Allan Appel Photo
Stung by the growing realization of systemic racial discrimination in the Northeast, a progressive Connecticut governor comes up with a detailed plan to integrate every single school, not only in this state, but in every town in America.
The NAACP opposes it.
That was back in 1971. The governor was Democrat Abraham Ribicoff and the NAACP’s opposition emerged because the plan required a dozen years. That was too long for black America to continue to wait.
That was one of the stunning and sobering historical facts to emerge from a talk at the Institute Library Thursday night.
The occasion was a lecture and signing to mark the publication of former New Haven Advocate intern and rising young historian Jason Sokol’s new book, All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn.
Political historian Jim Sleeper (pictured in foreground), who reviewed the book in Bookforum, was in attendance along with another dozen history and policy-interested citizens.
“It’s mind-boggling to stand here and think what if all the schools were integrated by 1983,” Sokol said during his presentation.
Sokol said his book is a retelling of a story, a recalibrating of a long-held and inaccurate nostrum: that slavery is a Southern sin and the North is land of liberty.
“I thought neither of these approaches accurate,” he said. After having told the story of the Jim Crow South in his previous book, “I decided to tell the warring stories in the conflicted soul of the Northeast,” he said.
He read from his chapter on Jackie Robinson’s acceptance as a baseball great, but not a next-door neighbor. “White Brooklynites rooted for Jackie Robinson, embracing a black ballplayer, yet in those exact same years, housing ghettos were formed and Bedford-Stuyvesant was established,” he said.
When Robinson wanted to buy a Connecticut home and live the American dream he had earned, he was “rebuffed in New Canaan, Greenwich,” and many other Nutmeg State towns. Finally, after a public shaming by black ministers, a journalistic expose, and a general outcry, Robinson and his family were able to settle in Stamford. “When the broker saw us, the houses turned out to be sold,” Sokol quoted Robinson’s wife Rachel’s recollection of her family’s painful racial experience in housing.
“The real racist was always the next guy,” Sokol said of the explanations offered by well-meaning brokers, realtors, and neighbors.
Sokol focused on Brooklyn, Boston, his native Springfield, Massachusetts, and the election of Edward Brooke, the first African-American popularly elected to the Senate, in 1966. He said many good books have been written about the Elm City, where he spent his senior year in college as an intern at the Advocate, so he went mining elsewhere — though he does pay some attention in his book to the election of John Daniels as the city’s first black mayor in 1989. Unlike what happened to other black politicians in 1989 in New York and Virginia, white Democrats stuck with Daniels, Sokol pointed out.
At that time Daniels also profited from fatigue with the Democratic machine, he added.
As an historian, Sokol said he often ponders paths not taken, like Ribicoff’s plan. “If I carried the story to 2014, I’d have to include the sad and sobering notes of police brutality, the incidents in the news every day.”
Still, he says he’s encouraged by the “symbolic” victory of President Obama in 2008 and his reelection. Supporting the symbol but not wanting a real black family in the neighborhood is the heart of the “warring soul” that Sokol is trying to explore. For that reason he found Obama’s reelection more interesting and heartening. “The country evaluated the record rather than the symbolic breakthrough,” he said.
Nevertheless, Obama “is walking such a fine line. It’s frustrating he hasn’t come out more forcefully on on issues like Eric Garner and Michael Brown. But I understand it. I too can be evasive,” he quipped.
Sokol said he is hopeful about political figures such as Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio. He thinks they get the story of race in the Northeast right — not just the symbols, but the complexity, and how economic growth alone will not by itself obliterate racism.
“I still remain optimistic,” he said
If you’re in Brooklyn, NY, you can catch Sokol being interviewed by the New York Times’s Brent Staples at the Green Light Bookstore in Fort Greene, Jan. 5, at 7:30 p.m.