Beyond the Cotton Field: How “Racist” Was Pre-civil-rights-era America, Really?

Yes, you read that right. Grant was admitted to Harvard Dental School in 1868 and then became Harvard University’s first black faculty member in 1871.

Grant wasn’t alone, either (except in his golf-invention exploits). By 1920, there were 3,560 black physicians in America, a figure including 65 black women. While this didn’t represent “proportionality” — blacks were 10 percent of the U.S. at the time — it did constitute 2.5 percent of the total number of American physicians. Not bad in a country supposedly so “white supremacist” that blacks were surely relegated at the time to cotton-fields toil. (Black youths may want to ponder this, too, when believing they “just can’t make it” in 2025 because the “man” is keeping them down.)

Many wouldn’t guess black Americans enjoyed such success a century or more ago, indoctrinated as they are with Howard Zinn-esque revisionist history. In fact, while I was hardly a politically correct youth (we didn’t use the word “woke” back then), I myself was surprised when getting a glimpse into actual American history.

My experience occurred when I was about 19 and, curious about dear ol’ dad, started perusing his old NYC podiatry school yearbook. What most struck me was not how young my father looked at the time, the late ’40s to early- to mid-’50s, but all the black faces gracing the pages. In fact, inspired to do a count, I determined that the black graduates were approximately 12 percent of the class. This was greater than black Americans’ share of that time’s national population (10 percent) or their proportion of NY state’s population (7.5); it also was about exactly the same as blacks’ share of the Big Apple’s population: 12.5 percent.

None of this would surprise Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, founder of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND). Now 76, Peterson grew up black on a plantation in Jim Crow-era Alabama. He not only bemoans our “woke” revisionist history, but also has no kind words for the civil-rights era.

In fact, while he’s most colorful and can be a master troll, he’s not kidding when claiming that this period destroyed the black community. Referencing his own life and experiences, he asserts that blacks were doing better prior to it. They lived more moral lives, he says; they took care of their families and community. Many opened businesses, Peterson further states, and if they wished to attend college, they could do so. Leftists, though, don’t appreciate hearing his “lived experience” (a truly dumb term).

But Peterson isn’t alone. Consider Professor Thomas Sowell, a black economist, commentator and true intellectual giant of our time. Now 95, Sowell says that when he grew up in Harlem, N.Y. (in the 1930s and ’40s), he never heard a gunshot. He has also stated that on hot summer nights he and others would sleep out on their fire escapes to stay cool (not uncommon in the days before air conditioning). When he relates these realities to young blacks, however, Sowell says they look at him as if he’s from another planet.

Of course, none of this is to say there wasn’t prejudice and discrimination a century ago. Every time and place has its characteristic bigotry and discrimination; today, for example, whites, Christians and men are often the victims. (Hence did a survey some years ago find that more than a third of white students claimed to be non-white on college applications.) It’s also true that Peterson’s and Sowell’s experiences are anecdotal.

Moreover, black Americans’ civil-rights-era decline is a correlation involving multiple factors. For one thing, it also corresponds with the advent of the television age, which itself correlates with increased crime in every population exposed to TV. (Read my piece “Why the NRA is Right About Hollywood” for more insight.) Thus have white Americans also experienced moral and social decline. 

This said, blacks’ post-Jim Crow degradation has been inordinately steep. Furthermore, statistics tell the same story the aforementioned anecdotes do: In many respects, blacks were doing better during those “racist” times closer to slavery days.

For example, approximately 78-85 percent of black children were raised in two-parent households in the early 1900s; today the figure is ~40 percent, with about 73 percent of black kids born outside of wedlock.

In the early 1900s, the black unemployment rate was generally lower than that for whites; today it’s about 67 percent greater (5.5 vs. 3.3). As to the black poverty rate, it declined from 87 percent to 47 percent during just the 20 years between 1940 and 1960. This was the sharpest two-decade black poverty drop in history, almost halving the rate and lifting ~3-4 million people from destitution.

Note that this all occurred prior to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” anti-poverty programs and the welfare state’s birth. In fact, the subsequent black-community economic gains paled in comparison, at least partially because the welfare state contributed to the elimination of incentive, erosion of virtue and decline of the family. It all underlines, too, why President Ronald Reagan once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

As for crime, approximately 200-350 black Americans were murdered every year in the early 1900s; today about 12,000 are. This amounts to about 44 times as many despite the U.S.’ black population being, approximately, only eight times as great. Ninety-three percent of these victims are killed by other blacks, too. In fact, homicide is the number one cause of death among black children ages 1–14 (never mind the older “kids”).

“But what of the Ku Klux Klan!” the Howard Zinn-history types will ask. “Weren’t they raping and pillaging mercilessly in the 1920s?” The group was at its peak back then, after all. Well, it’s not that simple.

Now, I’ll preface what follows by emphasizing that I’m not at all saying the KKK isn’t a bad group. I am saying, however, that too many Americans have a comic-book conception of history. It’s often a Manichean historical sense—odd, too, given that most today are moral relativists—that places past groups strictly into good or evil categories. But the reality is the opposite: The Truth is black and white. People are shades of gray.

Now, as to the lightest of grays, the late Judge Lee Dryer, host of the Conservative Law and Politics Show in Tennessee and once an assistant prosecutor, was a friend of mine. I was often on his program, until his untimely death from pancreatic cancer, at age 55, in 2019. He was one of best men I’ve ever known, too. I mention this partially because I should have eulogized him long ago, but also because I want to make clear that he was beyond reproach. And he once told me a striking story.

While in a discussion with a black fellow, in Tennessee presumably, the subject of the KKK arose. The black man said he didn’t mind the KKK. Lee’s eyebrows were raised, and the man elaborated. “As long as you didn’t do anything stupid,” he explained, “they didn’t bother you.”

Then I once heard a story related by an older woman. In her youth, a man in her neighborhood was cheating on his wife. Well, the KKK burned a cross on his lawn as a warning. They apparently considered it part of their mandate regarding protection of womanhood.

Again, this isn’t to sanitize the KKK, but simply to emphasize the folly of the comic-book-history narrative. Not every white American was a flaming racist prior to ____ (people sometimes enter a date around the time they were born; call it chronological chauvinism). Nor was every black American back then forced to hide in the shadows in terror. People were people, good, bad and ugly and complex, trying to negotiate this fallen world as people always do.

Of course, there was far more poverty generally a century ago, and lifestyles and life expectancy have increased markedly for all races. But the reality is that if you were a black person at the time, you were safer from crime; more likely to be raised in a loving, intact family; more likely to be taught responsibility; and had to fear other black people far less than you would today—all in the “racist,” pre-WWII United States.

It all explains, too, why boxing manager Dick Sadler made a certain famous statement (incorrectly attributed to Muhammad Ali) after witnessing the conditions in Zaire, Africa. Now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zaire was where he found himself in 1974 with his charge, George Foreman, for the “Rumble in the Jungle” heavyweight title fight. Alluding to the ultimate silver lining in a cloud, he said of the slave days:

“Thank God our grandpappies caught that boat!”

Yes, they caught the boat and, ultimately, their ship came in. It’s just a shame so many of their descendants have caught something else: the hate-America-first virus.