Isabel Wilkerson on the Norths racism: -Erika The groundswell of protests over police brutality in the closing days of 2014, when people dropped to the marble floor of Grand Central Terminal and shut down the Brooklyn Bridge, blocked Lake Shore Drive in Chicago and chanted I Can’t Breathe from Boston to Oakland, summoned ghosts not only of the marches of the civil rights era but of the larger forces that led to the arrival of so many African-Americans in the big cities of the North and West in the first place. Dozens of cities would ultimately join in these demonstrations of discontent. But a map of the largest protests those first nights, and of the high-profile cases of police violence in recent months, lit up like a map of the Great Migration: New York, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Washington, Los Angeles, Oakland, all of them the major receiving stations of the movement. These were the places to which generations of African-Americans fled to escape the state-sanctioned violence their descendants have now faced in the North and West. In matters of racial injustice, the South has been the center of attention since before the time of the Civil War. But the North, with its shorter history of a mass black population, has only more recently dealt with the paradox of an enlightened ideal coexisting with racial disparity. The protests have become a referendum on the black condition since the Great Migration. The protests are beginning to wake people up to the idea that the problems are not only there but have been obvious all along, the historian Taylor Branch told me. It feels like the South in the 1950s.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 21:24:00 +0000
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