Reply #35: It was like that for white people. [View All]

[Cleita]

My teen years were in the fifties. It wasn't so hot for women who didn't fit the mold like your mother. A friend of mine, who was being raised by a single mother along with her siblings, were dirt poor. Dad had abandoned them and mom had to try to make do with women's wages and working as many jobs as she could handle.

It wasn't so hot for colored people, both African American and other ethnicities. They usually weren't allowed to join the unions or get the better paying jobs. They stood back and watched as immigrants from Europe did get those union jobs.

It's true that the poor were able to get some sort of housing. There was no homelessness to speak of that wasn't voluntary back then, but the children of the ethnic poor often went hungry because there was very little social welfare back then. The war on poverty didn't start until the sixties.

White people seldom saw the grinding poverty because they lived in their own neighborhoods, and their children attended schools there on the other side of town. People of color could not buy houses in those neighborhoods even if they were rich. I was in high school before I ever met another black child in school. She was the only one there. The nuns explained she was an experiment to see how it would work out and if they would allow more black children in the school in the future.

I'm sure you didn't mean it, but I get offended when I see posts like this. It's the same ploy that talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh uses to suck people in to his white supremacist shit. He starts out about how things should be, the picket fence, unlocked doors, just like back then. What he leaves unsaid is that this is when everything was ruled by whites and colored people knew their place.

The fifties were not utopia for anyone else but the white majority. If you get a chance pick up a copy of the old fifties Sci-Fi movie, "When Worlds Collide". The story revolves around a race to build a space ship that can only hold one hundred people to save the human race before another planet hits earth and annihilates it.

The humans selected are young couples, 50 males and 50 females. At the end they decide to take a dog with them. So all those couples are all white. It's like no one else on earth is worth saving but white people. But they do save one dog. This tells without words what the fifties was like and whom it was good for.