“When someone tells you, ‘Move to the back of the bus’…he is saying…I have power over you.”—McCamy Taylor, The Back of the Bus
For reasons I’m not even sure that I understand, I have been involved in a project in the Deep South for the last few years. It is in the northwest part of Florida, and if you know anything about Florida, the further north you go, the further South you get. I am 12 miles from the Alabama border, and it is common to see a Confederate flag where I live and many of the people are quite fluent in the n-word.
Since I have been in the Deep South, I have been using my free time to visit sites along the Civil Rights Trail. I have had the opportunity to visit the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where members of the local Klan planted 15 sticks of dynamite and blew up four little girls attending Sunday school. I was a teenager when this happened.
I have also walked from that church to the Birmingham City Hall, tracing the steps of a Children’s Crusade for Civil Rights, where the police fired water cannons and had police dogs attack hundreds of child marchers, locking many of them in jail and borrowing animal cages from the fairgrounds to keep the rest caged in a park. When the parents and others tried to pick them up, it was suggested by the authorities that they should not bail these children out.
I also have walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where a group of peaceful marchers were heading to the capital in Montgomery to plead for the right to vote, but were interrupted by police on horseback with clubs who beat the marchers so severely that it became known as Bloody Sunday. I was in high school when this was happening.
As an aside, Edmund Pettus, for whom this bridge was named was a senior officer in the Confederate army. After the war he became a Grand Dragon of the Alabama KKK, and because of the reputation he gained in organizing the KKK in Alabama, he became a US Senator from that state and remained in office until his death in 1907.
I have also visited the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, and stood on a site where cotton, chicken, pigs, cattle and people were auctioned, and read a letter from a mother who was restrained while they auctioned her seven children, knowing she would never see them again.
I have spent three different days at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, also known as the Lynching Memorial, that documents the lynching of over 4,500 people in the U.S., the vast majority in the Deep South. When I toured Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, I cried; when I toured Dachau concentration camp in Germany, I cried; and when I toured the Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, I cried.
A woman was lynched because she complained to the police that her husband was lynched; a mother and her son where lynched because they could not find her other son who was accused of stealing a chicken; and a great many people were lynched because they tried to vote. These stories are repeated over 4,500 times at this memorial’s six-acre site. Moreover, these lynchings were often large public events, drawing huge crowds and families who brought their children along to view the proceedings, saddled upon their parent’s shoulders. After the lynching, the crowd would often mutilate and burn the victims, and cut off pieces of the bodies as a souvenir of the event. It was also the case that the bodies might be left hanging for days, and if an effort was made to take them down, that person risked the same fate. This was to make sure the black people in the community got the message.
What all of this terror had to do with was the Jim Crow Era, a period defined by both formal and informal efforts to maintain segregation in the South. Of the Jim Crow era, the events surrounding the life of Rosa Parks has best been burned into the American psyche. The following four paragraphs have been lifted from an article I published about Mrs. Parks last year after I visited the Rosa Parks Museum on the campus of Troy University:
“Rosa Parks lived in Montgomery during the 1950s, and like many of the black working-class people in that city she depended on the bus system to get to and from work. During this time there was segregated seating on the busses. Black people were expected to enter the bus at the front, pay their dime, exit the front door and enter the rear door to sit at the back of the bus. This was done so that the white riders did not have to be inconvenienced by the black riders walking past them. Also, black people were not allowed to sit in a row occupied by a white person, or across from them, and the bus drivers were empowered to detain anyone who broke these rules until the police arrived to arrest the violator.
“The bus laws were an example of many such laws in the South that were known as Jim Crow Laws, and they restricted black people to designated drinking fountains, worked to ensure that black people could not vote, sit on a jury, or own property. It restricted them from restaurants, did not allow them to swim in public pools, prevented them from attending white schools, and even established on what sides of the street black people were allowed to walk. Also, should someone violate these rules, they could be arrested and jailed. Beyond this punishment, it has been documented by the Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative that many of the close to 400 black people lynched without trial in the state of Alabama alone in the post-reconstruction era were related to efforts by white terrorists, such as the KKK, to enforce these Jim Crow laws.
“In 1955, the reserved and diminutive Mrs. Parks was riding home from work in the black section of a bus, toward the middle, and there was higher ridership on the bus than normal. A white man entered the bus and the driver told Mrs. Parks to give her seat to the white man. She quietly ignored him and the driver summoned the police and had her arrested. In her book, Mrs. Parks recalls that while waiting for the police to arrive, she was concerned she would be lynched, manhandled or beaten, and suggested she was just tired of the humiliation and degradation associated with having to obey these laws designed by white supremacists. While being processed in the police station during her arrest, Mrs. Parks requested a drink of water, and was told that this was not possible because the available drinking fountain was for whites only.
“The response to Mrs. Parks’ refusing to give up her seat had dramatic implications for the US civil rights movement. It initiated a bus boycott by black people and their supporters in Montgomery that lasted over a year, and she became known as a leader in the US civil rights movement. Unfortunately, her activism made her unemployable in Montgomery, so she was forced to move north, and she became a part of the Great Northward Migration of black people to escape the dangerous and degrading conditions imposed by the white supremacist society that defined so much of the Deep South.”
Rosa Parks is an icon in the Civil Rights Movement and she is an icon because she would not move to the back of the bus. Her story is known across the U.S. and in many places around the world. She is known as the First Lady of the Civil Rights Movement, having received too many honors to count. Most importantly, her refusal to move to the back of the bus has been identified as a landmark expression of defiance of white supremist culture.
“Words matter, and the right words matter most of all. In the end they’re all that remain of us.” —John Birmingham
It was a lucky day in my life when I met Ann Brunkhorst (now Anderson). The year was 1991, and the circumstance was that I had flown to Minneapolis from Las Vegas in the process of being recruited to work for Lyle Berman’s Grand Casino adventure. Grand Casinos had been capitalized for $2.9 million from the Bank of Lyle, and he had a plan to make the company much bigger. The company was not yet public and so young that I’m not even sure that people had formal titles, but Ann was in charge of training. Moreover, when it came to how the company treated people, she was also the primary architect of the culture.
One of the many important elements she introduced into the Grand culture was the notion of the heart of the house, a term that would be used instead of back of the house. Again, this was in 1991.
I recently had the opportunity to visit with Ann and asked her what drove this decision. She said she had flown out to visit a few casinos in Las Vegas in the early 1990s, and back of the house was the term that was being used. This made no sense to her. She suggested people don’t want to be assigned to things in the back, often they don’t want to work in the back, and they do not want to be told to go to the back. She concluded that the use of the term heart solved those issues quite nicely.
“Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care, for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.” —Gautama Buddha
The point of all of this is that there are still casino firms that use the term back of the house. Moreover, I started reading the re-opening procedures that many of the regulatory agencies have been publishing and the back of the house is often used. Based on my research and beyond the re-opening documents, if you are a regulatory agency, you probably use this term somewhere in the many documents that define your reality.
If your organization is using the term back of the house, I am not suggesting that you are using it maliciously. This is a legacy term and its use has been institutionalized over a great many years. I would suggest, however, that if you continue to use it, you might a bit insensitive and tone-deaf. It is 2020 and now would be a good time to make a culture shift. The term carries baggage with some people and groups and there are just better alternatives. Words matter, and so do people’s feeling about who they are, what they do, and where they work.
Please take this to heart.
