The Civil Rights Act was passed and signed in 1964. As I was born in 1960, the act was something I learned about years later. When my school taught me about this act, about ten years or so after it passed, the events that lead up to it seemed to be part of ancient history. A story in black and white film clips and pictures of men and women marching, of police and firehoses and savage dogs. Of soldiers walking a small black girl to school, and the National Guard forcing a Governor to stand down. Of lunch counters and buses and bridges. Of black citizens and white authority.
I grew up in Chicago, having moved there in 1968. I saw plenty of examples of racism and prejudice and while I learned that it was wrong, I didn’t connect any of it to the changing laws and practices, or to the segregation of the recent past or the integration going on around me and throughout the country. I saw the racism, and as I was a white kid it wasn’t hidden from me. On the contrary, racists took my skin color as a sign of alliance; a mark of confederacy.
And I went through my young life, from high school and into the Navy, having racists assume I would laugh at their racist jokes while almost simultaneously listening to white people tell me that racism was all but gone in the north of America. Sure, there were still racism in the South, but up north we were civilized. This was a lie folks told broadly, and only believed by those doing the telling.
But I didn’t live in the South with separate water fountains and bathrooms, and I didn’t join the Navy before the military was integrated. The America that I knew was functionally integrated yet remained heavily committed to segregation. The instances of black and white personal integration were more rare than intentional segregation. Whether it was at school or aboard ship, people segregated. And we accepted this as culturally comfortable. While the occasional black man sitting with a table full of white people wasn’t all that rare, people actually did a double-take when they saw a solitary white man freely sharing company with a group of blacks. The policies and laws had changed, and some number of the people accepted that as just and good, but so many others rejected it in their own lives and community. The laws had changed, but you can’t stop people from choosing their company.
Many years later I was told that integration had economically hurt the American blacks more than it helped them. My impulse was to reject this. Perhaps it was the source. I often heard from racist whites how things were better for the blacks before the laws had changed. This still goes on today, with the worst of them promoting the benefits slavery brought to African Americans. (Look at how bad things were in Africa before we brought them here! In The States the blacks were housed and fed and clothed. etc.)
Of course it was better to open the whole of the country up to everyone without restriction to race. I read about separate but equal, and redlining, and the Green Book. Integration must have been a positive all around. But I was mistaken, and though I was told this several more times, I didn’t fully understand it for many years. There was truth to that claim, though not for the reasons the racists I knew offered.
In 2009 I bought a small wreck of a house in Michigan, north of Muskegon and inland from Lake Michigan. The idea was to reduce my cost of living to as low as I could, and so afford choices that greater economic freedom allow.
The neighborhood I found my home in had been platted as an addition to the resort community of Lakewood back in the beginnings of the twentieth century but had never been built up. The Great Depression stopped the building of cabins, and the resort closed. The housing became permanent homes to workers who filled their rolls in the arsenal of democracy that was Muskegon during WWII. Eventually that resort was incorporated as the village of Lakewood Club, but without the platted addition across the township line.
The rapid increase in industrialization Muskegon felt during those war years put a demand on housing. One of the solutions was houses built from kits. All the parts numbered and packed to be put together by the homeowner or contractor. We all have heard of the kit homes from Sears, but there were other companies too. My house was one of those, though it was located in Muskegon proper. Late in the fifties developers wanted the land it and many of its cousins sat on, and an entrepreneur bought up many of these small kit homes and moved them north to this platted but undeveloped neighborhood where they were then rented out. The neighborhood was settled by mostly African Americans, many of whom would eventually buy the houses outright. Many of these homes were gone by the time I arrived, and though some several remain, the neighborhood is nothing like it was in days past.
In my research of these properties and this neighborhood I found that the recently demolished roadhouse a quarter-mile west of me had once been called the Ebony Club, and following that I learned of the Chitlin’ Circuit. The Chitlin’ Circuit was a collection of clubs and theaters throughout the country that catered to black entertainers and audiences. Famous entertainers such as The Temptations played there. As I dug deeper into this I learned about the summer resort known as Idlewild. It was in Lake County, Michigan, and catered exclusively to blacks. It may have been the largest summer camping resort in the country, and was founded in the early twentieth century in response to Jim Crow laws.
The business flourished, as did many other black-owned businesses throughout the country. Across the country, businesses owned by African Americans and catering to the black race were a central part of the wealth in those communities. But when The Civil Rights Act was passed and signed, it legally opened white-owned businesses to non-white customers. It was a practice that many whites had been accepting as a matter of economic advantage. But the end of segregation, both as a practical issue and a legal one, did indeed spell the demise of many businesses that formally had a captive audience. Idlewild exists today as an unincorporated community, with a museum I plan to visit once the pandemic has passed.
Let me be clear as to what it was I realized. Integration put money on a one-way street, going from the pockets of the black community to those in the white community. This is about money.
The real failure here was from the other direction. While much of white America objected to segregation and lauded the Civil Rights Act, they didn’t embrace the practice. They failed in integrating themselves with the black community and black owned business. It was the other side of integration.
And for this discussion I will not dive into the practices of many towns and neighborhoods of establishing covenants to maintain those color restrictions that had been before codified in law. Here I only acknowledge what was never presented to me when I was taught about the end of segregation. While my people were patting themselves on the back for allowing blacks to shop at their stores and eat in their restaurants, there was no effort made to do the reverse.
What should have happened but didn’t, was the opposite movement of some money from the white pocket to black business. Integration became synonymous with allowing blacks to join whites. In truth it should have been (and still needs to be) both whites and blacks joining each other.
And yes, there are those who practice this very thing. But too few do, and too few recognize that this failure on the part of white America is partially responsible for the failure of the proportional success of black business.
I am not here at this moment to address reparations for slavery, or the myriad business practices that banks used to keep the upper hand white, nor all of those other actions taken by businesses and governments to foster economic segregation. I take this moment to offer my commitment to patronize black owned business in my community, intentionally and deliberately. And ask for other white Americans to do the same. Let us integrate some of our money as it should have been done all along.