history – The Last Good Bar

sleepynegress:

Decided this deserved it’s own post because it bothers me that there’s so little in the media about these successfully racially mixed spaces in the 19th century. I feel like this needs to be common knowledge.

This article is about Longtown, Ohio, a racially mixed town, with white, black, and Native Americans who lived a good life, intermixing from the mid 1850′s without racial violence or issues, until WW2.

I think the closest I have seen to any coverage of something similar, was the movie The Free State of Jones… which is AWFUL and has that heavy-handed patronizing preciousness around race, that I hate. Not to mention it’s boring af and hella white saviory. I honestly don’t think a white male filmmaker could get this right. It’s on Netflix, but I don’t recommend it.

There are better docs on youtube about him… A white man who deserted the Confederates and formed his own mixed raced territory within Mississippi. He was an intimidating figure who basically kept the peace until his death.

I feel like a lot of the lazy hand-wavey bullshit modern bigots like to pull comes from this idea that humans just weren’t meant to mix and it’s some kind of inevitability (on ALL SIDES of course, because they always feel weirdly implicated when we talk about the horrifically demonic shit white people did, I think because THEY KNOW they would do it too) that people will always hate each other because they are different.

And these hidden histories prove that’s bullshit.

I think a lot of these histories… and, there are quite a few, have been in a way ignored and suppressed because it doesn’t fit that narrative of constant oppression of the other (with a token white savior to romanticize our pain and make white people cry).

I think seeing successes like this from even those so-called extra-racist days (don’t believe that bullshit either, time passage doesn’t magically lessen racism, no matter what time you exist in, a conscience works, some just ignore it for their own greed… as a lot folks should definitely see these days, given Trumpism).

I remember the Smithsonian putting on a festival some years back, which spotlit the mix of cultures and pockets of mixed raced towns that birthed bluegrass in Appalachia. That had tents for Scotland (with Scots) and Mali (with people from Mali). And I wish more people knew about The Carolina Chocolate Drops with Rhiannon Giddens who has done SO MUCH to spread that history and culture through her musical artistry.

All this to say… I really wish more period stuff dealt with POC successfully and happily existing those times, without the constant spectre of racial violence and abuse, even in the U.S. because that was a reality for some too.