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Her father died in jail after a white lady downtown accused him of not getting out of her way on the sidewalk. Bumptious contact, as Jim Crow defined it. That’s how it went in the old days.
In Chapter 7, Harriet recalls the ways she said goodbye to various loved ones. Most of her loved ones were forced to “[leave] her” due to Jim Crow laws and racism. Her father was accused of not “getting out of the way” of a woman and put in jail as a result of segregation laws. He died by suicide in his prison cell. Harriet’s husband was killed trying to protect a Black restaurant worker who was attacked by three white men. Harriet is heartbroken when Elwood is accused of a crime he didn’t commit and taken to the Nickel Academy, as it’s just another in the long line of tragic injustices that has robbed her of her family.
‘This is out back,’ Turner said. ‘They say once in a while they take a black boy here and shackle him up to those... Then they get a horse whip and tear him up.’
Elwood made two fists, then caught himself. ‘No white boys?’
‘The White House, they got that integrated. This place is separate. They take you out back... and that’s that...’
In Chapter 9, Elwood learns that Black students suffer more brutal punishments and injustices at Nickel Academy due to their race. While the white boys face horrible beatings at the White House/Ice Cream Factory, they never get taken “out back.” Turner explains to Elwood that when Spencer or one of the housemen takes you “out back,” you don’t return. They explain Black students’ disappearances by claiming that they ran away, and as Turner says, “that’s that.” Only Black students are taken “out back.” Elwood asks Turner what happens when their families check on the missing students, and Turner points out that many of the other students don’t have the same family support he has. “Out back” is symbolic of the unequal justice system that Black people have faced during the entirety of American history, up to and including today.
More distressing than the notion that the newspaper didn’t care about what was going on at Nickel was that they received so many letters like it, so many appeals, that they couldn’t address them all. The country was big, and its appetite for prejudice and depredation limitless, how could they keep up with the host of injustices, big and small. [...] This was one place, but if there was one, there were hundreds, hundreds of Nickels and White Houses scattered across the land like pain factories.
In his quest to record the horrors of the Nickel Academy, Elwood recounts in Chapter 14 that his letters to The Chicago Defender hadn’t been answered or printed in the editorial section. He gives other examples of racism occurring at the same time; for example, a concrete pool in Baltimore is being filled in rather than letting Black people swim there. The lack of interest in what is happening at Nickel is a reminder that horrible acts of racism and segregation are going on all over the country, and that to society in general, ignoring it is easier than stopping it.
