(1) Do you have proof of this? It is amazing that in liberal Minn. none of these stories have come to life yet, sounds like bs to me.
(2) When my mother's parents moved up here from Nebraska in the twenties, one of the farmers in the area they moved to, about as close to lily white as can be,(Nordlanders, British, French etc.) one successful farm family was negro, and all the stories about them are positive.
(3) Could you tell
when they were driven off of their farm and had to live in the "forest"?
Bob
(4) PS--So you are saying all the stories told by WWII black soldiers about how they were treated in the South are lies, please tell me which cafes in Minn, told blacks they could not eat with the good white folks."
Bob, I think you and I have touched on your history lesson of race relations in Minn. before. What I said then still stands; Minn was never a cross-roads of black immigration and its record is no more applicable than say, N.D.'s. Even so, mostly for lc's benefit, I will address your issues as I've numbered them.
1. I think it is unlikely that ANY such history would be written and certainly none handed down verbally. It would be astonishing if it were, not that it is not. And, you may note that none of the cities of black unrest I mentioned, then or now, included Minneapolis. Thus, your memories of Minn are not applicable to the issues in question but you may want to check a little further south, say Chicago or Detroit.
2. No institutional prejeduces on race EVER occur when a minority is sufficently tiny. The Chinese in Calif. were not discrimated against at first but THEY sure were when they became a large portion of the population! Are you suggesting that Minn. has long had a large black population that has always been well treated? Surely not. Again, your postion is not applicable to the question before us.
3. From the contast between the wording of your question and what I said, I'm not quite sure what you are saying. Do you ask if I'm saying your ancestors "drove" blacks off their own farms? Or that they were driven off the farms of the whites? Actually, I doubt that black family your parents remember were there in the late 1860s so it's unlikely they were driven off their own farm. Or, if that isn't what you meant, I'd just note that I never said anyone was driven off any farms at all in the north. Not applicable.
4. Right, didn't mention that did I? And, I am sad to have to admit it, you are correct and it was wrong. But, my question back to you is, do you want to even suggest that the things you rightly recount never occured in the north? Or that it was much less frequent or less mean than it was in the south? If so, you deceive yourself, as blacks in the north would assure you. So, you are correct in what you say but it's irrelivant to the question.
I NEVER knew of northern discrimination from any history books, other than what happened in some bloody NYC riots against blacks immediately following the start of the war. (Perhaps you could find something on that history in your liberary.) Anyway, I learned of it from my northern (black) friends after getting to know several in the USAF in '59. Some of the stories they told me of northern discrimination made me disgusted. Some of the
things they told me they had been TOLD to expect in the south disgusted me because it wasn't true, and I told them so. By the time we sepereated, after completing our electonic training in Biloxi, MS, each one told me they felt safer there and had been better treated in public, in that presumed bastion of "southern predejuce", than they normally were in Philidelphia, New York and Boston when outside their black neighborhoods (there was one guy from each city in my classes). That's a fact, at least their statements to me were. Maybe you would suggest they were lying to me?
Proof? Naw, no book and page number anyway. Just a common sense recognition there is a rational basis for things we can still see today. You can get some specific info from the web site link given above tho, IF you will read it. Conceeding a little to the "logic" of your defense of the north by your memory of Minn, I did see no reference to your state, so maybe that site's all wrong and the north never did any of the dastardly things I've mentioned. ??
