I would really love to see a copy of this, and I bet that there are probably quite a few around in used bookstores and people's attics. It just wasn't that long ago.

It looks like so many books that were in our house when I was growing up. Aside from the many things in the article that are great, just looking at that page brought back so many memories, or at least that feeling of being immersed in memories.

AMDG

I'm trying to figure out why that even mattered. These days I'm blaming everything on having to think in Spanish.

AMDG

Moving out on Monday, drivin to the Mid West Tuesday

Yep, congratulations. Hope the move goes reasonably smoothly. Seems presumptious to ask for more where moving is concerned.

Some aspects of this article are engaging, but the man does irritate. Consider his assessment:

Victor H. Greene made a book designed to help Black people know where they could stay. Because he knew Black people could not stay.

This makes no sense whatsoever.

That and the small stupidities. Trayvon Martin's wasn't a 'death by racism'. It was a death by misadventure - that which arrives when you elect to practice your MMA moves on the neighborhood watch captain and discover (too late for you) that he had a gun. The author's averse to the Plains states because he's addled by the idea that some Stormfront type will kill him (NB, about 16 people have been murdered by klavern members since 1953, and all but a couple in one of 3 Southern states; not exactly a quotidien occurrence in Kansas). He thinks the purpose of drug laws is to incarcerate blacks because racism (NB, about 80% of those in prison are there for violent crimes or property crimes; half the remainder are not black).

Interestingly, a White Pages search for this man turns up only a couple of matches, the salient one a fellow in Alameda, California (a quite ordinary burgh with a modest black population) who was born around 1975. The woman he identifies as his mother would have been 48 years old in 1975. He identifies the two of them as having been 'homeless' during his early childhood. Red flag.

Cross-posted with Art. "You're welcome" was to Rob's "thank you."

Yes, some of those specifics like the mention of Trayvon Martin don't really signify what he thinks they do. But the overall gist is reasonable enough, if limited.

Thanks, Janet. Corrected. Also noticed that the second link was not a link--fixed that too.

"I think the perception is greater than the fact, but there's not doubt people really feel that way."

Yes, and on both sides.

When I search for Carvell Wallace I get pages of hits which mostly refer to this writer. Where do you get 80 for his mother's age? I didn't remember him mentioning her exact age, but searching that piece for both "80" and "eighty" I don't see any reference to either as his mother's age. I think you're barking up the wrong tree in insinuating some kind of fraud.

He has a website: http://www.carvellwallace.com/

Sorry, this is the link for the series.

Oh, I see Maclin already said that.

AMDG

Which isn't to say he wasn't called Greene but traded as Green (for example), but using "Greene" as a search term just slowed things down.

I don't see where you see that his mother was 80.

You're right. They're on Highway 80.

I've heard that when Jewish people from New York drove down to Florida in the pre-Interstate days they weren't always welcome at some motels in the Carolinas and Georgia.

Mostly the correspondent from Dickinson, North Dakota, writing: several places of business, while they are glad to provide for Negro customers, do not care to advertise for Negro trade. The attitude of a majority of those I contacted was that, while they themselves had no color prejudice, some of their regular customers did have. ... There are so few Negroes living in North Dakota that a colored person is still a curiosity. Some of the prejudice here is merely unfamiliarity with any of the race. It is a general thing, and not specific. When talking about Negroes abstractly, they feel differently than if a colored person, in person, asks them for services.

I've heard that when Jewish people from New York drove down to Florida in the pre-Interstate days they weren't always welcome at some motels in the Carolinas and Georgia.

I believe 'restricted' commerical accommodations were characteristic of venues where there were large populations passing through of both of affluent Jews and affluent old stock Americans. It's hard to say though, because it's something you know only from folklore or mass entertainment. The 'restricted' hotel in Gentlemen's Agreement was a fancy place. Private clubs tended to have one sort of clientele or the other (not an issue for any but those affluent enough to pay the initiation fees and the dues); that's still true to a great degree.

The Southern anti-semitism in my family (2d degree relations) was manifest in what used to be called the '5 O'Clock Shadow'. Jews were people you had to do business with, not people you had into your home. The thing is, the relation in question was a lawyer who'd spent his adult life in New York (a very jarring experience) and Washington (a more congenial one). Had he been in some other line of work or practiced with his father back in Tennessee, he might have had a different take on things.

Also, I think people forget that Jews used to have more distinct tastes and sensibilities and Jews and bluebloods similarly situated could and did have quite different manners. It was said of Lionel Trilling and J. Robert Oppenheimer that they spent their life playing against type. I could tell you small stories from Rochester in the 1970s which would demonstrate some of the properties of that difference in manners.

I think southern anti-semitism was overestimated.

My mother would second your opinion. She said there were too few Jews to matter to people in the South of that era.

I'm pretty sure I've heard the same observation made by the French, or some continentals anyway, about the English.

What's maddening about the anti-Southern prejudice I mentioned--it's a whole little anecdote--is that they absolutely did not see that it was a prejudice, and absolutely could not consider the possibility that they could be wrong.

Yes, but I'm from New York, so you did notice that conversations had a different rhythm. I'm speaking of the cohorts born from approx 1925 to 1942. With the older generation, it was more pronounced. My mother was a classical music aficionado and had season tickets to the Philharmonic. She told us, ca. 1975, that Jewish women were easy to spot in the Eastman theatre because their sense of style was quite distinct (and, it had been explained to her by an older Jewish friend, incorporated certain practical considerations).

No Woody Allen types in Ra cha cha.

You can see here that in 1948

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfW9-0EzYxA

Dinah Shore had a residual Southern quality in her singing voice that she later lost (while retaining it in her speaking voice).

Interesting contrast to Rosemary Clooney

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIOLUXgiTTc

Who from age 20 until her death never had a trace of a Southern accent in her singing voice. You can see by age 27, she had none in her speaking voice either

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEXL3d1RKBk

But like Maclin said, I don't remember anybody ever making any kind of a big deal about Jews when I was growing up, and we lived fairly close to a synagogue. Of course, we weren't in a rural area.

AMDG

I grew up in an area of Miami that was half Jewish and half Gentile, so it's fun to read all this. Blacks and Latinos were the definite minorities with of course the former looked down on moreso than the latter. The Haitians were of course the bottom tier as the newest immigrants speaking a language no one else understood.

Everywhere else I have lived economics seems to be the sole indicator of neighborhood. Language, of course, is the primary directing force here. But the Jews, Blacks, and Gentiles most likely all spoke only English. Only elderly European Jews were likely to speak Yiddish, or other.

This reminded me that I hadn't looked at the videos Art posted. Interesting clips but . Clooney's voice sounds a bit forced, like maybe she was still working at getting rid of the southern.

Clooney's voice sounds a bit forced, like maybe she was still working at getting rid of the southern.

I was surprised to find this recording on Youtube. She wasn't well known prior to 1951. Her signature song - which she was so reluctant to record that her manager at Columbia Records had to tell her she could record the song or she didn't work there anymore - was sung with a put-on accent which sounds Italian.

She was a Kentucky partisan to the end and was buried in her hometown. I didn't realize she grew up in towns smack on the Ohio River 40-60 miles outside of Cincinnati (and lived in Cincy as well). This map of American dialects

http://aschmann.net/AmEng/

Says that's where the Southern accent gives way to the generic midwestern accent. I'm wondering if she and her sister never sounded all that Southern to begin with.

My daughter is married to a man from Louisville and she lives there. My impression is that there is no Southern accent there at all. It's all midwestern.

I would think that it's just natural to want to live around people who are like you. It's not a repudiation of other cultures, but an extension of the relaxation in your own home where you know, usually, how people are going to behave, and what they expect from you.

AMDG

Louisville not my town. I seem to recall seeing a brief documentary on the Bingham family who owned the Courier-Journal. The parents had noticeable Southern accents; their children were a split. The children were born ca. 1940.

I've visited East Tennessee recently (not to visit family. My cousins there are indubitably numerous but quite distant). The accent is much more common there than up the road in the Shenandoah Valley.

Now that you mention it, I do have one shirt-tail of a shirt-tail born in 1979 who has a drawl.

I'm told by one of my shirt-tails that her maternal side relations have proper accents. Her thesis is that the loss of the accent is a bourgeois thing and that working people keep it. It did occur to me that when and where I grew up, to sound local was somewhat downmarket. My siblings and I were a 50-50 split: two have generic accents and two sounded local.