Stand your Ground

Captain John Parker of the Lexington, Massachusetts militia, staring at a formidable line of red coated British regulars arrayed before him and his motley band of minutemen early one chilly April morning in 1775, implored his scared and over matched farmer friends to "stand your ground.  Don't fire unless fired upon.  But, if they mean to have a war, let it begin here."  

Parker's words have rudely come back into the American lexicon.  They are, in effect, the title of a Florida law written with good intent and empowering any citizen to protect him or herself in the event he or she is threatened by violence.  The law has been called into question after a man patrolling a Sanford, Florida neighborhood and on watch for trouble, ignored 911 dispatcher orders and followed a young  African-American dressed in a "hoodie."   Apparently, there was a confrontation and the teenager was shot and killed by the neighborhood volunteer.  The facts of the incident remain in dispute but the killing has again highlighted the problem of race relations in America.  So, it is and, seemingly, so it will always be.   In Florida and up the coast to our little city, we struggle with the issue long after 620,000 of our ancestors laid down lives in a dispute over the rights of one man directly opposed to those of another in the American Civil War.  

Prior to World War II, the northeastern metropolitan centers were populated with an energetic and industrious class of mostly European descent, well established after generations living in their ancestors’ adopted land.  Mixing in with them were fresh immigrants and their descendants leaving Europe for a better life in America.   Jewish, German, Polish and Italian ethnically pure enclaves were common no matter which city one spoke about and Rochester was no different.  People gravitated to live where common culture and tastes could be found.  

As industrial production skyrocketed to support the material needs of a nation at war, the northern labor force was supplemented by African-American migrants from the South seeking good paying jobs in northern factories.   When the war ended, flush with war time salaries and a new outlook, blacks remained to build lives in their new surroundings.    As had been the case in the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era in the South, the natives of northern cities, they themselves all too familiar with not so subtle bias against immigrants, were incapable and unwilling to integrate African-Americans into their neighborhoods and lives.  African-Americans were subject to segregation and overtly racist treatment by unwelcoming communities.  The 1950s saw western societies trending towards conservative public policies and ramping up consumer based economies.   The American middle-class, newly empowered with political and economic muscle, sought alternatives to the heterogeneity and constriction of city life.  The gulf between peoples constituting the essence of cities, those who had once melded peaceably if not harmonically, widened. 

A Rochester newspaperman captured some of this social angst in a scathing review of his restless city.  He stomach punched his sycophantic neighbors by labeling them indolent, butt-kissing yes men.  In his now out of print Smugtown, G. Curtis Gerling called out the feckless socialites and business people in town for their destructive emphasis on the selfish and the mundane at the expense of the infinitely more important social contract.  The complacent attitude not only leaked into and began to corrode Rochester’s industrial base, it led to the inevitable alteration of its collective structure.  The monied class, the civic leaders and the culpable citizens never thought to imagine how bad it could get.  Being labeled smug was the least of their worries.  Their selfish myopia was soon brought into focus on the mean streets on a steamy July night in 1964.  Everything that came before that summer in Rochester was no more.  It was the time, if any such time can be identified, where the Young Lion of the West no longer roared.  Rochester stepped into the abyss as simmering discord and hidden, seething hatred broke out into open violence.  

150 years after the Civil War ended, on the decaying streets of Rochester and in too many places elsewhere in America, bigotry and interracial discord remain with us.  There have been major strides towards equality to be sure, but distrust and antipathy thrive.   Although prohibited by law, segregation is condoned by the ungovernable forces of social and economic preference.  It flourishes in the poisoned fallout from misguided public policies intended prevent exactly what has occurred.

Just a stone’s throw from the northern terminus of Route 15, the mean streets of Rochester are living examples of the uncaring and unattractive tendency of Americans to congregate around their own kind, to choke off meaningful dialogue, to find compromise to lessen the tensions that historically flare into deadly violence and to eschew the right economic policies that can substantially mitigate that risk. Concentrated poverty, inefficiently run and crumbling schools, lack of opportunity, a dramatically higher unemployment rate than that of white suburban towns surrounding the city and an overall sense of despair hang over the former home of Frederick Douglass, George Eastman and Susan B. Anthony. 

Despite what those three did to bind the racial wounds of the nation, lend a hand to lift the underprivileged and advocate for those with a limited voice, places like Rochester continue to suffer.  It, and other cities, home to predominately African-American populations continue to lag behind the rest of America.  Inner city dwellers are at the bottom of the social and economic totem pole.  They show higher percentages of school drop outs, higher mortality rates from disease, higher poverty rates and are surrounded by skewed rates of violent crime.   Those with the economic means and a choice flee this dead end hell.  The Rochester metropolitan area becomes more segregated with each passing year.  It is almost as if America had never even fought a civil war.  

For more on the social and cultural segregation that defines Monroe County and our nation, check out Route 15 to Gettysburg at Amazon.com.