Starting today, the Star-Telegram will present a weeklong series, “The color of hate,” that will provide readers with an unprecedented examination of how the Jim Crow era unfolded in Fort Worth.
Newspapers have no greater responsibility than to help their communities understand their past and how it affects the present and future.
To that end, the series is a detailed, candid look at a part of Fort Worth’s history that has been shrouded for decades. We hope the following questions and answers will give readers a basic understand of what’s behind the series.
Why is the Star-Telegram publishing this series?
We believe that understanding the present requires knowledge of the past. This series concentrates on a part of Fort Worth’s history that has never been examined openly.
The Jim Crow era created a community culture that merits examination years later because it fostered divisiveness that even today impedes our ability to become the strongest and most unified community possible.
If we are to effectively and fairly address current race-related issues, we must be able to understand their origins.
Our series has found and documented an important part of those origins. It is not about placing blame or finding guilt. It’s about learning from the past and reconciling the past with the present.
Why are we doing this series now?
Now is as good a time as any to try to understand the Jim Crow era in Fort Worth and how it affects contemporary life.
The timing is important in other ways. For instance, many local residents who are in their 30s and 40s, and younger, have never heard about what life was like here during the Jim Crow era.
The series will give those residents a candid look at how Jim Crow culture affected life. They stand to gain a piece of key context for understanding why certain race-related initiatives, such as diversity training and affirmative action, are part of our lives today.
Additionally, we are publishing this series while people who lived through the era are still alive and can tell us what they witnessed. As part of Fort Worth’s living history, they may have more to add while they are with us.
Why stir up all this again?
We empathize with people who grew up during the Jim Crow era and who do not want to be reminded of a time known for shameful abuse of others. They are not proud of that era, and they fear that revisiting it will reignite hatred and divisiveness.
However, we are confident that our community has matured more than enough to be able to look candidly at a part of its past that hasn’t been talked about and use what it finds as a guide to map its future.
The Star-Telegram ‘s past is not exempt from scrutiny in this series. The Thursday installment will look at the newspaper’s racist policies during the Jim Crow era.
Some people will not be able to make constructive use of the series. We hope they are treated with the patience and dignity that they may not be able to offer.
We expect the series to generate a great amount of discussion. We hope such talk results in acknowledgment of the waste of human potential that injustice creates and in a commitment to understanding and working with each other to build a better world.
We hope those who are learning about the Jim Crow era for the first time will want to know more about it and how it shapes current life, so their understanding of the world around them is strengthened.
We wouldn’t mind at all if hearts release such a flood of empathy and concern that the vestiges of Jim Crow are washed away forever.
Whose idea was this?
The series grew out of staff writer Tim Madigan’s experiences while writing about the race riots that stunned Tulsa, Okla., in 1921 but had been swept aside in accounts of local history.
Madigan says he grew up in a typical middle-class environment that nurtured a decent but naive grasp of life that hadn’t prepared him for what he uncovered in researching the Tulsa riots, their causes and consequences.
He encountered examples of inhuman abuse and suffering, and even though Madigan is a highly experienced journalist, he was as emotionally vulnerable to the hideous information as some police officers can be at the scene of brutal crime.
“I was horrified. The extent of it horrified me,” he said.
But it also changed him forever, igniting within him a hope that his work would open paths to understanding and empathy that could help reconcile the perpetrators and victims of racial injustice.
Such reconciliation, he said, means that wrongs must be acknowledged, apologies offered and amends made. All of that depends on understanding, which requires details, and he gathered the details from records and the personal recollections of the people who had lived through the horror.
Madigan’s sense of fairness compelled him to look beyond Tulsa and search Fort Worth’s history for any signs of similar culture. He found the unwritten Jim Crow chapter.
Beginning in March, Madigan began a massive research project that included interviewing scores of people who had lived through the era in Fort Worth.
Now, after nearly eight months of work, his series is presented proudly by the Star-Telegram in the hope that we all will benefit from Madigan’s vision of greater understanding and the harmony that can flow from it.
