Isabel Wilkerson, the first female African-American winner of the Pulitzer Prize (in journalism), wrote in her award-winning historical treatment, “The Warmth of Other Suns” about the #GreatMigration; the mass relocation of African American families from rural to urban spaces.

An excerpt:

“Harvey Clark was from Mississippi like Ida Mae and brought his family to Chicago in 1949 after serving in World War II.  Now that they were in the big city, the couple and their two children were crammed into half of a two-room apartment.  A family of five lived in the other half.  Harvey Clark was paying fifty-six dollars a month for the privilege, up to fifty percent more than tenants in white neighborhoods paid for the same amount of space.  One-room tenement life did not fit them at all.  The husband and wife were college-educated, well-mannered, and looked like movie stars.  The father had saved up for a piano for his eight-year-old daughter with the ringlets down her back but had no place to put it.  He had high aspirations for their six-year-old son, who was bright and whose dimples could have landed him in cereal commercials.

The Clarks felt they had to get out.  By May of 1951, they finally found the perfect apartment.  It had five rooms, was clean and modern, was closer to the bus terminal, and cost only sixty dollars a month.  That came to four dollars a month more for five times more space.  It was just a block over the Chicago line, at 6139 West Nineteenth Street, in the working-class suburb of Cicero.  The Clarks couldn’t believe their good fortune.

Cicero was an all-white town on the southwest border of Chicago.  It was known as the place Al Capone went to elude Chicago authorities back during Prohibition.  The town was filled with first- and second-generation immigrants--Czechs, Slavs, Poles, Italians.  Some had fled fascism and Stalinism, not unlike blacks fleeing oppression in the South, and were still getting established in the New World.  They lived in frame cottages and worked the factories and slaughterhouses.  They were miles from the black belt, isolated from it, and bent on keeping their town as it was.

That the Clarks turned there at all was an indication of how closed the options were for colored families looking for clean, spacious housing they could afford.  The Clarks set the move-in date for the third week of June.  The moving truck arrived at 2:30 in the afternoon.  White protestors met them as the couple tried to unload the truck.

“Get out of Cicero,” the protestors told them, “and don’t come back.”

As the Clarks started to enter the building, the police stopped them at the door.  The police took sides with the protestors and would not let the Clarks nor their furniture in.

“You should know better,” the chief of police told them. “Get going.  Get out of here fast.  There will be no moving in that building.”

The Clarks, along with their rental agent, Charles Edwards, fled the scene.

“Don’t come back in town,” the chief reportedly told Edwards, “or you’ll get a bullet through you.”

The Clarks did not let that deter them but sued and won the right to occupy the apartment.  They tried to move in again on July 11, 1951.

This time, a hundred Cicero housewives and grandmothers in swing coats and Mamie Eisenhower hats showed up to heckle them.  The couple managed to get their furniture in, but as the day wore on, the crowds grew larger and more agitated.  A man from a white supremacy group called the White Circle League handed out flyers that said, KEEP CICERO WHITE.  The Clarks fled.

A mob stormed the apartment and threw the family’s furniture out of a third-floor window as the crowds cheered below.  The neighbors burned the couple’s marriage license and the children’s baby pictures.  They overturned the refrigerator and tore the stove and plumbing fixtures out of the wall.  They tore up the carpet.  They shattered the mirrors.  They bashed in the toilet bowl.  They ripped out the radiators.  They smashed the piano Clark had worked overtime to buy for his daughter.  And when they were done, they set the whole pile of the family’s belongings, now strewn on the ground below, on fire.”

(pp. 372-374)

by Michael Barnes

I am about to embark on a new methodology for capturing the breadth of American inequality, which has its roots in a powerful intersection of race and class.

A blog with clever tagging can accomplish this, and if Policy Riot is not the ideal home for this project, I will create a link.

Essentially, “this is water” to echo the late David Foster Wallace in his Kenyon College commencement address.  The racism and class-based oppression which is reproduced through state institutions, including school systems, is so pervasive that it is “normal” -- America’s water.  We have become largely desensitized, and so it passes around and through our field of influence too often unaddressed, by virtue of the limitations of our time and attention, or so many surmise.

The example that drew my attention at this particular moment was Jury Duty.  This is a class based division (which statistically aligns with race-bias), in which “exempt” or salaried employees called for Jury Duty often are permitted to miss work while still receiving their work pay, while also receiving government compensation, or effectively “double dipping.”

This makes Jury Duty a sweet gig for a salaried employee with no other immediate obligations (newborn child, etc.).

However, for “non-exempt” or hourly employees, they lose wages for the hours they do not work, and thus the government compensation is likely an inadequate tradeoff.  There is also the likelihood that losing hours might imperil their ability to maintain a strong schedule at work, where employees often compete for hours.  Cutting time for 1 week or more might endanger their schedule long-term, as well as (against the law) their overall perception as a consistent worker.

Of course, judges could dismiss these individuals from juries.  Though “non-exempt” workers, if they are not outspoken or strong self-advocates, a potential likelihood for those denied certain societal privileges, might be less inclined to make such a request, over those salaried employees who would rather not serve on a jury, for one or more personal reasons.

However, even if judges uniformly accepted requests by hourly workers to miss jury duty (and I am not sure -- call a lawyer? -- whether “missing hourly wages” is a legitimate, legally-defensible reason to be dismissed from a jury?), there is a larger and more sinister impact.

If the working classes, who are disproportionately people of color, are disincentivized to join the “jury of their peers” then their viewpoint, their perspective, and their cultural lens is denied a place in the jury is well.  In other words, working class minorities, who are more likely to end up on trial, especially for charges that can lead to significant prison sentences and life-altering consequences, are more likely to be denied a trial by a jury of their (actual) peers.  This isolation increases the likelihood that their contexts will not be understood, and that the cultural incongruence -- a racial and class bias -- between the jury and judged (accused) can over many trials influence outcomes.

Of course this is one of many influences of class divides, as expressed more broadly by the exempt / non-exempt classification, including language which identifies “whom is whom.”