Donald Trump's plan to deport the Dreamers brings to mind a disturbing rumor I first heard in 1968. It was said that George Wallace was promising to send Black Americans back to Africa if he were elected as president.. I wondered then as I do now how you can send people to live in a nation where they have never set foot?
Racism continues in the United States
The Dreamers are not the first set of individuals living in this nation who were wished, by some, to be shipped to a country where they had never lived. In 1968, an older cousin told me that a white classmate was crying because she did not want my relative to be sent back to Africa with other black people if George Wallace won the election.
It was being said in my community by blacks and whites that this was a campaign promise, so as a child I believed it.
The following year a white girl in my class told me that her grandma had said that if Wallace had become president, all African Americans would have been sent back to the Ivory Coast. I found this interesting and wondered how anyone could be sent to a country where they had never lived? This is why I have been feeling such a passion for the Dreamers. It seemed to me as if history is repeating itself and racism is continuing to thrive in the United States.
I shared my 1968 story with my husband, relating it to the Dreamers only to be told it was not true. He said George Wallace was a segregationalist but did not run his campaign on the premise that he would send black Americans to live in Africa.
I decided to get some facts to prove I was right and checked the Internet high and low. I could find nothing to back up what I was told close to 50 years ago, not even as an urban legend. I have to concede that my spouse is correct, but this brings up another issue
Some Americans do wish for a lily white land that is purged of people of color
Although George Wallace never said he was sending black Americans to Africa, someone did so on his behalf.
The fact that two different girls told my cousin and me similar stories, indicates that there were individuals(at least in our community) who wanted a Wallace presidency to remove African Americans from this nation.
Slavery had been over for over a hundred of years, and most every black American living in 1968 was born on U.S.
soil. It's possible, that because he was an unapologetic segregationalist there were those in the country who desired the 1968 Democratic candidate to win the election and purge the land of everyone who was not lily white.
The idea that there are Americans today, 50 years removed from the Civil Rights era, who want to deport the Dreamers to Mexico, lets us know that the more things have changed, the more they have remained the same. As a person of color from my viewpoint, it seems as if Donald Trump has channeled the racism demons that plagued both George Wallace and Bull Conner. The mindset of number 45 is stuck in the era where he came of age. And no matter how he spins it, I will always believe he wants a lily white America which never was and never shall be.
