04-18-2021, 02:20 AM
Chapter 2 “Racism Drained the Pool.”
Many Americans have fuzzy ideas about government, says McGhee. Many don’t associate it with interstate highways and public schools, but with taxes and regulation. But it has not always been that way. An interesting point of departure in this chapter is The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, a book written in 1857 by Hinton Rowen Helper, a racist Southerner, to complain about how slavery was hurting white people.
“Notwithstanding the fact that the white non-slaveholders of the South are in the majority, as five to one, they have never yet had aby part or lot in framing the laws under which they live” (qtd in McGhee, 19). By his count, there were 393 public libraries in PA, but only 26 in SC: Maine had 236 while Georgia only had 38. Little New Hampshire had 2,381 public schools while Mississippi had only 782. That’s because, says McGhee, owners in a slave economy had little need for literate laborers, and their plantations “didn’t depend on local customers, whether individuals or businesses: the market for cotton was a global exchange. . . . Life on a plantation was self-contained; the welfare of the surrounding community mattered little outside the closed system” (19). The strong tradition of investing in local schools and infrastructure never developed in the slave counties of southern states as it had in the North and Mid-West. Helper wanted the slave owners, at least the big plantation owners, held to account. Rather than discussing how they should be compensated for the loss of their slaves, he demanded that lower-class whites be compensated for their loss/underdevelopment owing to slavery.
Fast forward to the new millennium--Those counties which relied most on slavery in 1860 still had lower per capita incomes than surrounding counties in 2000, according to a study, “Slavery, Inequality, and Economic Development,” by Harvard professor Nicholas Nunn (20). When the Civil War ended, the infrastructure of southern states was severely underdeveloped in comparison with the North. This lack limited the upward mobility of ALL residents, not just Blacks. Today 9 of the 10 poorest states in the Union are still in the South, as are 7 of the 10 with lowest educational attainment.
In the 19th century, the gov. began using its power and resources to help White citizens, beginning with the Homestead act of 1862, which, with its 1866 complement, enabled some 1.6 million citizens to become landowners—though a mere 6,000 Black families were able to take advantage of this offering. McGhee makes similar points about the New Deal—a good deal for whites with limited benefits for blacks. And then the GI Bill which helped millions of whites into college, and thousands of blacks into trade schools. And finally, in the ‘50s, the building of our interstate highway system and the accompanying suburbs—with their racial covenants barring Blacks (22).
As the ‘50s began, whites overwhelmingly supported government policies and interventions in the economy which directly benefitted white citizens. According to the American National Election Studies of 1956, 65% of white people “believed that the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living in the country.” This number reached 70% in 1960, then dropped precipitously to 35% in 1964—the year of the Civil Rights Act (28). McGhee connects this drop to de-segregation, via the example of mass closures of public swimming pools in the South in response to forced integration. Here is a partial list of the pools McGhee discusses.
Baltimore, 1956: a lawsuit forced city pools to integrate, but whites simply stopped going and the pools were closed.
Warren, Ohio, privatized public pools. Montgomery, WVA, leased to private businesses.
Oak Park, Alabama, had a public park with a zoo, but sold of the animals and filled the pool with cement.
Fairground Park, St. Louis, had 313,000 visitors in the summer of ’49, but barely 10,000 in ’50, the year they decided to integrate the pool. The first week it opened there was a riot involving 5,000 whites. Closed for six years.
Jackson, Mississippi, had 5 pools, but closed 4 and leased one to a private corporation. Black residents sued all the way to the Supreme Court, where Hugo Black ruled in favor of the racists in Palmer vs Thompson, with a curious inversion of separate but equal—so long as the damage was equal to both races, closing the pools was not discriminatory (27).
New Orleans closed Audubon pool, the largest in the South, for six years.
In DC, between 1953-63 125 new PRIVATE swim clubs were opened.
If public pools had to be shared, public money thus providing equal access, Whites preferred to close and do without them. These closed pools then, and the rationale behind them, become the dominate metaphor/analogy of McGhee’s book. She examines efforts to “close the pool” of public education, as the push for school choice begins in the civil rights era, as does, almost as suddenly, resistance to policies intended to ameliorate inequality in housing, jobs, and educational opportunity. And of course, welfare and other forms of direct government support. Generic opposition to government spending on social programs steadily increases into the ’70-80s, and Reagan famously declared “Government is not the solution: Government is the problem.”
Finally, in every chapter, McGhee seeks to balance losses with gains, to show how, from Sacremento, CA, to Lewistown, ME, people of all colors have been able to work together to take control of and improve their immediate communities--what she terms a “solidarity dividend”--thereby making her point that “The sum of us can accomplish far more than just some of us” (273).
Many Americans have fuzzy ideas about government, says McGhee. Many don’t associate it with interstate highways and public schools, but with taxes and regulation. But it has not always been that way. An interesting point of departure in this chapter is The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, a book written in 1857 by Hinton Rowen Helper, a racist Southerner, to complain about how slavery was hurting white people.
“Notwithstanding the fact that the white non-slaveholders of the South are in the majority, as five to one, they have never yet had aby part or lot in framing the laws under which they live” (qtd in McGhee, 19). By his count, there were 393 public libraries in PA, but only 26 in SC: Maine had 236 while Georgia only had 38. Little New Hampshire had 2,381 public schools while Mississippi had only 782. That’s because, says McGhee, owners in a slave economy had little need for literate laborers, and their plantations “didn’t depend on local customers, whether individuals or businesses: the market for cotton was a global exchange. . . . Life on a plantation was self-contained; the welfare of the surrounding community mattered little outside the closed system” (19). The strong tradition of investing in local schools and infrastructure never developed in the slave counties of southern states as it had in the North and Mid-West. Helper wanted the slave owners, at least the big plantation owners, held to account. Rather than discussing how they should be compensated for the loss of their slaves, he demanded that lower-class whites be compensated for their loss/underdevelopment owing to slavery.
Fast forward to the new millennium--Those counties which relied most on slavery in 1860 still had lower per capita incomes than surrounding counties in 2000, according to a study, “Slavery, Inequality, and Economic Development,” by Harvard professor Nicholas Nunn (20). When the Civil War ended, the infrastructure of southern states was severely underdeveloped in comparison with the North. This lack limited the upward mobility of ALL residents, not just Blacks. Today 9 of the 10 poorest states in the Union are still in the South, as are 7 of the 10 with lowest educational attainment.
In the 19th century, the gov. began using its power and resources to help White citizens, beginning with the Homestead act of 1862, which, with its 1866 complement, enabled some 1.6 million citizens to become landowners—though a mere 6,000 Black families were able to take advantage of this offering. McGhee makes similar points about the New Deal—a good deal for whites with limited benefits for blacks. And then the GI Bill which helped millions of whites into college, and thousands of blacks into trade schools. And finally, in the ‘50s, the building of our interstate highway system and the accompanying suburbs—with their racial covenants barring Blacks (22).
As the ‘50s began, whites overwhelmingly supported government policies and interventions in the economy which directly benefitted white citizens. According to the American National Election Studies of 1956, 65% of white people “believed that the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living in the country.” This number reached 70% in 1960, then dropped precipitously to 35% in 1964—the year of the Civil Rights Act (28). McGhee connects this drop to de-segregation, via the example of mass closures of public swimming pools in the South in response to forced integration. Here is a partial list of the pools McGhee discusses.
Baltimore, 1956: a lawsuit forced city pools to integrate, but whites simply stopped going and the pools were closed.
Warren, Ohio, privatized public pools. Montgomery, WVA, leased to private businesses.
Oak Park, Alabama, had a public park with a zoo, but sold of the animals and filled the pool with cement.
Fairground Park, St. Louis, had 313,000 visitors in the summer of ’49, but barely 10,000 in ’50, the year they decided to integrate the pool. The first week it opened there was a riot involving 5,000 whites. Closed for six years.
Jackson, Mississippi, had 5 pools, but closed 4 and leased one to a private corporation. Black residents sued all the way to the Supreme Court, where Hugo Black ruled in favor of the racists in Palmer vs Thompson, with a curious inversion of separate but equal—so long as the damage was equal to both races, closing the pools was not discriminatory (27).
New Orleans closed Audubon pool, the largest in the South, for six years.
In DC, between 1953-63 125 new PRIVATE swim clubs were opened.
If public pools had to be shared, public money thus providing equal access, Whites preferred to close and do without them. These closed pools then, and the rationale behind them, become the dominate metaphor/analogy of McGhee’s book. She examines efforts to “close the pool” of public education, as the push for school choice begins in the civil rights era, as does, almost as suddenly, resistance to policies intended to ameliorate inequality in housing, jobs, and educational opportunity. And of course, welfare and other forms of direct government support. Generic opposition to government spending on social programs steadily increases into the ’70-80s, and Reagan famously declared “Government is not the solution: Government is the problem.”
Finally, in every chapter, McGhee seeks to balance losses with gains, to show how, from Sacremento, CA, to Lewistown, ME, people of all colors have been able to work together to take control of and improve their immediate communities--what she terms a “solidarity dividend”--thereby making her point that “The sum of us can accomplish far more than just some of us” (273).
![[Image: 4CV0TeR.png]](https://i.imgur.com/4CV0TeR.png)
