I love reading about stories where we see important details like the boys throwing the rocks. How could young boys get it in their head to do this themselves? Its not normal to just form into a pack and stone a house. It had to have been organized by the parents. Teaching that type of extreme dehumanizing violence and those kids could still be with us today, not in their seventies or early eighties. That kind of dehumanizing behavior gets deeply engrained if never punished and it is sanctioned by the adults. This instance shows the mechanism for instilling and passing white anger at black Americans down through the generations, instilling the white racism we see today through practiced violence. These kids were probably praised instead of being admonished, fortifying in their minds they did something right, not wrong.
I also noticed the mailman spreading the word. He is a government employee and thus an agent of the government. In this case, we see the government spreading hate and sending out a message instilling violence, echoing Trump’s call to action in December for January 6: “It will be wild.” Interesting, the police notice says that the people of Levittown went wild. This white terrorist attack on the black home by many in the neighborhood inflame by a “black invasion” into their community was not a one-off incidence here, and black Americans were consistently driven out homes and communities starting after the Civil War in the South, then spreading outside starting firmly in the 1880s and 90s. Boys in sundown towns threw rocks at black Americans not out of the town on time during that period leading up the FHA 1934 Act.
But it was that Act along with a couple other New White Deal Acts, like those that insured white backs from collapsing again, that systemized the lockout and nationalized the sundown town practice, but using federally backed loans through those reinsured white banks rather than stones, firebombs and white lynch mobs. All of those acts were thoroughly vetted by the solid MAGA conservative senators to *include* segregationist mechanisms of exclusion into those laws. No legislation could get through without their approval, vetting and rewriting. Once through it was easy to get signed, as the president, in the same party, and who that “solid south” voted for when he ran for VP in 1924 (while every other state vote the opposite, at the time “red”), and who segregated the armed forces when assistant secretary of the navy under Wilson, not only owed them but courted their votes. The President doesn’t write the acts or pass them, only signs them, agreeing to enforce them. After that was signed, banks would not risk money to developers like Levitt to “high risk” (euphemism for black American) anywhere in the country. Thus, until that act was “repealed” through replacement in 1968, it created no subdivisions nationally that were white, and also coded with HOA principles that strongly suggested “no negroes allowed.” It acted as a “white only” sign hung over the suburbs the way they were hung over water fountains.
Thus, American went from a patchwork of sundown towns formed by violence, threats and bombs that drove out black Americans from dozens of states to a solidifying whiteness in every county and state. Whites, including immigrants who had been somehow not totally white like Italians, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians etc., know literally bought into whiteness, the white American dream. Those laws (not policies or individual acts of racism like slurs) did more to systematically damage black Americans nationally, but in a genteel way, than anything else before it, while solidifying whiteness. After that started, the deep feeling that black Americans didn’t belong was embedded into the emotional structure of the American psyche.
Shows like “Leave It to Beaver” only reinforced that whiteness, eliminating European ethnic differences, to display a bland but solid whiteness by creating hollow laughter devoid of ethnic jabs or references, which black Americans didn’t watch, because they didn’t have TVs and the majority of them were in cotton fields, internal migrant fruits and vegetable pickers, and domestic servants, or some other “bottom” subsistence job like janitor in factories, schools and office buildings. Yes, the majority were locked out of the type of economic wealth building in the fifties to afford TVs, though a minority could.
The deep tragedy is that whites continued to write and teach a version of American history that reflected that solidifying of whiteness as positive, triumphalist, for all races or ethnicity, including blacks. When combined with the “victory” of WWII, followed by the vast extension of credit to Western Europe to rebuild, and to US corporations to produce a mass global supply chain to export all those goods and sell domestically, that embedded mental pride in American growth made for an unimpeachable feeling of gratitude and pride in the white middle class that is impossible to mentally dislodge. The sectarian divisions of ideological whiteness had been fused in the unconscious emotional sense of national pride.
To this day, thanks to the daily preaching of the triumphalist Greatest White Generation, black Americans see that period and president as opposite of what it and he was, oppositional to black American civil rights and equality. This 30-year period functioned as a national lockout for them, not just by this nationalized housing segregation practice, but by also an economically hurtful on limitation of unionization of the majority of black Americans by law, thanks to excluding black American agriculture and domestic workers in the right to form unions by the same “solid south” group that wrote the other white deal acts.
It is not DeSantis excluding the teaching of black American history that is flat out wrong. It is continuing preaching of the white version of history of this period to all that is already being done and happening over the last 50 years. It might be too late to convince brainwashed adults of all races that this period was systemically harmful to black Americans financially while unprecedentedly helpful and enriching for whiteness, whitewashing the past, but perhaps some black American children can be taught the harmful truth of this history in some newly opened black Freedom schools. That period provided reparations for whites in an unprecedented way by the expanding credit to them only by the government.
Sure, whites are grateful for this period and turn that president of the white conservative MAGA party who served four terms and would have gone for a fifth had he not died. They achieved great benefits of wealth expansion as a whole white ethnicity. Whites emotionally might be beyond emotional reach, even if they differ drastically on the surface. They will be loath to rewrite history to reflect this nationalized segregationist wealth division in housing and unions. But perhaps a crack in that white foundation can occur if black Americans are adversarial enough in presenting the mechanisms of this period’s segregationist law-based practices that sprung up nationwide, like this article does. We need more of these concrete stories to gain a wider understanding and counter narrative to show the real visceral inequality embedded into daily white life. Because children shouldn’t be throwing stones as black houses.
