Racist Nostalgia Everywhere, ‘Colored Day,’ ‘Blacks Around Back,’ Slaveholder Mayors’—San Antonio Still Glorifies Its Defective Past in Present Time
What the ignorant do, racists included, is to show pictures of old movies online and talk about how great they were back in the day. They will also post pictures of old TV shows, and old areas of downtown San Antonio. What they will never do is talk about the white supremacy associated with those old pictures. Showing pictures of old Amos and Andy shows in a gleeful light is but an attempt to ignore what that show actually stood for—racist stereotyping of Black people. They will talk about how funny the show was, and this might be true, but it was designed to make White people think that Blacks were good for nothing but making them laugh. Whites laughing at this show filled their need to feel superior in a country that was seething with racist bigotry.
Others will post pictures of Parks (like Playland Park in San Antonio’s Express News article in 2023) that talks about how much fun people they had there without ever mentioning that the owners were racist bigots that would not let Black come to the park except on one day out of the week which they called “Colored Day” held on Juneteenth. Others show pictures of the Majestic Theater and other theaters in San Antonio and never mention that Blacks had to go around the back to get into the theater. It gets worse, as the ignorant want to paint a picture of a “paradise” that never existed. These remembrances of days gone by are so misleading and devoid of all of the real history. There was nothing great about these old TV shows that never had any Black actors, or if it did, only one once in a while. Native people were never portrayed with real people from that culture, but with White men actors dressed up like Native Americans.
The lure of entertainment coupled with white supremacy was a driving force to make Whites feel they were in control. Jim Crow segregation was the American nightmare, and many Whites were driven by the intoxicating trance of white supremacy. There were problems with their pipe-dream that included a growing reality that most Blacks never celebrated their racism, which many of the ignorant want to dismiss. One must remember that white supremacists of the 1950s always were worried about Black progress, and found ways to dance around criticism of their hatred—they made all white TV shows, and all-white movies, in all white theaters. They were worried that once Black people began to fight for freedom their fiction would crumble and die away. They would not be able to pass on their false history acquired from the exploitation of human beings to their children and future generations through well-thought-out media propaganda. These clowns are still doing that with remembering the past as if it were just a “White” past—their white supremacist “sweet past” was presented as some sort of great remembering.
The racist images that flooded the minds of Whites increased brutality and led to the policies written into law or practiced by Whites as tradition. Those Racist TV shows and movies, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and others, no matter how good they may have seemed, were products of racist producers in a racist Hollywood. Pictures of former Mayors of San Antonio hang at city hall with no reference to their slave owning cruelty. Samuel Maverick, Charles King, and Francois Geraud were all slave owners and white supremacists, but yet their pictures hang there with no reference to their blind barbarity. All of the attempts to create a false history continues even now.
