Segregation affected everything
and
was'nt limited to politicians and judges and courts
but affected the day-to-day life for
most whites you know
I once interviewed for two hours at Duke 0:00:25.609,0:00:28.460 John hope franklin
about %uh his book called Mirror to America which it was his last book
and he said when he went to take
I believe it was the %uh the graduate record exam
and one of those exams that you take
to get into graduate school
he ever want to take it
at vanderbilt
which is in northern tennessee
and as he was walking down there on the campus he would see
African-American groundskeepers
and they could tell that he was going to do something academic a was carrying a briefcase
and their jaws dropped three feet
symptomatic of what you're talking about
and when he got into the room
that proctor who was a professor
asked him what are you doing here
and he said I've come to take the test and the guy through the test on the floor
just a little bit of an example
he told another example because
it helps put flesh
on that thing
when he was a little boy
because she was growing up in oklahoma
0:01:52.680,0:01:53.729 took her hand
and he walked across the street
and somehow in the middle of the street with traffic whizzing around she said to him
in effect are you black or are you white
and he said I'm Black
through down his hand
blind, traffic everywhere
0:02:13.249,0:02:14.180
so it's just unbelievable
reminds me of of the the %uh
person at the university
named Blind Jim Jim Ivy
black man
who is blind in an accident in the nineteen nineties
and started
%uh working
on campus not for the university selling peanuts and candy
to students
and he became known as blind Jim
and a very %uh
respected figure on campus
students sort of adopted him
he became
what he called himself was the dean of freshmen
because he took the freshmen under his wing
and gave advice and tried to help them
but all this was an of a paternalistic relationship
blind Jim did was
work on the campus and is in in many ways was part of the campus but not really part
of the university
and the students took care of him
they're a very affectionate the with the sporting events and cheered for the rebels and
%um
went in parades with them
he was
still an African-American
now what I think is interesting about compare your blind story and blind Jim's story
the fact that blinds Jim is blind
%um
helped him survive on the campus
because he was not seen as a threat
blind people are often pitied
by sighted people
and so he is pitied now for being blind and for being black and he's seen as harmless
because he is
by the nineteen forties and fifties
and blind said he cannot even
do the two this thing off looking at
female students
so he said
he plays a since the role in in the life on the campus
he dies in the mid-fifties soon after the brown decision
and there is some reason to believe that
attitudes had hardened after the brown decision
and that
whites were treating him less
respectfully some of the white students were so
perhaps he was
becoming an anachronism after brown
his function could only be served under segregation.
0:04:53.120,0:04:54.639