Many owned businesses or worked at comparatively well-paying jobs in local factories. Their employers withheld federal, state, and local taxes from their paychecks just like their white counterparts. The vast majority of Summerton’s Black citizens were employed. This may sound like a rough life for impoverished rural students, but Summerton was not a poor town. Sometimes a student would just drown on the way.įound this article helpful? For more racial justice news and analysis, subscribe to the Colorlines newsletter today. When they arrived at school, they would have to chop wood for their unheated classrooms … if they arrived. Often, when the water was particularly high, someone would provide a raft to row their way across the Lake Marion Reservoir.

On other days, rain would force students as young as 6 years old to wade across a stream to attend school. If the children were lucky, they walked as far as nine miles to attend one of the segregated schools in Clarendon County’s District 22. Their children were mostly just tired.Įvery day, young Summertonians maneuvered through one obstacle course after another, only to be rewarded with an inferior education. In 1948, when only 16 states in America had outlawed segregated public schools, Black parents in the tiny hamlet of Summerton, South Carolina, where three out of every four residents were Black, finally got tired of being robbed by white people. With sharp, incisive wit, Harriot speaks hilarious truth to oppressive power, providing readers with a singular look at our shared history that is as comprehensive as it is utterly necessary.Sometimes their children walked. In Black AF History, Michael Harriot challenges this narrative, presenting more than thirty little-known stories about the experiences of Black Americans, from the Tulsa Race Massacre to the history of policing. Or calling the cops on Black Americans for walking around their own neighborhoods, or listening to music, or bird-watching, or any other normal everyday activity. It could even be said that the historical devaluation and elimination of the experiences of Black people is as American as apple pie. It should come as no surprise that the dominant narrative of American history is blighted with errors and oversights-after all, history books were written with the perspective of white men at the forefront.

From beloved columnist Michael Harriot comes a comprehensive and bitingly hilarious appraisal of American history, in which the dominant narrative is directly confronted and corrected to showcase the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans.

Michael harriot black af history