Segregation Was Never Good For Black People. Not Even A Little Bit

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Segregation was never good for black people. We were not better off during Jim Crow. Not even a little bit. Those who wax nostalgically about how we thrived during segregation and leveraged it to our economic advantage to support and sustain healthy, strong black communities are just straight-up wrong.

We need to stop romanticizing life for African Americans before integration. The overwhelming majority of black people were trapped in abject poverty (or at best, a fragile subsistence), locked out of nearly every profession or industry where they could gain access to significant income and wealth, regardless of their level of education or social-economic status. We were also excluded from Wall Street and other centers of capital and investment. (In fact, for much of America’s history prior to integration, not only could we not acquire stock and commodities—we were counted as livestock ourselves). As recently as the 1950s, the rare African American with a Ph.D. could hope for no better than a job as a teacher or minister.

And the great black entrepreneurs in the age of segregation operated with absolutely zero legal protection or civil rights, essentially deprived of any legal means of protecting their assets/wealth. Laws both civil and criminal were set up so that white people could take property, money, land, etc. from black people with impunity. And what they couldn’t take, they would destroy—the devastating 1921 race riot that destroyed Tulsa, Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street” is the best known, but far from the only example of this truth. Countless black people, including (maybe especially) the educated and relatively wealthy—including many WWI veterans who tasted freedom in Europe—were lynched (concurrent with the establishment and rise of the Ku Klux Klan) in order to eliminate them as a source of economic competition and as a way to use terror to keep blacks “in their place.”

The vast majority of people who talk today about how much better off black people were during segregation have lived most, if not all of their lives, in the post-segregation era. I’ve interviewed many people who actually lived through Jim Crow segregation (most are now in their 80s or 90s or older), including my late grandfather, who died at age 97 in 2008 less than six months before Barack Obama was elected to the U.S. presidency. I can’t remember any of them wishing to go back to the way things were during segregation. Today, we operate with unequal protection and access as black people; they operated with zero protection and access. If any of us black people born after 1960 were magically transported back to 1921, 1931 or even 1951, most of us wouldn’t last a month.

No matter how much we struggle with injustice and racism today, our better is in pushing forward, not going back to a nostalgic, selectively imagined, segregated past.

Editor’s Note: Opinion pieces are solely the opinions of the author and not representative of Black Enterprise.

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