Unequal: A Story of America: Chapters 4–7

A white landowner named Watson had persuaded Ned to borrow forty-five dollars for farm supplies, but it was just a ruse. When Ned paid him back in cotton, Watson claimed that it wasn’t enough. It was his word against Ned’s. A white landowner against a poor Black farmer.

Even in good years, a white plantation owner chiseled away at a sharecropper’s earnings with his pen: some here for rent, more there for groceries purchased at the plantation store, still more for fertilizer, seeds, and tools, all bought on credit.

If white people couldn’t bring back slavery, then they were determined to exploit and control the South’s Black labor force any way they could.

On March 30, 1908, a Black man named Green Cottenham was arrested in Alabama because a white sheriff suspected that Cottenham didn’t have a job—a so-called crime devised by white politicians after Reconstruction.

Cottenham’s predicament wasn’t an isolated case. In Alabama alone, more than two hundred thousand Black people toiled for no pay in mines, on plantations, and in factories. They were caught in this new system of “convict labor” by a web of new laws, racist sheriffs, and corrupt judges, whose only goal was to force as many Black people as possible to work for nothing.

Ned saved his neighbor’s livestock and livelihood that day, but the confrontation with Beale’s men cost him dearly.

As he passed through the ornate main hall of Detroit’s Michigan Central Station in the summer of 1921, however, Ossian sensed immediately that freedom in the North meant something different for Black people.

The Motor City welcomed Black people’s cheap labor but resented their presence.

Patients soon began streaming into Dr. Sweet’s storefront office, and his modest fees slowly filled his bank account.

In a sense, the agents were telling the truth: The deeds to most homes in Detroit included restrictive “covenants” that forbade owners from selling them to Black people.

The leaders of the fledgling civil rights movement understood what was at stake in the Sweet case.

“I insist that there is nothing but prejudice in this case,” he declared, adding, “that if it was reversed and eleven white men had shot and killed a black while protecting their home and their lives against a mob of blacks, nobody would have dreamed of having them indicted.... They would have been given medals instead.”

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund went on to support the most important legal cases of the civil rights movement, and remains to this day one of the staunchest defenders of equal rights for Black people.

Rather than solving the problem of racial segregation in Detroit, however, the trial only managed to shine a light on how deeply entrenched it had become.

Once the fanfare settled, it became clear that the verdict in The People v. Henry Sweet left only the slightest dent on the city’s racial walls.

In neighboring Grosse Pointe, real estate agents developed a point system for home buyers, rating them on such categories as religion, accent, and “degree of swarthiness.”

The effects of this segregation reverberated through time, as Black buyers were mostly excluded from the benefits of owning homes and prevented from transferring housing wealth from one generation to the next.

Those few Black families who did succeed in buying homes were the exception and not the rule. Their number has increased, especially after the Civil Rights Movement helped outlaw overt housing discrimination.

For Ossian himself, tragedy at home overshadowed acquittal in court.

It was rumored among Black people that the only way the conditions of segregated schools improved was when they burned down—and Durham’s Black business community in the Hayti neighborhood still had enough clout to demand that the city build a brand-new and spacious building, just in time for Pauli’s freshman year.

She adamantly refused to attend a segregated college.

Pauli Murray raced through a newspaper article dated December 12, 1938, describing how Black lawyers had breached the wall of segregation for the first time since Plessy v. Ferguson.

The year after she was refused admission to UNC, Pauli Murray gave an impromptu speech at a church in Virginia, trying to raise money for the legal defense of a sharecropper who had been accused of murder—and who faced an almost certain death sentence.

“First astonishment, then hoots of derisive laughter, greeted what seemed to me to be an obvious solution.”

“Opposition to an idea I cared deeply about always aroused my latent mule-headedness,” she said.

Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

Incensed, Pauli Murray skewered the admissions committee in the letter she sent back several days later.

“Gentlemen,” she wrote, “I would gladly change my sex to meet your requirements, but since the way to such change has not been revealed to me, I have no recourse but to appeal to you to change your minds on this subject. Are you to tell me that one is as difficult as the other?”

With three young children and middle-class jobs, they were indistinguishable from their new neighbors in most respects. Except that, of course, they were Black.

When a Black bus driver named Harvey Clark tried to rent an apartment in all-white Cicero, for example, a crowd broke in, threw his belongings out the window, and set them on fire. Clark himself was later indicted by a grand jury “for inciting a riot and conspiring to lower property values” in Cicero.

HOLC offered homeowners new, low-interest loans that could be paid back over a long period, with low monthly payments. The program saved millions of homeowners from foreclosure.

On every single HOLC map, African American neighborhoods were marked as red. “Redlining,” as this practice came to be known, excluded Black people from one of the most important financial rescues in all of American history.

But while construction crews, dump trucks, and excavators transformed huge swaths of open land into leafy suburban towns, redlining ensured that most Black people remained stuck in the same overcrowded and crumbling neighborhoods.

A local political leader called on the Myerses to “go back where you came from,” blaming them, not the hostile white mob, for the turmoil.

At the end of the year, officials from the state of Pennsylvania intervened, issuing an injunction against any Levittown resident harassing the Myers family.

King argued that “the moral force of SCLC’s nonviolent movement philosophy was needed to help eradicate a vicious system which seeks to further colonize thousands of Negroes within a slum environment.”

“We have created a caste system in this country, with African-Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies,” writes Richard Rothstein, a journalist and author who exposed the whitewashed history of America’s racist housing system, in a book titled The Color of Law.

George Floyd didn’t need statistics to know that to be a Black person in America means living under an intense amount of extra scrutiny by the police.

Many thousands more were stopped or arrested on the faintest pretext.

A turbulent history of police brutality against Black people roils beneath the surface of the present.