The U.S. House of Representatives
passed a resolution in late July 2008
apologizing to African Americans for
the years of slavery they have suffered.
This was the recognition by the U.S.
of the injustice and inhumanity of the
slave system and “Jim Crow”, as the
period of intense racial discrimination
between 1865, when slavery was
officially abolished and the 1960s, was
known.
At that time, the US political
establishment was forced to take action
against nefarious racial discrimination
though, in some states more and
in others less; it kept black citizens
legally segregated from white people
and limited their civil liberties, even
denying them the right to vote. This
legal segregation was more inhumane
and violent in the southern states than
in the northern United States.
The name “Jim Crow” applied to that shameful
period in American history belonged to
a comedian and singer named Rice, who
composed and performed the song “Jump,
Jim Crow” in 1828, about a black servant who
danced while brushing his master’s horse. It
is not clear why the term “Jim Crow” began
to be used to refer to any entity that practiced
racial segregation: “Jim Crow laws”, “Jim
Crow schools”, “Jim Crow buses”, etc.
There were workplaces, universities, taxis,
trains, buses, boats, canteens, restaurants,
hotels, hospitals, health services, water
fountains, prisons, nursing homes,
barbershops, public parks, sports fields,
circuses, fairs, theatres, cinemas, concert or
party halls, libraries, beaches, swimming pools,
waiting rooms, telephone booths, workshops,
lifts, brothels, lines, entrances to and exits
from buildings. Everything could be ascribed
to this form of US form of apartheid.
Segregation applied to marriage, professions,
neighborhoods, churches and cemeteries.
In some cities Jim Crow martial law was
imposed and blacks could not go out on the
street after a certain time of night. In the Jim
Crow courts, whites swore with one hand on
a Bible and blacks swore on a different copy
of it.
Black people were excluded from most trade
unions. They were not admitted to Jim Crow
sororities, clubs and societies. Board games
and sports involving physical contact between
blacks and whites, including combat games
such as boxing, were prohibited unless the
opponent was a foreigner.
Add to this ignominious situation the violence
with which the Ku Klux Klan, the members
of the John Birch Society, the White Citizens’
Council and other elements of the American
extreme-right were acting. It was a real white
terrorist system!
In the face of such outrage, the struggle of
Black Americans for their civil rights became
increasingly intense. It generated such great
personalities as Malcolm X and the Reverend
Martin Luther King Jr., as well as hundreds
of martyrs, remembered or anonymous, from
Black Power organizations and others who,
in the 1960s, gave birth to a situation that
seemed to be a precursor to a revolution.
Although the fear of reprisals by the empire
and its control of the media limited the
international denunciation of these abuses and
global solidarity, the triumph of the revolution
in Cuba, the rise of anti-imperialism and
the ideas of social justice in Latin America
encouraged the just domestic struggle of
Black people.
This coincided with the need for the
recruitment of black soldiers for the
asymmetrical imperialist war against Vietnam
and all this forced the establishment to bury
the Jim Crow.
For the sake of national security, the empire
made major reformist “concessions” in race
relations in a country where the law was white,
white policemen, white judges, white mayors.
And on film and TV screens, actors and
actresses were white, and blacks were always
represented in submissive and complacent
attitudes.
Prior to this request for an apology from the
House ofRepresentatives, the other branch
of Congress, the Senate, passed another
resolution in April 2008 apologizing for “the
many cases of violence, abuse and neglect”
suffered by Native Americans. The Senate also
apologized in 1993 for the “illegal overthrow”
of the Kingdom of Hawaii a hundred years
earlier.
Yet humanity is still waiting for the U.S. to
apologize and compensate so many nations on
every continent whose democratic existence
the U.S. has assaulted since it became an
imperialist power in the early 20th century.
And to do so with the promise to never again
to intervene in the internal affairs of other
nations, as well as to respect the human rights
of their own citizens of other ethnicities and
ways of thinking.
Manuel E. Yepe is a lawyer, economist and journalist. He was a professor at the Higher Institute of International Relations in Havana. He was Cuba's ambassador to Romania, general director of the Prensa Latina agency; vice president of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television; founder and national director of the Technological Information System (TIPS) of the United Nations Program for Development in Cuba, and secretary of the Cuban Movement for the Peace and Sovereignty of the Peoples.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann
englishmanuelyepe.wordpress.com
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