Talk:Paris, Tennessee

Back to my sandbox for now

This was in such bad shape that I've moved everything back to my sandbox for now. Hope to bring it back out for collaboration sometime before long.Pat Palmer (talk) 14:44, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

This page under construction

I am working as the lead author on this article, which is under construction. I don't yet know what it's final format will be. It is what I would call an experiment. However, one of its goals is to provide a more complete history of the town and county as regards race relations. Per online sources almost everywhere, these are the kinds of lies by omission that have long been carried forwards: 1) there was never school segregation, and there were never any all-black schools, 2) there were never separation of the races (different doors, bathrooms, seating areas, etc), 3) People of color were never required to live in a certain section of town and not allowed to come into the rest of the town except on Mule Day, 4) Men of color were never banned from almost all jobs except picking cotton or tobacco, and 5) There were never lynchings and intimidation and discrimination against blacks. In this important time of social change, it is time to provide a more honest accounting, and that is one of my main goals in this article. I grew up in Paris, TN, and still have friends and relatives there whom I regularly keep in touch with. I am old enough to remember when the public schools were first integrated. There are many nice things to know about this small town, but none of those matter in the face of the Big Lie that slavery never happened, the denial that the population percentage of people of color has gone from 25% down to less than 10%, which is undeniably at least in part a product of their still being confederate street and building names, confederate monuments, and widespread silence on the injustices of the past. The silence about these matters has, in my opinion, festered into a poisonous cancer, a boil which needs lancing.

The history of this town and this county (as well as many similar towns and counties in the region) is missing huge chunks. A great deal of important information about what happened in the past has been deliberately forgotten, not recorded, actively discouraged from being talked about, or plain old ignored. This may be in part because it is simply embarrassing. I want to try to find out what there is that can still be determined. Because without knowing what was, we're basically living a kind of lie, that pretends that things in the past were okay, things in the present are okay, and things in the future will be okay without our needing to make any course corrections.

It's not just this town and this county where that happened. It happened in lots of towns and counties all over the country, and nowhere was history buried and forgotten and glossed over more fully, with more active enthusiasm, than in the Southern United States. Trevor Noah, in his auto-biography "Born a Crime", notes that these days even Germany openly and deliberately teaches to children what happened during the Holocaust in World War II, to prevent it ever happening again. But in the U.S., not so much. He wrote:

In American, the history of racism is taught like this: "There was slavery and then there was Jim Crow and then there was Martin Luther King Jr. and now it's done."

Pat Palmer (talk) 17:43, 9 February 2021 (UTC)