the question: Is something wrong with America? And maybe one more: Is somethingwrong with Americans?
Before we ask or answer questions like these, perhaps we should ask an even larger question. Is America a place where people have any chance at all to do well over time?
It might be that geography and geology on this side of the globe are not suitable for civilization or sustained human activity. Whoever lives on this side — whatever their values or culture — may, in the long run, not matter.
Historically, large populations of humans have been unable to establish themselves for long periods on our hemisphere.Hurricane Irene, 1999
The Americas have been inhospitable to humankind. Looking back over the eons, a case can be made — due to earthquakes, volcanoes, meteor hits, frequent ice ages, predatory animals, mosquito and insect bred diseases, droughts, floods, wild fires and hurricanes — that large populations of humans have simply not been able to establish themselves on our hemisphere for long periods; nor will they, ever.
This disturbing graphic is one artist’s depiction of volcanic eruptions 100 miles southeast of Yosemite National Park — now a hundred years overdue.
The United States endures, on average, a thousand tornadoes each year. This number is greater than all the tornadoes that occur in the rest of the world added together.
It wasn’t until 1920 that the population in North America reached a hundred million people. It is conceivable — under reasonably imagined scenarios — that the population of North America will soon collapse.
Some geologists believe the mammoth super volcano buried beneath Yellowstone National Park will erupt someday — perhaps soon. If they are right, surviving humans will have to start over.
Coastal shelf off Los Angeles, California
Other geologists believe seismic activity in the west may one day cause the loss of sizable portions of our continental shelf, perhaps precipitating a cataclysmic flood. Earthquakes in the Cascadia subduction zone have wiped-out huge swaths of our Pacific Northwest forty-one times during the past ten-thousand years. The next earthquake/tsunami is a hundred-and seven years overdue.
It is often said California is the eighth largest economy in the world. Should California or the Pacific Northwest slide into the Pacific Ocean, it would be hard for the rest of North America to keep going.
In addition to the deaths of forty million people, intensive seismic activity and floods could destroy California’s four civilian nuclear reactors (one active, but all storing dangerous quantities of radioactive waste) and the military’s nuclear sites, nuclear powered ships, and submarines. High-level radioactive waste would then pollute the Pacific Ocean and our coastal areas for many thousands of years (much like the disaster now unfolding in Fukushima, Japan).
The question of whether our continent is suitable to support an advanced civilization for more than a few hundred years remains to be answered. It’s not clear to me that it can.
But let’s return to the original question: Is something wrong with America?
Why does a country with our values do bad things? Why so much inequality, crime and perversion? Why so much addiction, pervasive drug use, bullying, child abuse, domestic violence and murder?
Why generational wars, gated communities, blighted inner cities, militias, and political extremism? Why concentration of wealth for the few and debt and despair for the many? Why the increase in home schools and private academies in a nation whose founding virtue was public education for every citizen?
Why so much hatred directed against a people whose only crime was hating slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the current hardships of discrimination in hiring, housing, health care, and policing?
Why can’t black people, for example, catch a break after everything they’ve put up with, from lynchings to (for one black man, at least) being ridiculed on national television for mispronouncing correct answers on Jeopardy?
When we ask questions like these, it seems clear (to me at least) that something sinister is wrecking havoc on our dreams and aspirations. Something fundamental about the way we think and problem-solve is not serving us well.
Europeans like to point out that Americans solve problems by selecting and working through all the wrong solutions first. It’s what makes us so sure we’re right, when we finally stumble on the correct solution.
But how about another view? We live in a country where powerful people once owned slaves. Industrial tycoons operated private militias to control restless employees.
We live in a country where an entitled, strong-willed aristocracy has ruled for centuries a population who believes itself to be free; a democracy.
Old habits of thought and action have been handed down from each generation to the next on both sides.
The powerful and wealthy have learned they can hire spokesmen (like Rush Limbaugh and Tom Brokaw, for example) to play on the fears, aspirations, and assumptions of common people to better confuse and seduce them into serving their interests. This manipulation of one class of people by another has led to a schizophrenic dynamic, which is one of the reasons people in other countries and cultures think Americans are crazy.
Possible future if we don’t secure our democracy.
The lunacy will not end anytime soon. It seems our country is determined to follow its aristocracy wherever it leads. History is full of examples of elites who — deluded, depraved, and out of touch — led their civilizations into the abyss. It’s why our ancestors invented democracy — so cliques of wealthy, well-connected power-trippers couldn’t harm us.
Alas, democracy is not a form of government the elites of the world favor. And we may have lost our democracy a long time ago. Perhaps we never had one. We simply imagined we did, because our rulers told us so.
Billy Lee
Post Script — 19 October 2017 — from the EDITORS:Nineteen months after the publication of this essay, Americans elected a self-proclaimed billionaire and entertainer who was unvetted as to his physical and mental health; unvetted as to his financial status; unvetted in his foreign entanglements; and who lacked any experience whatever in the art of politics.
He lost the popular election by eleven million votes to Hillary Clinton (3M votes) and third-party candidates (8M votes).
Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, and Evan McMullen garnered the lion’s share of third-party voting.
The new president blamed his 11 million vote deficit on illegal voting by immigrants. He is now being investigated by the Justice Department and committees in both the Senate and the House of Representatives for conspiring with foreign powers to rig the outcome.
He didn’t serve in the military, yet threatens to take America to war against Korea and Iran. Something is wrong with this picture. He is dismantling health-care and unleashing immigration pit-bulls like ICE on a population of young people who have no memory of having ever lived outside the United States.
It seems like an angry, racist pit-bull is loose in the china-shop. Maybe Billy Lee is right. If so, the United States is screwed. It really is. When this nightmare is over, a lot of broken glass is going to be lying around that everyone will somehow have to clean-up.
The good news? America has a way of surviving catastrophes of its own making. We’re good at managing unnatural disasters that we inflict on ourselves. Maybe to some the chances seem this time to be as low as one in a million.
Jim Carey said in the movie Dumb and Dumber, one in a million means we still have a chance. We might survive the mess of a failed presidency. It’s possible. Who knows? Many are ready to sit on the sidelines to “wait and see” what happens.
During WWII, millions boarded trains in Europe to travel to God knows where. What’s the worst that can happen? many thought to themselves as they watched German soldiers with dogs push families into rail cars.
Maybe waiting to see what happens is not the best strategy for survival..
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Note: On Tuesday September 24 2019 the House of Representatives opened an impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump.
Opposition to Barack Obama’s health care law began six years ago, before he was even elected President. Opposition has continued through his presidency — Intense, persistent, unabated. As I write this article, advertising against “ObamaCare” is running around the clock in every state.
In June 2013 the Supreme Court overturned part of the new law to allow states to opt out of Medicaid expansion. All the Confederate states except Kentucky opted out, as did Maine and Wisconsin in the north, and the eight central states that divide the country down its middle, north to south.
One-half of the Medicaid-eligible uninsured live in these twenty-one states — five million people. Because their states opted out, these five million folks will continue to lack health insurance long after the rest of us are fully enrolled.
In addition, twenty-eight states refused to set up health care exchanges. This lack of cooperation continues to complicate the roll-out process and adds an unplanned-for burden to the new health plan.
What’s going on here? Anyone with common sense and a knowledge of history knows exactly why the opposition is relentless. Racism is at the heart of our politics, and we have a black president who proposed a universal health care law that enables Negroes in America to finally get health insurance like the rest of us. It’s that simple.
I am sure that only a very few of those who oppose “ObamaCare” would agree that their opposition is racially motivated. People don’t generally examine themselves or their motives. Nor do most people want to change. It’s the part of being human to which the writer of Genesis alluded when he wrote, The Lord saw that the inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.
Few people believe they are evil or even capable of it. No one believes they’re racist, even when it’s obvious to everyone else. Just because messing with the Affordable Care Act has wrecked havoc on minorities and the poor in the states that opted out doesn’t mean we’re mean-spirited, opponents say. We have our reasons.
Are there otherreasons people despise “ObamaCare” that aren’t racist? Of course. Some have to do with greed. The USA has the most expensive health care in the world. People who care have to ask: why?
One possibility is that the USA — unlike most countries — no longer limits incomes.
In the 1980s Congress removed caps on incomes by lowering top-bracket federal tax rates from 92% to 28% (later adjusted to 35%). For the first time since before the Great Depression people could make and keep as much money as they could get their hands on. Owners and executives began to pay themselves as much cash as they could squeeze out of their companies.
Artist’s conception of greed gone wild. Some Americans consider selfish greed a virtue.
Driving down wages, overcharging customers, and misrepresenting company assets & income to accrue additional tax advantages can and does result in huge windfalls, which leaders are now able to keep — under the new tax codes — for their personal enrichment.
Business owners who once spent money to strengthen their company’s infrastructure — or to bolster wages and benefits for employees — now divert it into ridiculous pay packages for themselves and their executives.
In 1990 the USA spent five hundred billion dollars on health-care. Today it’s two-and-a-half trillion — five times as much. Most of the money has gone into increased compensation for “top” doctors and health care company owners and executives.
Excessive compensation of “specialists”, owners, and high-level executives is an embarrassment to our country and a disgrace. It is the reason USA health-care is notoriously expensive and has, during the past few years, soared beyond the grasp of most median-income families.
The wealthy custodians of America’s most lucrative cash cow — the vast health care industry — are in the fight of their lives to keep government as far away as possible from their private treasure trove.
People laughed at this joke. Is it funny?
Under Obama’s presidency racism and greed have joined forces to deny tens of millions of Americans affordable health care. The national campaign to smear the ACA and degrade support by labeling it “ObamaCare” (after the hated Negro president) has been successful enough that people actually laughed at the joke illustrated above when it played on late night television. The put-down went viral on the Internet.
Let’s be clear. Buying health insurance is not mandatory. People who choose not to buy health insurance forfeit a tax deduction — same as when they choose not to buy a house. Why is this hard to understand?
And by the way, deadlines and cut-off dates don’t increase enrollments. They decrease them. They were a concession to opponents in exchange for votes of support.
What have been the unintended consequences of the campaign to destroy the Affordable Care Act? This is where Jimmy Fallon got it right. It has been a Cinderella story.
When this debate is over the blue shirt will know more than the green shirt. Why?
Opposition has worked the way competition between companies sometimes does. It forced advocates to confront errors and mistakes. It compelled the builders of the ACA to address problems sometimes overlooked during roll-outs of big national programs like Social Security and NASA.
Opposition sharpened wits and forced clear thinking from people who might have been tempted to overlook issues until after the roll-out. It mandated an all-hands-on-deck approach to solving the problems of the Health Exchanges after opponents pointed them out.
Love overcomes hate. Believe it.
When people write the history of the Affordable Care Act a hundred years from now, I believe they will say the ACA had a smoother roll-out than many of the successful government projects introduced during the twentieth century.
They will point out that the ACA became the model for the programs of the twenty-first century. They will remember Barack Obama as one of our best and most beloved Presidents.
And once again history will teach people the age-old lesson. Love is more powerful than hate.
And what is love if it’s not helping suffering people who stand helpless before diseases they don’t understand, which will kill them if those who are healthy turn their backs?
May those Americans given much always be a grateful people who offer hope and comfort to the sick and disadvantaged who live all around.
If the United States divested the wealth of the 100,000 wealthiest Americans but allowed divested persons to keep one million dollars to sustain themselves, what could it do with the money?
The question deserves an answer.
The answer may surprise people. Some say the United States could completely pay off the national debt of 17.4 trillion dollars and run the government at current spending levels (5.6 trillion dollars per year) for the next five years. Taxes on everyone, including the wealthy could be completely eliminated for half a decade — until 2020.
Tools of a typical tax accountant: calculator; complicated forms; toy blocks.
As a practical matter, the United States can’t divest 100,000 of its wealthiest citizens — not without crashing the economy. And, sadly, information about wealth and its distribution is frustratingly opaque. Economists can’t trust what they think they know.
Nevertheless, the United States can put in place tax policies that lift the burdens of filing and paying taxes from the backs of the vast majority of citizens. It can easily pay for things like education, health care, research, and retirement while stimulating economic investment and growth. And it can protect our freedoms and egalitarian way of life from individuals who have sequestered an unreasonable share of our resources. (Read Capitalism and Income Inequality elsewhere on this site.)
This is the visible hand.
The wealthy, and those who support them, tell us that the closer a civilization resembles the natural order of things — that is, a state with the least amount of government possible — the better off that civilization will be. The invisible hand of free markets will enhance the destinies of all. Free markets, fewer taxes, fewer regulations — policies like these take the brakes off the economy and improve everyone’s lives.
Since we all plan to be wealthy someday, what could possibly be wrong with reasoning like that?
Bullies rule on unregulated playgrounds.
Well, for one thing, it ignores why folks create civilizations in the first place. In the eons before civilization, humans made little progress. Think of an unregulated school yard or imagine a jungle with no rules. What always happens? Bullies and predators end up running everything. The meek and the fragile have to hide or be eaten. Whatever ideas or contributions they might make to enhance the quality of life get lost.
It’s been like this in jungles and on playgrounds for as long as jungles and playgrounds have existed. It’s never going to change. It’s why folks need playground teachers and yes, civilization. With civilization we can organize ourselves. We can make rules to protect the weak and improve the lives of both predators and prey.
We know from history, it’s the powerful who create civilizations to protect their advantages. For thousands of years bullies in expensive garb have run the show on every continent on Earth.
Our nation’s founders said that all people were created equal before God.
Two-hundred-and-forty years ago something new came along. Our ancestors won a revolution. They organized a civilization that would eventually empower the powerless and give voice to the weak.
Yes, they codified slavery, because what else could they do? Africans had been slaves in America for a hundred years already. For a hundred-and-fifty years two-thirds of whites had come to America as indentured servants, a temporary form of slavery that ended, typically, after seven years of servitude.
The habits of history weighed heavily on our founders, and being unsure of their steps, they gave-in to the pressures of greed to better form the consensus that would permit the birth of something new in the world. And guess what? Our new-born civilization grew up, matured and ninety years later ended slavery in the United States of America.
Earth needed a new way — a way based on the dignity of people, their rights before God, their need to be free from humiliation by others more powerful and crafty than themselves. They needed a new kind of civilization, and our founders found a way to build it, blemished and imperfect as it was.
It took time; it didn’t happen overnight. I was twenty years old before black folks got the right to shop freely; to buy a soda in a drugstore; to buy a house; to get a loan. Maybe two-hundred years seems like a long time for a constitutional republic to get serious about freedom for individuals and families. It is a long time. We might as well admit it.
The flag should stand for what is right, just, and fair. It is the symbol of our civilization.
Today, as the civilization we built slides into the shadows of an unregulated jungle, people need to stand up and shout, No! This can’t be right. In a civilization built by hundreds of millions, we can’t let a few thousand of the most clever humans sequester twenty-five percent of the wealth. It’s an unreasonable reward for cleverness, and it’s unfair.
Why did our ancestors build the civilization we call America? Why did they take hundreds of years to shape and change our way of governance?
It’s because they intended to make America succeed for everybody. I’d like to believe that they didn’t want it looted and plundered by the powerful. They didn’t intend for average people to be “gated” out of the desirable places to live, or for the disadvantaged poor to be locked away to rot deep inside our inner cities.
We still have work to do. The work falls on each generation to make the world a fairer, safer, more loving place for every person who lives and breathes.
Thomas Piketty was an instructor of economics at MIT during the 1990s; he is the founder, Paris School of Economics; Director, Department of Social Sciences, Ecole Normale Supérieure; and Director of Studies, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
Fortunately, America has allies around the world ready and able to help do what’s right, if we only listen. One is Thomas Piketty, the French economist.
I’m excited about this book. Many reviewers say it’s important. It is the culmination of years of research by a brilliant scholar. It presents, I’m told, a paradigm shift in thinking about the problems economies have delivering fairness to average people.
If Piketty’s book strengthens the courage of economists in the United States to speak openly about the touchy subject of inequality, he will have done our country and its people an enormous favor.
Gold jewelry and coins held in an overseas bank.
The United States, though proud of its wealth, seems to go to great lengths to under-report it. It’s primary focus is to collect taxes, I guess.
Assets not subject to taxation hold little interest for government accountants. The Feds limit their count to households and tell us that our total wealth is 54 trillion dollars. Other economists say it is higher — maybe as much as 188 trillion; they include in their tally many assets not normally taxed.
The subject of how wealthy America really is — who holds the wealth and in what amounts — is murky at best. According to John Cassidy, Thomas Piketty’s call for households to declare their net worth and be taxed on it will provide the reliable statistics needed to un-muddy the waters and enable policy makers to fashion the sound and fair tax policies required to protect the benefits of civilization for everyone.
Billy Lee
Post Script:Billy Lee advocates for a standard of maximum personal-incomes and estate-sizes established by the United Nations as ratios pegged to each country’s minimum wage. Violations would be treated as felonies by international courts.
Billy Lee’s proposal and some of its economic and moral advantages are described in the article, Capitalism and Income Inequality. The Editorial Board
The word community sounds egalitarian to most people. And gated? No word has a fairer proportion of safety to airy openness in the image it conveys to the mind.
Gated community near Orlando, Florida.
Florida is a land flowing with gates and communities. It is a Promised Land of sun, leisure, warm pools, and exclusivity. For the past month Bevy Mae and me have been vacationing inside this paradise at a house at one such community near Naples, Florida. It took three references, photo ID, and all cash up front to get us in here.
We are grateful for our good fortune. And we are in a really safe place. But when thinking about the state of affairs which has excluded as many as 94% of all Americans from the possibility of living here — if only for a few weeks — it makes me sick to my stomach. And of course, if you don’t live here you can’t be here — not even to drive through.
The compound we live in is huge. While biking in it the other day I was amazed to stumble on anothergated community inside ours. It has a lake and huge houses. The gated occupants of our community aren’t allowed in their community even though their community is inside our community. Apparently, there are layers of gated communities. I never knew that.
As a teenager, I lived for two years in Key West, Florida. This was before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was totally segregated down there. The only black person I ever saw was our maid. She was an articulate thirty-year-old woman and really beautiful. I liked her a lot and talked with her every chance I got, usually about politics. From her I learned how difficult life was for black people in Key West at that time — and maybe just as importantly, that a lot of black people actually lived in Key West.
She said she supported the incumbent Democrat for Congress who was then running against an upstart Republican — a young guy always on the radio always complaining about how rich his opponent was. She liked the Democrat, she said, because he once bought park benches for her neighborhood.
At Key West High School the powers-that-be were considering the admission of a black kid from a “good” family. His dad was an officer in the U.S. Navy, I think. In the school cafeteria over lunch I made the mistake of saying I saw nothing wrong with going to school with “Negroes” (as they were then called by polite people).
“What!” some kid yelled. “You want to eat with niggers?” Soon a crowd gathered. I stood my ground, and no one beat me up. The South was changing, but only a little.
One thing Key West didn’t have back then — no town did in those days — was gated communities. We had a military base that was gated — I lived on it — but the gates were for security against the hated Communists. We didn’t have terrorists or any other sort of enemies of the state. All that was to come later.
After World War II, the South and some parts of the North enforced segregation with a civilian militia called the Ku Klux Klan. It was a quasi-religious/military-style organization self-tasked with extra-judicial punishments of Negroes who violated the unwritten codes of the South.
If a black family bought a house in a white neighborhood, the militia would burn it down. Sometimes, so as not to smoke-damage nearby homes, the KKK would bomb the house; or if young white children lived nearby they might burn a cross in the front yard to frighten the occupants into leaving.
Lynchings — common after the First World War — were, by the 1950s, less common.
After dozens of documented actions against Negroes — and perhaps hundreds or thousands of undocumented ones — white neighborhoods did not need gates, or walls, or fences to remain segregated.
Eventually, after years of separation, the white people who lived in these communities came to believe — many of them — that black people chose not to live next to them, because they preferred “their own kind.”
Terrorism? It didn’t exist in the United States of America in those days. The first time I heard the term was in college. Terrorism, then, was always directed against Israel, for some reason, almost always by Palestinians. The reasons why were never clear.
I don’t know what white people say today is the reason black people don’t live in the gated communities of Florida. I haven’t lived here long enough to learn.
I would bet that in some town somewhere in this huge state a black family lives in a gated community. Maybe more than one. I can imagine people pointing to that family as proof of my being uncharitable to the good people of Florida and to people everywhere who live in these spaces.
But it seems plain to me — fifty years after Congress, the President and the Supreme Court declared segregated housing illegal — black people don’t live in these desirable communities. Why is that?
I don’t know. I met a black man down here the other day. He told me he had been a Marine who helped liberate Kuwait during the first Gulf War.
