Wait, so Jim Crow Was a Good Period for Blacks in America? Could Have Fooled Me
’Tis the season for Donald Trump to audition potential running mates while the rest of us speculate on who the lucky winner will be.
The trial by political fire was on full display last week as the entire Democratic Party establishment seemed to rise up and pile on Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, whom multiple news outlets have put on Trump’s short list of possible running mates.
His offense? He expressed what sounded to many ears, including mine, like nostalgia for the bad old days of Jim Crow segregation.
“During Jim Crow the Black family was together,” Donalds said during a Black GOP outreach event in Philadelphia last week, according to Politico. “More Black people were — not just conservative, because Black people always have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively.”
He also took a few shots at decades-old poverty-fighting policies from the days of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, saying they promoted a culture of dependence, a defining critique for many of today’s conservatives.
Not surprisingly, media reports of his remarks were followed by blowback from allies of President Joe Biden, including the Congressional Black Caucus and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York.
“It has come to my attention that a so-called leader has made the factually inaccurate statement that Black folks were better off during Jim Crow,” he said in a posting on X, formerly Twitter, of his stinging remarks from the House floor last Wednesday,
After listing some of the tragic aspects of that era — from lynching to the suppression of the Black vote — he concluded, “How dare you make such an ignorant observation?”
Devastating. But was he right? Different ears will hear his remarks through their varied experiences.
I’m old enough to remember the last days of Jim Crow as a Black child visiting relatives in the South and, take it from me, we’re better off now. I see nothing in the Jim Crow period to which I wish to return.
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