Dynamite Hill

I was at a Fourth of July picnic when, out of the blue, two middle-aged middle-class whites just started talking about how they didn't understand why blacks think society owes them so much. They thought that blacks should just suck it up and work harder to make a better life. One of the conversationalists is an unabashed liberal on most issues, and the other an archconservative.

I pointed out that poverty and lack of education are the real causes of social immobility. American slaves were bought and sold like cattle, frequently forbidden to learn to read, to marry, and even keep their own children. It takes generations to overcome that kind of history. When blacks finally got schools, they were separate and vastly inferior (something that still hasn't been satisfactorily addressed). And these days poor whites, especially in the south, are falling prey to out-of-wedlock childbirth, divorce and other historically black social disorders at ever increasing rates. Poverty and ignorance, not ethnicity, keeps people down.

A couple days later I heard a story about "Dynamite Hill" on the radio. This was a neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama. From the 1940s to the 1960s blacks who did better would buy houses on the "wrong" side of the street. They were greeted by bullets and bombs.

So, when blacks in Birmingham did exactly what my white friends insisted they should do -- work hard, earn more and improve their lives -- they were greeted by terrorist death threats.

Some of that ended 50 years ago with voting rights and affirmative action legislation (which was just overturned by the Supreme Court). But just because you outlaw legal discrimination doesn't mean that the people who threw the bombs had changed their hearts and minds.

The people who committed those acts of terrorism did so with the tacit consent of the police. In many cases they were the police. Since then blacks have lived among people who had once tried to kill them. How easy was it for them to get jobs from those people at decent wages? To get a loan from a bank run by a bomber? To buy a house through a real estate agency owned by one of the shooters? To get fair treatment at a traffic stop from the cop who looked the other way when white men threw bombs through their front window?

Most of those terrorists are dead now, fifty years on. But their sons and grandsons have inherited their businesses. How many have also inherited their fathers' hatred and racism?

White Southerners are still carping about the Civil War (they call it the War of Northern Aggression), which ended almost 150 years ago. Yet somehow my friends think blacks should forget the institutionalized racism and police-condoned terrorism that occurred within their own lifetimes, at exactly the same time the hard-won legal protections of the civil rights era are being completely dismantled by the Supreme Court.