HOW BROTHER WHITE AND HIGHWAY 61 EDUCATED ME ABOUT SLAVERY & RACISM

One of Hundreds of Antebellum Houses Along Highway 61

When I still believed in religion, we attended a large black church in Little Rock for ten years.  It was an education, and remains part of my heritage, background and knowledge that no one can take away or likely duplicate.

We saw the effects of racism, even sometimes experiencing so-called reverse racism, watched proud people overcome and some fail.

It's hard not to respect strong Black women, who, with a single glance can control five children, frequently including boys one foot taller.  

At the church I had frequent talks with a man named Ulysses White, forty years my senior.  Brother White, as we called him, was a tall, slim Black man, in his 70's, who could still put in a day's work as a carpenter, plumber or handy man.

Brother White was always educating me.

One day I pointed out a large Victorian style house in downtown Little Rock to Brother White.  Those houses had been owned before desegregation by rich whites, then afterward became multi-family units divided into 4, 5 or more apartments for Black families.  

Now, as downtown Little Rock was being revitalized, rich white folks were buying them up again and restoring them to their previous grandeur.  Yes, gentrification!

Brother White listened patiently to me about "these great houses" and then said abruptly:

"I never look at the houses.  I look in the back at the slave quarters."

While I said nothing in reply, I felt the full sting of those words.

But, it was not until a few months later that I actually understood.

The Crossroads~Intersection of Highways 61/49

We were in Memphis with some time on our hands, bored of sampling barbecue.  I looked at the map and saw the famous Highway 61, the legendary "blues highway," stretching from Memphis to Clarksdale, Mississippi, down through the Mississippi delta where nearly every blues performer was born.

"Mileage between cities" on the map showed only 76 miles separating Memphis and Clarksdale, just north of where Highway 49 intersected, the famous Crossroads where Robert Johnson dealt with the Devil to improve his guitar skills.

We would drive that 75 miles in our orange and white VW bus and see what we could see.  Maybe we would even run into Mr. Devil.

Almost immediately, exiting Memphis to the south, we saw huge antebellum houses, plantation houses, one after the other.  Antebellum means built before the Civil War.  

Across the highway from these houses were huge farms, measuring thousands of acres, planted in cotton and other crops.

  

Reminded of Brother White's words I started trying to see behind each house, staring at an angle before being directly in front of each house, to see the slave quarters.  I was not disappointed as, time and again, that's exactly what I saw.

Then it hit me.  These houses, some measuring several thousand square feet, could not be maintained, cleaned, meals cooked and children cared for without Black women as slaves.  

And, across the highway, these huge farms, some measured in thousands of acres, yet farmed before mechanical equipment was available, could not have been plowed, planted, cultivated and harvested without Black slave labor.

Both house and farm were far too large to be run without the nearly free labor of Black slaves.

It finally dawned on me that this whole Southern agriculturally-based society was built on the backs of Black slaves.

Below is a YouTube video of legendary bluesman Johnny Winter, accompanied by his brother Edgar on sax.  Both were born with albinism. They're playing Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited:"