Over the last year, I have spent time reading my father’s columns and my mother’s book reviews from the 1950’s, published in The Defender. They are archived at the New York Public Library. Although my father spent most of his life as a journalist, I was only ten when he started to work full time for the Democratic Party instead, so I never read his columns from earlier years.

I have also been obsessed recently by trying to imagine how middle class blacks survived Jim Crow. My maternal grandfather was a successful businessman in the colored community in Savannah and my paternal grandfather was a doctor in the same community. How did they manage to lead professional lives and even thrive within a society where any random white person had more power than they did? For one thing, they obeyed the rules of segregation: as a child, visiting Savannah, I don’t remember even seeing white people. But they were also smart, very smart. It has always struck me as ironic that some white scientists claim that Negroes are not as intelligent as whites, since natural selection would predict that people whose lives depended on their wits would be smarter than those who were cosseted by laws that gave them every advantage and power, no matter how stupid they were.

Here is one of my father’s columns, where he describes how a black businessman survived in rural Georgia.

Toni Martin Writes