@andrewt as a small business owner there would be little incentive to do this because you have to keep eating fees. We gotta do something to kill the credit card / debit processing fees scam.
@sun@leyonhjelm take your strong distrust for the government and apply it to all the leaders of your local community. Everyone you grew up with that you were expected to trust. There's no guarantee these people are honest; it's more likely they're not being straight with you about things like this.
If you really believe their story that he was "constantly committing crime and hurting people", you'd think he could have been arrested... but to me it sounds like a lie they told themselves to justify it.
@sun I'm pretty sure my little hometown was a Sundown town. In the 90s we had a few blacks move in and one latino family, they were run out of town. Didn't last more than a few weeks due to harassment and threats. Other than that there was never a non-white person in my community unless they were living and working at one of the farms.
TL;DR after Reconstruction we had blacks living, working, and owning property in almost every zip code in the country. Loewell goes into detail on this in the book.
And then almost simultaneously country-wide the blacks were violently evicted, their properties stolen, etc. They were blamed for economic distress because obviously their existence in the community was taking away from the white residents :rolleyes: so that was used as justification to kick them out, then they used the local police to keep them out.
Some communities went as far as to organize to be incorporated so they could apply for federal funding for a Sheriff which they used to enforce keeping blacks out after sundown.
And many town/city ordinances that followed were carefully done to not be officially on the books. It was pretty dirty. So much of it only existed in living memory that has now been lost because the people are dead, but he was able to get elderly people who worked for these municipalities to go on the record about what the local laws and ordinances were and how they enforced them
@sun@leyonhjelm the Janesville, WI one on this site says they had ONE black local helping to run an anti-black operation which is... weird. but okay. lol
> In a set of interviews provided at the University of Wisconsin historical interviews, William ‘Blue’ Jenkins talks about his investigation of union discrimination in Chevrolet plant at Janesville, “found Janesville had a “ring” made up of newspaper, church, business people and the city’s one Black resident; they worked to keep Blacks out of the city.”
@sun Interesting, there's a map now. I wonder if this is ongoing research. I have his book he published around 2000, and he's not full of shit on this.