Yes, There Was Racism In The 90s
- Elexus Jionde
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
On Super Tuesday 1992, Bill Clinton organized a press conference at the Stone Mountain Correctional Facility in Georgia, an area rich with white supremacist events, to remind voters that he was tough on crime and not a president of "special interests," like his forerunners Dukakis and Mondale. He delivered a speech in front of a crowd of mostly Black inmates. Jerry Brown remarked on the photo op: ”Two white men and forty black prisoners, what's he saying? He's saying we got 'em under control, folks, don't worry." This type of photo opportunity was not the kind of topic discussed during Clinton’s infamous saxophone-playing appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show the same year. In the public mind, he was a cool president.
In fact, the 90s as a whole are often viewed as racism-free. Here are five ways that's a misconception.
Intellectualizing Bias
Anti-Black bias raged in the form of the bestselling book The Bell Curve, published by Charles Murray in 1994. The book argued that IQ was largely inherited and unchangeable, and it was used as an excuse to justify not "wasting" money on social programs. The justification was that a low IQ, which Murray attached to Black Americans, correlated with poverty, crime, and out-of-wedlock children.
The Bell Curve called for the elimination of aid for poor mothers, an end to affirmative action (because it supposedly placed low-IQ people of color into situations beyond their ability levels), and a shift from family-based immigration to merit-based immigration. Critics pointed out the book's many flaws. As Nicholas Lemann declared for Slate in 1997, "The Bell Curve, it turns out, is full of mistakes ranging from sloppy reasoning to mis-citations of sources to outright mathematical errors. Unsurprisingly, all the mistakes are in the direction of supporting the authors’ thesis." Even so, the book continued to be cited as groundbreaking among conservatives and racists. Despite the critiques lobbed at Black people and their intelligence, the real problem was American schools, through underfunding, racism, zero-tolerance policies, and re-segregation.
Racism In The Workplace
In the early nineties, the job market was not too hot, and it could be especially challenging when you were Black. A September 1991 Diane Sawyer Primetime Live episode showed the stark differences in treatment between a Black man and a white man’s experiences in St. Louis. The black man, 28-year-old Glen Brewer, was ignored by salesmen, followed by salesmen, harassed, quoted a more expensive price for cars, and denied an opportunity to apply for housing— in stark contrast to the white man’s experiences. While other neutral encounters may have not made it to broadcast, the racism was still damning. This same discrimination persisted on the job market, where skin color and hair played a role in the job market.
In the year before the Diane Sawyer exposé, there were 3,272 reports to the EEOC about racial discrimination in the workplace, and by 1999, there were over 6,249 reports a year citing such offenses from slur-tainted remarks to finding nooses in doorways. In 2000, it was reported that there had been dozens of noose-related incidents throughout the 1990s. Wrote Sana Siwolop for The New York Times, “In most cases, officials say, a noose was placed anonymously on an employee's chair, in a locker, or on a door. But the Miami office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is currently pursuing a lawsuit on behalf of a black employee, who, it says, had a noose wrapped around his neck, which was then pulled, while he was working for a Florida office of the Asplundh Tree Expert Company.”
People were getting more comfortable reporting harassment and racism in the workplace with nearly 50,000 official complaints made by the end of the decade.
Racist Restaurants
A slew of early 1990s lawsuits opened the floodgates and increased conservative calls for tort reform. A Black woman named Helen Jones filed a lawsuit against Shoney's in 1991 because she had been passed over for promotions and harassed with racist comments. At the time, there were 759 Shoney’s restaurants in 35 states, and many had been similarly racist toward their Black employees. According to Lynne Duke for The Washington Post, “[CEO Raymond Danner] was so adamant about holding down the number of Black employees that managers hid Blacks from view, including an instance where a Black employee was told to hide in a restroom when Danner paid them visits. Employment applications were color-coded to separate Blacks from whites, and Blacks, if hired, were tracked into kitchen jobs so they would not be seen in the dining areas.”
Shoney’s was ordered to pay $105 million to 40,000 current and former workers, as well as some job applicants. The company was also ordered to be monitored for further discrimination for the next ten years. In the same year as the Shoney’s lawsuit, six Black college students sued the International House of Pancakes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, because employees refused to seat them and locked them out of the building, highlighting an ongoing issue of unequal treatment in businesses. The suit was settled in 1992 for $185,000.
In 1994, the breakfast diner chain Denny’s had 1,400 locations in the 1990s and profits of $1.53 billion per year when it was accused of making Black customers pre-pay. In court, it was revealed that one former Denny’s manager had instructed employees to close the location when too many Black customers approached. A 15-year-old Black girl named Rachel Thompson of Vallejo, California, was refused a customary free birthday meal in 1992 and was added to a lawsuit featuring six United States Secret Service officers who were forced to sit and wait for an hour in Annapolis, Maryland, while their white coworkers were served. Rather than admitting wrongdoing, Flagstar paid $54 million to 295,000 aggrieved customers and their lawyers through a federal government-brokered mediation.
Denny’s was owned by Flagstar, a Spartanburg, South Carolina company whose CEO was Jerome "Jerry" Richardson, who was preparing to erect the Carolina Panthers stadium on the site of a Charlotte, North Carolina lynching. Richardson embarked on fixing Denny’s image by publicizing that it would include more Black people as customers and employees in its advertisements. As late as May 1994, none of the 1,400 Denny’s locations were operated by Black franchisees. Due to the public relations nightmare created by the lawsuits, there were 27 Black franchisees by 1996. Then there was Cracker Barrel. After various complaints by former employees, the NAACP agreed to sue in 1999. A lawsuit by customers followed in 2001, and by 2004, the U.S. Justice Department affirmed that the restaurant had segregated customers by race. Cracker Barrel eventually settled for $8.7 million and hired a number of minorities to compensate.
Corporations were learning that workplace environments that allowed racism would be expensive to maintain.
The Mystery of The 1990s Church Arsons
Between 1995 and 1996, there were 145 arsons, leading to the establishment of the National Church Arson Task Force and the passage of the 1996 Church Arson Prevention Act. According to the task force, 33% of all arsons and bombing attacks at houses of worship from January 1995 to August 2000 targeted Black churches.
In January 1996, eighteen Molotov cocktails were thrown at Inner City Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. Someone painted "Die Nigger Die" and "White is Right" on the church’s back door. The church was home to Green Bay Packers player Reggie White, which brought national attention to the recurring fire attacks. Bill Clinton, who was up for re-election, attended the church’s reopening. Afterward, the investigation stalled. Reggie White said a year after the attack, "This is just what I feared would happen. In an election year, the awareness was heightened. But now it's gone. You're not hearing about it any more."
The arsonists of Inner City Baptist Church were never found, despite massive evidence and years of investigations. Three days after the Knoxville attack, two Black churches in rural Alabama were burned to the ground on the same night. The next month, three churches within a six-mile radius in Louisiana were set on fire, coinciding with the anniversary of the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth sit-in. Four months later, a church was set on fire in Charlotte, North Carolina. The next year, when two men burned down Macedonia Baptist Church in Ferris, Texas, they told prosecutors that it was "because it was a nigger church."
While some believed the attacks to be part of a coordinated conspiracy, The Washington Post reported later that year, "The people burning down Black churches in the South are generally white, male and young, usually economically marginalized or poorly educated, frequently drunk or high on drugs, rarely affiliated with hate groups, but often deeply driven by racism." A group of unaffiliated racists is not better than connected ones. These hateful fires were not aberrations but an indictment of a right-wing system of punditry and propaganda, fused with neoliberal negligence, creating hateful bigots with access to weapons, chemicals, and an unprotected victim pool.
The Lynching of James Byrd Jr.
On June 7, 1998, James Byrd Jr., the 49-year-old cousin of Rodney King’s first wife, accepted a ride from three white men in Jasper, Texas. In this nineties version of a lynching, Byrd was beaten, urinated and defecated on, and dragged by a truck until he was dead. The three white men, Shawn Berry, Lawrence Brewer, and John King, dropped Byrd’s body off in front of a Black cemetery and went to a cookout. All three men, two of whom had white supremacist backgrounds, were charged with murder and hate crimes.
The white men were found guilty in a trial that brought the Ku Klux Klan to the courthouse. Brewer and King received the death penalty. Although Governor George W. Bush opposed the hate crime additions, they remained part of the charges. It was the first time in Texas history that white people were held responsible for the lynching of a Black man.
So... was there racism in the 90s? Yes, yes there was!