Sitting on a palm tree-lined patio, sipping mint tea at seven o'clock in the morning, under the blazing midsummer Florida sun, I wondered why the NAACP leadership selected Miami Beach, of all places, for their annual convention.
I've lived down here for 20 years, and I still have not adjusted to the long, hot summers. Most of us are trying to get out of here, heading north toward cooler climates, trying to escape what the weathermen say "feels like" every bit of the 100 degrees-plus, even in the shade, if you can find any.
I don't know how my ancestors did it. My grandfather and his family migrated here from Georgia in the '20s, looking for that ever-elusive chance to get ahead. Their parents roamed the South, wandering like the biblical Jews in the desert, for decades, after the federal government abandoned them, giving up on Reconstruction and leaving them to fend for themselves under the Jim Crow laws that locked them into a strictly segregated, separate-but-equal world, where the word "equal" had lost all meaning.
With the so-called Hayes-Tilden Compromise, after a presidential election so rife with fraud and turmoil it threatened to throw the country back into civil war, African-Americans lost all hope for a political solution to racism. Even though they were a majority of the population in some counties and several states, they had been stripped of the power of the vote.
Even the simple essentials, like being able to travel by train, eat in public restaurants, stay in hotels, shop, go to a hospital or get an education, were all but impossible for them. No matter how hard they worked and tried to participate as equals in society, they were denied everything. Florida was one of the worst places for many reasons but, with the help of many, they persevered. Some, like my father, found the only way to survive was to leave, which is exactly what he did, finding work in Niagara Falls.
Because he could pass for white -- that is, he was very light-skinned with long, straight hair -- he was often able to travel without too much trouble. But he told me he sometimes got in trouble, no matter what he did.
Sometimes, he said, he rode in the white train cars because the black conductors would not let him ride in the black cars. They'd politely, but forcefully, escort him off the black car and take him to the white car, where he was sometimes afraid he'd be caught and arrested. He had seen other light-skinned black men in the same situation being arrested and beaten mercilessly by the white railroad police, who used their billy clubs to enforce the law.
He did not like to tell his children much about life in the South when he was young, but sometimes I'd hear him and his brothers telling stories over a game of cards some Saturday nights, when they and their best friends would all get together for a night of storytelling and bid whist. The card games, music and laughter would last long into the night. Long after we kids were supposed to be sound asleep upstairs in our little rooms, I could hear them telling the stories they did not want us to hear.
Those stories painted a vivid picture for me of what life was like in the South for poor black families. It was, as my father said, "pure dee hell."
So here I sit, generations later, the beneficiary of their struggles, at a table on the patio of a beautiful, spanking brand new hotel on Miami Beach built, owned and operated by black people. I wish my father could have lived long enough to see this. He predicted it would happen one day, and he did all he could to prepare me for the day when "equal" would mean more to me than it did to him.
Just as he had predicted, it happened through the courts as well as the ballot box. "Education, education, education," he preached. "You need to learn, learn, learn," he told us. "I never had the chance, but you will." He made sure of that.
Yet we are gathered here this week in Miami Beach at the NAACP Convention, still making the same demands our predecessors made in 1905 at the Niagara Movement Convention.
We still do not have fair access to education, jobs, health care, housing and the vote.
In Niagara Falls, W.E.B. Du Bois and a few dozen others attempted to gather and read aloud their demands for social justice. Regrettably, their group was denied accommodations and they were forced to meet in Buffalo and Fort Erie.
But it was their foresight that led to the formation of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, which would carry the fight for freedom to the Supreme Court, in the same way that another group of freedmen had tried to end the legal segregation years earlier, in the famous Plessy v. Ferguson case (1896). The case arose out of Louisiana, where Homer Plessy was arrested for deliberately trying to board a "whites only" train car.
The separate but equal rule decided in that case stood until just 49 years ago. In 1954, the Supreme Court saw the light in the Brown v. Board of Education case, which the NAACP and others will honor and recognize with new demands for reform. In light of the Supreme Court's recent affirmative action cases, which seem to take us one step forward and two steps back in this ongoing struggle for equality, we have a long way to go. And apparently, it will take 25 years to get there.
Perhaps by then, Niagara Falls will have an active NAACP chapter and a functioning convention center. It's never too soon to start planning!
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | July 15 2003 |