Coming to America

Again, from Lemkin's autobiographical notes, he is writing about his first experiences upon arriving in America. He writes, "The train stopped at Lynchburg, Virginia, and it was here that I saw for the first time, in the rest rooms of the station, the inscriptions "For Whites" and "For Colored." These intrigued me and I innocently asked the Negro porter if there were indeed special toilets for Negroes. He gave me a puzzled look, mixed with hostility, and did not answer. After seventeen years in the United States I understand now that he must have thought I was making fun of him.

As the train moved south I kept thinking about those inscriptions with all the naivete of a newcomer. I remembered that in Warsaw there was one single Negro in the entire city. He was employed as a dancer in a popular night club, where he pounded the floor with both feet as if to destroy it. Everyone enjoyed his dancing and tried to invite him for drinks. A feeling of curiosity and friendliness prevailed towards this lonely black man in Poland. But towards the Jews, I could not help thinking, their was not the same friendliness; there were three million of them, in the trades, in the professions, in other work, and their competition was felt."

Lemkin, Lemkin, Lemkin. You were so clueless.

In "Slavery By Another Name" (Blackmon, pg. 358) we find that nearly 700,000 black men with at leat 2.5 million wives and children lived as sharecroppers and rent farmers. Earlier in the book, Blackmon wrote that thousands of these men were incarcerated due to bogus debts they purportedly owed to the farmers who rented land to them or for abusing farm animals. Upon being found guilty, the sharecropper would have to pay court fees and the debt to the farmer who pressed charges against them. When they could not pay, their options were to accept extremely long sentences on building roads, even longer sentences for a farmer that would accept labor in exchange for paying the fee for them, or serve a one or two year sentence in a coal or steel mine (that ultimately resulted in death for a large number of men).