Chapter 13
Prejudice:
Marijuana & the Jim Crow Laws
Smoking in America
The first known* smoking of female cannabis tops in the
Western hemisphere was probably in the 1870s in the West Indies
(Jamaica, Bahamas, Barbados, etc.); and arrived with the immigration of
thousands of Indian Hindus (from British-controlled India) imported for
cheap labor. By 1886, Mexicans and black sailors, who traded in those
islands, picked up and spread its use throughout all the West Indies and
Mexico.
* There are other theories about the first known
"smoking" of hemp flower tops, e.g., by American and Brazilian
slaves, Shawnee Indians, etc., some fascinating - but none verifiable.
Cannabis smoking was generally used in the West Indies
to ease the back-breaking work in the came fields, beat the heat, and to
relax in the evenings without the threat of an alcohol hangover in the
morning.
Given its late 19th Century area of usage - the
Caribbean West Indies and Mexico - it is not surprising the first
marijuana use recorded in the U.S. was by Mexicans in Brownsville, Texas
in 1903. And the first marijuana prohibition law in America - pertaining
only to Mexicans - was passed in Brownsville in that same year.
"Ganja" use was next reported in 1909 in the port of New
Orleans, in the black dominated "Storeyville" section
frequented by sailors.
New Orleans' Storeyville was filled with cabarets,
brothels, music, and all the other usual accoutrements of "red
light" districts the world over. Sailors from the islands took
their shore leave and ther marijuana there.
Blackface
The Public Safety Commissioner of New Orleans wrote
that, "marijuana was the most frightening and vicious drug ever to
hit New Orleans," and in 1910 warned that regular users might
number as high as 200 in Storeyville alone.
To the DA and Public Safety Commissioners and New
Orleans newspapers, from 1910 through the 1930s, marijuana's insidious
evil influence apprently manifested itself in making the
"darkies" think they were as good as "white men."
In fact, marijuana was being blamed for the first
refusals of black entertainers to wear blackface* and for hysterical
laughter by "negroes" under marijuana's influence when told to
cross a street or go to the back of the trolley, etc.
* That's right, your eyes have not deceived you.
Because of a curious quirk in the "Jim Crow" (segregation)
laws, black Americans were banned from any stage in the Deep South (and
most other places in the North and West also). "Negroes" had
to wear (through the 1920s) blackface - (like Al Jolson wore when he
sang "Swanee") - a dye which white entertainers wore to
resemble or mimic black people. Actually, by "Jim Crow" law,
blacks were not allowed on the stage at all, but because of their talent
were allowed to sneak/enter through back doors, put on blackface, and
pretend to be a white person playing the part of a black person!
And All That Jazz
In New Orleans, whites were also concerned that black
musicians, rumored to smoke marijuana, were spreading (selling) a very
powerful (popular) new "voodoo" music that forced even decent
white women to tap their feet and was ultimately aimed at throwing off
the yoke of the whites. Today we call that new music . . . jazz!
Blacks obviously played upon the white New Orleans
racists' fears of "voodoo" to try to keep whites out of their
lives. Jazz's birthplace is generally recognized to be Storeyville, New
Orleans, home of original innovators: Buddy Bohler, Buck Johnson and
others (1909-1917). Storeyville was also the birthplace of Louis
Armstrong* (1900).
* In 1930 - one year after Louis Armstrong recorded
"Muggles" (read: "marijuana") - he was arrested for
a marijuana cigarette in Los Angeles and put in jail for 10 days until
he agreed to leave California and not return for two years.
American newspapers, politicians, and police had
virtually no idea, for all these years (until the 1920s, and then only
rarely), that the marijuana the "darkies" and
"Chicanos" were smoking in cigarettes or pipes was just a
weaker version of the many familiar concentrated cannabis medicines
they'd been taking since childhood, or that the same drug was smoked
legally at the local "white man's" plush hashish parlors.
White racists wrote articles and passed city and state
"marijuana" laws without this knowledge for almost two
decades, chiefly because of "Negro/Mexican" vicious
"insolence"* under the effect of marijuana.
* Vicious Insolence: Between 1884 and 1900, 3,500
documented deaths of black Americans were caused by lynchings; between
1900 and 1917, over 1,100 were recorded. The real figures were
undoubtedly higher. It is estimated that one-third of these lynchings
were for "insolence," which might be anything from looking (or
being accused of looking) at a white woman twice, to stepping on a white
man's shadow, even to looking a white man directly in the eye for more
than three seconds; for not going directly to the back of the trolley,
and other "offenses."
It was obvious to whites, marijuana caused
"Negro" and Mexican "viciousness" or they wouldn't
dare be "insolent"; etc...
Hundreds of thousands of "Negroes" and
Chicanos were sentenced from 10 days to 10 years mostly on local and
state "chain gangs" for such silly crimes as we have just
listed.
This was the nature of "Jim Crow" laws until
the 1950s and '60s; the laws Martin Luther King, the NAACP, and general
public outcry have finally begun remedying in America.
We can only image the immediate effect the black
entertainers' refusal to wear blackface had on the white establishment,
but seven years later, 1917, Storeyville was completely shut down.
Apartheid had its moment of triumph.
No longer did the upright, uptight white citizen have to
worry about white women going to Storeyville to listen to
"voodoo" jazz or perhaps be raped by its marijuana-crazed
"black adherents" who showed vicious disrespect (insolence)
for whites and their "Jim Crow Laws" by stepping on their
(white men's) shadows and the like when they were high on marijuana.
Black musicians then took their music and marijuana up
the Mississippi to Memphis, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, etc., where
the (white) city fathers, for the same racist reasons, soon passed local
marijuana laws to stop "evil" music and keep white women from
falling prey to blacks through jazz and marijuana.
Mexican-Americans
In 1915, California and Utah passed state laws outlawing
marijuana for the same "Jim Crow" reasons - but directed
through the Hearst papers at Chicanos.
Colorado followed in 1917. It's legislators cited
excesses of Pancho Villa's rebel army, whose drug of choice was supposed
to have been marijuana. (If true, this means that marijuana helped to
overthrow one of the most repressive, evil regimes Mexico ever suffered.
The Colorado Legislature felt the only way to prevent an
actual racial blood back and the overthrow of their (white's) ignorant
and bigoted laws, attitudes and institutions was to stop marijuana.
Mexicans under marijuana's influence were demanding
humane treatment, looking at white women, and asking that their children
be educated whilte the parents harvested sugar beets; and making other
"insolent" demands. With the excuse of marijuana (Killer
Weed), the whites could now use force and rationalize their violent acts
of repression.
This "reefer raciscm" continues into the
present day. In 1937, Harry Anslinger told Congress that there were
between 50,000 to 100,000* marijuana smokers in the U.S., mostly
"Negroes and Mexicans, and entertainers," and their music,
jazz and swing, was an outgrowth of this marijuana use. He insisted this
"satanic" music and the use of marijuana caused white women to
"seek sexual relations iwth Negroes!"
* Anslinger would have flipped to konw that one day
there would be 26 million daily marijuana users and another 30-40
million occasional users in America, and that rock 'n roll and jazz are
now enjoyed by tens of millions who have never smoked marijuana.
South Africa Today
In 1911, South Africa* began the outlawing of marijuana
for the same reasons as New Orleans: to stop insolent blacks! White
South Africa, along with Egypt, led the international fight (League of
Nations) to have cannabis outlawed worldwide.
* South Africa still allowed its black mine workers to
smoke dagga in the mines, though. Why? Because they were more
productive!
In fact, in that same year, South Africa influenced
southern U.S. legislators to outlaw cannabis (which many black South
Africans revered as "dagga, their sacred herb). Many South
Africans' American business headquarters were in New Orleans at the
time.
This is the whole racial and religious (Medeival
Catholic Church) basis out of which our laws against hemp arose. Are you
proud?
Fourteen million years so far have been spent in jails,
prisons, parole and probation by Americans for this absurd racist and
probably economic reasoning. (See Chapter 4, "Last Days of Legal
Cannabis.")
Isn't it interesting that in 1985 the U.S. incarcerated
a larger percentage of people than any country in the world except South
Africa? In 1989, the U.S. surpassed South Africa, and the 1997
incarceration rate is almost four times that of South Africa, is the
highest in the world, and is growing.
President Bush, in his great drug policy speech of
September 5, 1989, promised to double the federal prison population
again, after it had already doubled under Reagan. He succeeded. In 1993,
President Bill Clinton planned to redouble the number of prisoners again
by 1996. He did.
Remember the outcry in 1979 when former U.N. Ambassador
Andrew Young told the world that the U.S. had more political prisoners
than any other nation? (Amnesty International, UCLA.)
Lasting Remnants
Even though blackface disappeared as law in the late
1920s, as late as the 1960s, black entertainers (such as Harry Belafonte
and Sammy Davis, Jr.) still had to go in the back door of theatrical
establishments, bars, etc.; by law!
They couldn't rent a hotel room in Las Vegas or Miami
Beach - even while being the headline act.
Ben Vereen's 1981 Presidential Inauguration performance
for Ronald Reagan presented this country's turn-of-the-century
Blackface/Jim Crow laws in a great story, about black comic genius Bert
Williams (circa 1890 to 1920).
Vereen had been invited to perform for the Reagan
Inauguration and had accepted only on the condition that he could tell
the entire "Blackface" story - but the whole first half of
Vereen's show, depicting Bern Williams and blackface, was censored by
Reagan's people on ABC TV, contrary to the special agreement Vereen had
with them.
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