~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I have a black friend whose research shows the Irish who came to America in the 1600s suffered pretty much like the Africans did when they came here in that century. Irish came unwillingly, scooped up off the streets of London and shipped to America as indentured servants, often treated like slaves for the seven or so years of their indenture, often longer, depending on the goodwill or honesty of their owners; Africans came here unwillingly, in chains, treated like slaves, and they were never going to go free. One – usually – got out of being servant/slave; the other never got out of being enslaved unless he ran away.
My friend talks about how, when the Irish came in droves the second time, in the 19th century, willingly that time, as they were escaping from the starvation of the potato famine in Ireland, signs went up everywhere in New York City and Boston as the poor and dirty funny-talking Irish came off the boats: ‘No Irish or dogs need apply.’ “They were shat on just like blacks for a long time,” my friend has said to me more than once.
I agree with her that the Irish had been disgustingly treated, but not forever. It’s different, as she so very well knows – the Irish are white.
Eventually, just like other “white” immigrants, when they got to go to school, become educated, go on to good jobs, to college, they were just some more white people on the block. Blacks, no matter how free they got, even with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, never were allowed to become just some new neighbor. They were black folks and because they were likely to stay that way, the majority of white people had no time for them.
Why is that? Why do white people dislike black people?
The difference between blacks and the Irish has made the difference between accumulating wealth for their progeny and remaining in poverty all through their lives and their children’s lives and their children’s children. Their “blackness” costs them health care, jobs, education, housing, decent treatment, respect due all human beings and – way too many times – their lives.
How criminal of them to be born black. It obviously makes Whites angry enough to hang them whenever possible and despise them even more remorselessly when they can’t hang them.
When John Lewis, 30-year black United States Congressman, died last Friday, July 17, I watched the television patchworks of photos from the newspapers of the 1950s and ‘60s, and I cried. The years of his taking part in the civil rights marches, along with Martin Luther King, were brutal. He had a record a mile long from being jailed because he was marching, protesting – one of those Constitutional rights that seem to apply only to people not of color.
It was the time of white people beating anyone who was black who walked in front of them or tried to sit in any random seat on a bus; it was the time of white people arresting any black person who took a sip from the wrong water fountain; it was the time of white people spitting on blacks who sat at a lunch counter designated for whites only; it was the time of white people hanging black men for holding their heads up like they were as good as anybody else.
I watched the pictures of John Lewis in his youth: white men with Billy clubs and baseball bats, hoes and rakes and their angry women with their big purses beat on black people who were trying to protect their faces. It was like watching footage of the Nazis rounding up Jews in Berlin in the late 1930s. This was America in our lifetime, however. A famously documented time of pepper sprays and teargas in the eyes of black marchers and bystanders; a time of black men rolled down the streets like logs by the force of fire hoses at full power; it was the time of white men on frightened horses prancing over people’s arms and legs and kidneys and heads.
In the footage showing John Lewis’s life, even children scratched at the faces and eyes of black people getting off the bus in Montgomery that spring day of 1961. White people didn’t want them to sign black people up to vote, so they beat on them until they couldn’t get up. And then they jailed them for not being able to get back on the bus.
What made me cry was that it was like right now, 60 years later, watching George Floyd being kneeled to death.
We have not come a long way from the first enslavements 400 years ago; or from the 150 years of emancipation, the 100 years of Jim Crow and now the 60-some years of unprecedented incarceration of black people. We are still doing the same sadistic things we’ve been doing for 400 years to people who are just like us except for the color of their skin.
What is it with white people who want to viciously harm black people? And not just harm them physically but cheat them, lie to them, refuse education and housing to them, beat the…, kneel the…, hang the…, shoot the…life out of them.
What is it with white Christian people of barbaric intent?
I would like to thank John Lewis, black crusader for justice by white men. Because that’s what he worked so many decades to get to.
Then, I would like to honor John Lewis’s lifelong march of decency. I would like his statue to be put up somewhere that all people passing by will read: Here stands what it means to be American: a good man, a man of true worth, dignity, courage and strength. If we all had such attributes as his – patience, integrity, grit, honesty, dignity – America would be living up to its nicely written words of equality for all.
Congressman John Lewis will not be on a horse and he will not be a symbol of a nation that likes to kill people of a different shade.
He will simply be the image of a good man worth emulation.
