Busy busy
Wow, busy day. I decided to save up all of my productivity and let it all fly on my last day of freedom.
- Finally got the haircut I've been bitching about for weeks now.
- Baked some lasagna (mom's recipe) that should last me a few days. I'll probably be sick of lasagna by Wednesday, but until then, tasty!
- Caught up on a few weeks' worth of laundry.
- Watched Ohio State destroy the Notre Dame Fightin' Irish in the oh-enough-with-the-commercialism-already Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, 34-20.
- Gathered up my class materials for tomorrow.
- Got some reading done, which brings me to the triumphant return of:
Book of the day (well, of the month, actually): Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. Jim Crow was firmly established in the South by the turn of the twentieth century, but had not intruded much into the North. By the 1920s, however, white Northerners began to erect their own segregationist barriers in employment and property ownership. The conflict in this book comes out of the barrier to property ownership. In Detroit, the realtors' association forbade its members from showing houses for sale in white neighborhoods to potential black buyers in the belief that black ownership, regardless of how the black owner maintained the house, lowered property values for the entire neighborhood. Developers began inserting protective covenants into home deeds that did not allow a homeowner to sell the property to buyers of certain races (the deed to the house that stinky_monky and I owned in Oak Park contained such a covenant forbidding us from selling to Asians; of course, such covenants are no longer enforceable, but I felt a certain satisfaction in the fact that we sold the house to a Thai family). Property appraisers automatically reduced the value of a house if a single black person owned property in the area. Banks did not offer mortgages to blacks who hoped to move into white neighborhoods because the simple act of buying the house reduced its value below the mortgage amount. White mortgage-holders in the neighborhood suffered the same fate if blacks moved into the area. Therefore, white resistance to black neighbors was not always out of racism: it was also a form of economic security.
And this is where Dr. Ossian Sweet comes in. Sweet was a successful black doctor who hoped to move his family out of the black ghetto. He found an owner of a bungalow in a white neighborhood who had no restrictive covenant and was willing to sell to a black family for almost 150% of the property's value. Sweet jumped at the opportunity, but was enough of a realist to know that he would not receive a warm welcome. Black homeowners in white neighborhoods had frequently come under attack recently and had been forced to sign over the property to the "neighborhood improvement association" and flee. When Sweet moved in, he brought in a group of family and friends, and a healthy supply of guns and ammunition, to help protect the house from the neighbors. During the Sweet family's second night in the house, the mob attacked, despite the heavy police presence. Thousands of white residents gathered in the street in front of the bungalow. Hundreds of stones pelted the house, breaking windows and furniture, as whites swarmed around the yard, threatening the blacks inside. Finally, the Sweets and their friends snapped, and gunfire erupted from the upstairs window, killing one white and injuring one more. All eleven occupants of the house were arrested for murder and put on trial.
This is really an amazing book, and I have not done it justice here. It won the National Book Award last year and all kinds of other accolades, and the author will be teaching one of my reading seminars this quarter. Boyle visited my Civil War seminar last quarter to discuss the book and he is an incredibly nice guy. During his visit I wore one of those cheesy Old Navy T-shirts with made-up sports teams emblazoned everywhere and he asked me where the "Pittsford Pirates" were from. After a second of confusion, I got to admit that the team didn't really exist and that I had bought the shirt on clearance. Good thing I have a history of impressing professors before I even attend class.