Yesterday, in Part One of this series, I described why I believe we need to open a new dialogue in this country on the issue of race. I also gave a brief history of how the concept of race was developed, and then refined and exploited by our American forefathers and mothers to justify inequality based on differences in skin color, culture, or nationality or even whether or not your eyelids have an epicanthic fold. An inequality that continues to exist despite the many achievements of the Civil Rights era in eradicating previously legal discrimination based on race.
That first part of this series was, in effect, an introduction and a prologue to the heart of the story I now wish to focus upon: my own personal journey through America’s racial divide, and the evolution of my own feelings, sentiments and prejudices regarding race over the first 50 years of my life. Because I believe that before you can have an intelligent conversation with someone on any topic, but especially on the subject of race in America, they have to know where you are coming from. Well, the story I begin today in part two of this series will tell you where I’ve been, what I’ve experienced and what I’ve learned about race and racism, over the course of my lifetime, both as a abstract idea, and as an ugly, persistent reality that continues to eat away at the American ideals we profess to love, and pledge to defend.
(cont.)
My Origins: North Carolina via South Dakota
I was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the mid-fifties to two recent transplants from the great plains of South Dakota. My father had recently been accepted as a graduate student at North Carolina State University in the Applied Mathematics Department, and he had moved my pregnant mother there shortly after their wedding. My parents, being not only Northerners, but citizens of one of the least populated and least diverse states in the country, were completely unprepared for the racially mixed, if segregated society that greeted them on their arrival .
My mother was the daughter of German Americans whose own parents had immigrated to Minnesota and the Dakotas at the turn of the 20th century. She had grown up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota’s “Big City,” but as it had a population of between 65,000-85,000 during the years she grew up there, so it was big in a relative sense only. My father was the third son of a poor farmer outside Brookings, South Dakota, a much smaller city, even though it is the home of South Dakota State University. In 1995, Brookings had a population of around 16,000. I’m sure it was even smaller back in the 1930’s and 40’s during the years of my Father’s childhood and adolescence.
Of greater importance, South Dakota was primarily an all white state. The vast majority of people who live there, even today, are the descendants of English colonists (such as my father’s family who can trace their time in this country back to the early 1700’s, or immigrants from Germany, and the Scandinavian countries. That funny Minnesotan accent that movies like Fargo poke fun at is very real, and it results from the heavy concentration of Scandinavians and Germans in the Great Plains states. I know because I have a number of relatives who speak exactly like characters in Fargo.
The largest minority in South Dakota are Native Americans (primarily the remnants of the Lakota and other Great Plains tribes) at about roughly 7% of the population, most of who reside on reservations concentrated primarily in the western half of the state. African Americans make up less than 1% of the state’s population as of 1995, with about 3,000 out of a total population of 700,000. I imagine those numbers were even smaller back when my parents were growing up. My mother remembers one black family that whose children attended her school. My father doesn’t remember meeting any African Americans until he went to South Dakota State on a track scholarship and competed against black athletes on the University of Iowa’s track team. Although I’ve never spoken to them about it, I assume that their experiences with Asian Americans and Latinos was probably just as infrequent, if not more so. The 1995 population figure for Asian Americans is also about 3000 individuals in the entire state at that time. Latinos did not even rate a separate enumeration in the population figures I found for 1995, falling into the catchall category of “Other.”
Based on their background, my parents were woefully unprepared for the type of racially diverse and divided society they encountered in North Carolina. To give you some idea for the culture shock they experienced one only has to look at the population statistics for 1960, where whites made up just under 75% of the total population and blacks comprised approximately 25%. The sheer number of African Americans they found themselves living among was simply beyond their prior ability to imagine, but even more challenging was the entire culture of North Carolina, both black and white, and the complex and (to them) mysterious relationships, unwritten rules and social codes that governed relationships between the two races.
This was the last throes of official segregation in the South, after all, a period where the Civil Right movement was upsetting the applecart of Jim Crow laws that had regulated race relations for nearly 75 years. My parents simply did not have the cultural knowledge to understand what was happening around them. Not born into white southern culture, and with no real experience of any kind with black southern culture, they were truly outsiders. Declaimed by their neighbors as “Yankees” (though that is a term they had never used to describe themselves before) they struggled to understand the world view of Southerners.
My parents both have vivid memories of the first time they encountered a black person after arriving in North Carolina. My mother was a small woman, tiny of frame, and with very youthful features that made her appear much younger than she was. My father, on the other hand was almost a foot taller than her, and also four years older. A veteran of a two year stint in the Army after college, he more than looked his age. As they wandered the aisles of a small grocery store, my mother in her last trimester with me and with the mother of all extended abdomens, suddenly my father was accosted by an older black woman who began verbally chiding him quite loudly for getting such a young white girl pregnant . I don’t know who was shocked more, my mother or my father (though it is my mother to this day who always repeats the story, probably because she now finds it more amusing than my father does).
It was their first lesson in the complex web of relations that bonded black and white communities to each other in strange and seemingly contradictory ways. A black man or boy would never have presumed to speak to my father in that manner, but an older black woman felt no such limitation. And needless to say, my parents did not anticipate that anyone of any race would accost the so openly in public. In South Dakota, with its ethic of stoicism and suppression of public displays of emotion, no one would have ever spoken to them in public like this, even if they might have been thinking the exact same thoughts to which the old black woman at that grocery in Raleigh gave vocal expression. Yet what they experienced was likely a direct outgrowth of a society where black women were commonly employed as servants in white households: as cooks, housekeepers and nannies. Indeed, that familiarity no doubt originated during the period of slavery where “house slaves” became the familiars of their owners and were treated differently, and accorded privileges because of that familiarity, which were never extend to “field slaves.”
Annie
Indeed, after my father moved us out of student housing when I was 2 and my brother 6 months old, and into a new home in the town of Cary (now a major suburb of Raleigh), my parents acquired their own “cleaning lady” who came by several times a week to help my mother with housework and taking care of my brother and I. Here name was Annie.
Why my parents chose to hire Annie I can’t really say. They certainly weren’t well off. My father was working at the Research triangle Institute while still working nights toward his Ph., D. in Experimental Statistics. I know the demands on his time from both work and school was one of the reasons he took longer to get his doctorate. I suspect a large part of it had to do with wanting to make my mother’s life easier. She had been moved thousands of miles away form her family and friends, and she felt isolated and lonely. In addition, I was very sickly as a child, with asthma and other afflictions and my father couldn’t be around much to help her deal with two small kids, a new home, and what I now realize was likely depression brought on by her situation. I’m sure my father’s guilt about his many absences played a large part in his decision.
But there were other forces at work that probably contributed to Annie’s hire. To be blunt about it, black servants came cheap in the North Carolina of that era. Many of the housewives on the street were we lived had their own “cleaning ladies” or “housekeepers” and it wasn’t because their husbands were rolling in dough either. It was just the thing to do. Having a servant of any kind added a little luster, and the price was more than economical. Middle class wives in the Midwest acquired new vacuum cleaners or washing machines. The middle class women of Raleigh had a cleaning lady instead. Either way their workload was made easier.
Annie was far from the stereotypical black “Mammy” still seen gracing the labels of Aunt Jemima brand products, or in as portrayed by in Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind. She was a small women, with birdlike limbs and legs, soft spoken and quiet. Her hair had been either straightened or was almost straight by itself, and her skin was so light that it was hardly much darker than my own. She had freckles on her face and arms, smiled easily and became a good friend and confidante to my mother. Her children used to come with her on occasion and play with me at our home while my mother and her cleaned the house together. She was, however, clearly a “Negro” as far as every white person was concerned.
Usually she took the bus, or her husband picked her up when she was finished working, but I remember clearly one time when my mother had to take her home. We all bundled into the car and drove for about 30 to 45 minutes (hard to be precise about time when you’re a child), until we turned down an old dirt road and after a short stooped the car in front of Annie’s home. I’m not sure what I had been expecting her home to look like (probably something like mine) but when we got out of the car I was more than surprised by what I saw. Annie and her family (she had 4 or 5 children, maybe more) lived in what could charitably be called a shack. It had 1 or 2 rooms at best, and was situated in a small dirt scrabble yard with a few chickens running around a small wired enclosed space. Annie thanked my mother for the ride. My Mom may have given her some extra food, though I can’t be sure about that. I know she told me later that she often did that to help out Annie’s family. Then we got back in our car and drove home.
Naturally I asked my mother a lot of questions after seeing where Annie lived. Annie was to me, as a child, a part of my extended family. Just another adult authority figure who cared about me. I had probably always assumed that everyone lived in a home similar to ours, or to the homes of our neighbors which I had visited. That Annie and her family lived in such a poor excuse for a home, a hovel really, was very disturbing to me. Why didn’t she live in a home like ours? Why did our family have so much room in our house, and her family so little in theirs? Why was ours so nice and theirs do shabby?
That was probably the first discussion I can recall with my mother about race, and the differences in status and treatment that resulted from being a “white person” versus being a “Negro.” It was in more ways than one a revelation. The idea that many of the people I knew, parents of kids I played with, thought African Americans were racially and genetically inferior merely because of the color of their skin was, to my mind outrageous, and unfair.
To my mother’s credit she did not try to defend the status quo, or claim that there was nothing anyone could do. She told me all about the official segregation in the South, but also that things were starting to change. We talked about Martin Luther King, and the civil rights movement, and how much she respected those people for their actions. She agreed with me that it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right that people like Annie had to suffer because of the racism of white people, but she also said that it wasn’t always going to be that way. She’s a very dyed in the wool conservative Republican, but she was a radical at that time and in that place on the issue of race. Her own friendship with Annie, and her experiences with her white friends from the South, had opened her eyes, eyes that had never had to really consider the question of racial prejudice simply because she had so little prior experience with anyone other than her extended family and friends in South Dakota. I will always respect and honor her for that.
The Petition
The one other significant event I remember from my years in North Carolina which revealed the starkness of the racial divide in America to me as a child was not the televised news coverage of the marches on Selma, the bombing in Birmingham, or the March on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his famous “I have a Dream Speech.” It was something much closer to home, and more personal. And it all resulted from something that most of us today probably don’t think much about because they are so ubiquitous. It was a just a petition drive.
Of course, it wasn’t just any old petition drive, but a drive to promote a voting rights act to ensure that all people entitled to vote could cast their vote in North Carolina. Today no one would find such a measure controversial. But back in the early 60’s, everyone knew what it really meant – giving the vote to black people. And among white Southerners, that was a very controversial measure, indeed.
Most of them already disliked the changes being forced upon them, allowing “colored people” to eat at the same restaurants as whites or sit anywhere they liked on the buses at the movie theatres. Those sorts of changes were bad enough to their mind, but allowing blacks to actually vote in large numbers was seen as nothing less than the work of Satan and his minions.
Perhaps my parents didn’t realize the depths of their neighbors abhorrence for civil rights for the “coloreds” or perhaps they were just naive. They did have a lot of friends who worked with my father, or were also graduate students, and a lot of them were from originally form places outside the South, but they also socialized with our local neighbors, too. Certainly my mother did, because she played bridge with many of the women on our street.
Or perhaps they just didn’t think anyone would see their names on the petition papers that the earnest young men (both white as I recall) offered to them at our front door. Or maybe they just didn’t give a damn who knew. In any event, they signed the petition, both of them, and the two young men went to the next house on our little street looking for more signatures. Well, as it turned out, they were the only people in our entire neighborhood who had signed. And everyone else in the neighborhood either saw their names prominently that petition when those two young men came knocking at their door, or they soon found out about it from those who had.
The effect was almost immediate. Suddenly, my brother and I were no longer invited to play with the kids next door. And most of our neighbors stopped talking to us, and I mean literally stopped talking. If they saw us out in the yard they didn’t wave or respond to our hellos. Often as not they just turned away, or went back inside their own homes until we had the good grace to go back inside ours. Obviously, some people had a more dramatic reaction to my parents “great sin” than others, but by and large it was a coordinated community effort. Months would pass before any of them would restore relations with our family and socialize with my father and mother, or let their kids come over to our house to play. Some of them never did get over what my parents had done.
All because of a signature on a piece of paper.
No, it wasn’t anything like what Annie or other black people suffered and endured everyday. It was a small thing really. But once you’ve been shunned for having supported the “wrong ideas” (or in this case for having parents who had done so) it isn’t something you’re likely to forget either. Today they take pride in having put their John Hancock’s on that piece of paper calling for equal voting rights, but back them …? I’m not sure if they were so sanguine after they learned the consequences of their actions. North Carolina was not a hot bed of the KKK, but I suspect they had some sleepless nights knowing that there were people out there who knew practically nothing about them other than (1) where they lived and (2) that they had signed a civil rights petition.
My parents didn’t signed another petition for a long, long time.
In December of 1963 we would move to Denver, Colorado, where my father took a position with a marketing research firm. I’ve only been back to North Carolina once since I was seven, and then only for a brief two day visit to see a medical specialist about five years ago. I have no idea of what racial tensions exist between blacks and whites who live there today. I only know what I remember from my childhood.
Part Three of this series will be (hopefully) posted tomorrow.
