POTTSTOWN — The snowstorm forced the cancelation of the 18th Annual All-Faith Celebration of the Life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday, but it did not prevent the message of fighting racism and covert segregation from being proclaimed.
Matthew Washington, the Stowe-born author of “The Jim Crow North: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Pottstown, Pennsylvania” was not about to let a little snow, or in this case, a lot of snow, stop him from talking about efforts to fight racism in Pottstown’s past.
Washington delivered his speech in The Hill School’s Center for the Arts, as planned, and event organizers quickly set up a Livestream of his speech so it could be shared with those staying safe and warm in their homes.
“Washington is an assistant professor of history at Prairie View A&M University,” according to his book’s website. “He is a contributing author to the anthologies ‘For the Sake of Peace: Africana Perspectives on Racism, Justice, and Peace in America and Contemporary Debates in Social Justice: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Exploring the Lives of Black and Brown Americans’.”
His remarks Sunday focused on two families whose names are well-familiar to longtime residents, Newstell Marable and the Corum brothers.
Born in Birmingham, Ala., Marable, who died in 2015, migrated to Pottstown after his stint in the Army and married the former Millicent Corum. Her brothers, James, William and Thomas were already labor activists and active in the local fight for equality, all attending Bethel African Methodist-Episcopal Church, which still stands at the intersection of Beech and Franklin streets.
All three brothers played “a pivotal role” in the struggle for civil rights, which resulted in the first Black police officer in Pottstown and soon enough their brother-in-law Newstell became a leader in that effort as well, Washington said, using spaces welcoming to Blacks such as Second Baptist Church, which also still stands at the corner of North Adams Street and Washington Hill Road.
Groups like the Colored Community Hospital Auxiliary, Pottstown Civil League, YMCA, Pottstown Human Relations Council and the Pottstown chapter of the NAACP were all integral to efforts from the 1940s into the late 1960s to expose and oppose what Washington said was “de facto segregation.” They worked to “actualize a freer and more inclusive America.”
In the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown Vs. Board of Education, which overturned legal segregation as it was being practiced in the American South, local civil rights leaders, along with The Pottstown Mercury, began to ask, as the paper did in 1954, “Does Jim Crow Live in Pottstown?”
The Mercury, Washington said, ran a series of seven influential articles under the heading, “Jim Crow, Yankee Style,” which documented the experiences of local African Americans and their struggle for equality in their day-to-day lives.
In Pottstown, segregation was not legal. “What was practiced in Pottstown, was policy and custom that excluded and oppressed African Americans more inconspicuously, more covertly,” Washington said.
For example, Black Pottstownians were frequently prevented from working as anything but laborers or janitors; “they were excluded from such fraternal organizations as the Owls, the Knights of Columbus, the Elks Club and Brookside Country Club,” he said.
“Blacks likewise, faced exclusionary housing practices as well,” he said.
“There was an informal, but airtight pattern of segregation,” Washington said.
Black Pottstownians “came face to face on a daily basis with the ways in which white supremacy and anti-Black racism permeated a variety of spaces in the North,” said Washington.
“Overall, these more covert, yet entrenched practices of de-facto segregation, northern Jim Crow, in places like Pottstown and close by, without question were, in fact, racially oppressive initiatives that engendered an atmosphere throughout the North that informally and ubiquitously, permeated and relegated African-Americans to a second-class status,” Washington concluded.
Source: Berkshire mont