the Illusion of a Golden Era

Protest has always been a part of the Black Experience from day one on these shores!
3 hrs 

In many ways whites viewed their time in the 1950's and the Kennedy family the same as Colored folks, but the differences in the perception of the decade, and the Kennedy family parted down racial lines because millions of whites were prepared to justify killing Negroes to maintain the status quo of the era. Freedom and rebellion meant two different things to whites and Negroes as illustrated in their cultural and thematic heroes and their reactions to certain things in the culture.

After the second World War white and Negro soldiers returned home with two rays of hopes and separated at the airports into the reality of their women working 'men's jobs' and the divisions of race and class. Jim Crow waited and laughed welcoming back home Colored soldiers at airports and bus stations around the country because he was law, not fairness or respect for Black men's manhood! 

For the most part whites didn't feel the angst of Colored soldier's reality after experiencing the warmth, and the respect, and the appreciation of Europeans for who they were as men, and soldiers. Many a Black man left babies in France and Germany with their mothers. They couldn't bring back their families to the U.S., nor could they talk about the way the hope they inspired in European women was reciprocated in a culture that discriminated in terms of culture rather than race. The love and the union between a white woman from say Germany and a Colored man would not thrive or survive anywhere in the States. I picked Germany because German Americans were instrumental in slowing down the American response time to the atrocities in Germany. See the contradictions? They are intertwined and seemed endless. 

Back in the States white people were mean and shifting through their 'shit'. In those days for Negro activists to find and relate to 'good' white folks was not without its dangers, but relations with good whites was a survival skill for 'Members' (that's what Black folks called each other back then) and strategically sound thinking. White soldiers adjusted to civilian life through their war sickness and rage in motorcycle gangs, their families, and the feeling of Jimmy Dean movies and being welcomed back home with acceptance, reverence and respect for their services rendered during the European conflict! 

On the surface this is what America looked like and felt like. You can hear it in the music and the movies, news articles and photographs, if you have ears. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 5.30.14

A rare photograph of Ethel Kennedy, left, Jackie Kennedy and JFK from Dave Powers’ private collection ~ 19543 hrs 

Pre-Camelot Jack Kennedy & Jacqueline Bouvier first met in may 1951 1951 

  

"... an interesting time to be Black and Indian in the 1950's, The perceptions of time and relationship with whites was strained to the hilt in terms of illusion, fear and hope..." - Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories 5.30.14





Lioness Daiba Sala