The other day my history class and I visited the Jim crow exhibit. The real exhibit is located on the Ferris States campus, but they brought some of it over to Schoolcraft College for Martin Luther King Day. Before entering the area I figured I would know pretty much everything they had to tell us, I was wrong. It seems like almost everything produced in the time and before the civil rights movement was racist. I also learned that not everything was antiques, things are still being produced today. One example of a new racial “toy” was the ghettopaly. Basically this was a version of monolopy based in the “ghetto” with every racial uncalled for thing you could think of. Besides the new stuff I was looking at the sign in the exhibit that didn’t allow Colors or Jews. I started thinking and thought it was very weird that my grandparents lived during that, and that was not too long ago. Before I end this I want to tell you about the worst thing I saw, it was a mother goose story told to kids, I can’t really repeat it but it was deffinetly racist and x rated.
January 26, 2008 at 4:07 am
You mentioned that it was weird that your grandparents lived during the time period when “Colored Only” and “No Jews” and similar signs were put up in public places.
Five months after I was born, Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving were married in Washington, D.C. Ms. Jeter was an African American and Mr. Loving was white.
When they returned to Virginia, Mr. and Mrs. Loving were indicted by a grand jury for violating Virginia’s law against interracial marriage. They pled guilty and were sentenced to one year in jail. However, the judge suspended the sentence if they argreed to leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years.
It was not until 1967–when I was nine years old–that the Supreme Court declared the Virginia law unconstitutional and ruled that states could no longer forbid interracial marriages.
The fact that such laws were still on the books during my lifetime feels weird to me.
If you would like to read the decision in “Loving v. Virgina,” please go to http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/loving.html.