There’s little protest against the horrible and dangerous conditions under which many poor and law-abiding Black people must live. It is not uncommon for 50 Black people to be shot over a weekend in Chicago — not by policemen but by other Black people. About 7,300 Black people are murdered each year, and not by white people or racist cops, but mostly by other Black people. These numbers almost make our history of victimization by racist lynching look like child’s play.
I was a teenager, growing up in the Richard Allen housing project of North Philadelphia, when Emmett Till was lynched in Money, Mississippi, on Aug. 28, 1955, and his brutalized, unrecognizable body later recovered from the Tallahatchie River. From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States.
Roughly 73%, or 3,446, were Black people, and 27%, or 1,297, were white people. Many whites were lynched because they were Republicans who supported their fellow Black citizens and opposed the lawless act of lynching. Tuskegee University has the best documentation of lynching. It records an 1892 high of 69 whites and 161 Blacks lynched. By the 1940s, occurrences of lynching fell to single digits or disappeared altogether.
At the time of my youth, today’s opportunities for socioeconomic advancement were nonexistent for Black people. For all but a few, college attendance was out of the question because of finances and racial discrimination. If you were not admitted to the Black colleges of Lincoln University or Cheyney State College, forget about college. I do not know of any student of my 1954 class at Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin High School who attended college. Though the quality of education at Benjamin Franklin is a mere shadow of its past, today roughly 17% of its graduating class has been admitted to college. The true hope for a youngster graduating from high school during the 1950s was a well-paying and steady job. My first well-paying job was as a taxi driver for Yellow Cab Company.
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