"The Scandal of Segregation"

Surprisingly the movie Moonlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture last night. The movie is loosely based on the growing up experiences of director Barry Jenkins and playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney. Although they did not know each other at the time, both men began their lives in the Liberty Square area of Liberty City in Miami, Florida. Even though the movie was primarily about the difficulty of growing up as a human being in these times it reflected other hues about growing up in largely segregated housing in America.

Although the housing complex and Liberty City area was not intended to be a segregated area, it followed a time when restrictive covenants and Jim Crow laws barred black Americans in the Miami area from living outside of Overtown. Overtown, then called Colored Town, grew to be one of the most densely populated areas in South Florida. Gaining notoriety in the 1930s, The Southern Housing Corporation was created and then “lobbied the new administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his first 100 days for the creation of a new ‘negro colony’ on what was-then the outskirts of the city to alleviate blight and to largely displace blacks from Overtown to spur further private real estate development in Downtown Miami.” (Wikipedia article on "Liberty City") Although more substantial historical facts may need to be gathered to confirm this, it calls to mind the scandal of segregation in the United States.

Segregation largely ruled in the south until the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960’s. How was it able to be understood as in any way ethical by any church anywhere? I certainly have a hard time understanding that! The whole concept of keeping people separate from one another—separate housing, separate schools, and even separate water coolers is so wrong by Biblical standards. As a young person growing up in the 1960’s I was first confronted with it when I read biographies of the early black players in the Major Leagues. I was shocked to discover that until April 1947 professional baseball players were kept in separate leagues until Jackie Robinson’s integration in April 1947. (Of course, that story was depicted in 2013 in the movie 42). But baseball’s integration did not mean that black stars of the 1950s during the early part of their career, such as Henry Aaron and Willie Mays, could stay in the same hotels or drink from the same water fountains as white players, especially in the South. The wrongness of this racial segregation stayed with me long before I ever visited any areas with lingering segregation in my adulthood of the late 1970’s and on.

Today segregation is a huge issue in many of the major cities in America. It is a scandal because in large part people who are not black have valued from it. Any time one group benefits from keeping another group separate in housing or pay (gender-based) or in any other way it is morally wrong. Even during the last eight years when a black president was in office we made very little strides toward breaking down residual segregation. It remains a negative blotch on the history of the United States.

The movie industry has a way of lifting up issues that need addressing. Even though Moonlight was about the maturation (coming of age) of a human being, for the average Caucasian viewer such as me it was a window into the lingering problem of segregation in our country. Most of us need more than a movie to realize that no National Guard units or any other artificial means can make our segregated cities better. Nothing else but systemic change can do that. Perhaps a movie like Moonlight can at least lead us one step forward toward that goal.