Wednesday, May 25, 2016

School Days



No, I don't know for sure that this is school photo, but the building has that institutional feel, and there is a bell on the wall that sure looks like the one that made my life miserable at my high school.

What's interesting to me is that this photo includes two black women.  It' true that only the southern states had Jim Crow laws, but it's also true that when this picture was taken, different races didn't hang out a lot, and while things have improved over the years....well, I live in Los Angeles, one of the most diverse cities on the planet, and when I wander around the area, what I see is a world that's still pretty separate.

And for the record, California never had Jim Crow, but it did have restrictive real estate covenants.  In a nut shell, real estate developers had their customers sign agreements that forbade them from selling their new homes to non approved groups.  Blacks, of course, Hispanics, Asians, and Jews were the most frequently targeted groups for exclusion.   Ronald Reagan, when he first ran for governor, had three main issues, lower taxes, ending free higher education, and the preservation of restrictive real estate covenants.  Two successes and one failure.

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