I was born into segregation, as was my father and his father before him. Most people won’t question things like that, even when it’s impossible to reconcile with their fundamental beliefs. There were no black people in the schools and church I attended as a small boy. In fact, I had almost no interaction with black people at all.
The only black person I saw regularly was Miss Sweetie Long. I knew she lived at the corner of Mitchell Road and Jonesboro Road, so she was over a mile into her walk when she came by our house. Assuming she was going to Mr. Foster’s store, she had another 2 miles to go. That seemed like a long way to walk to me, and she had to be pushing 80 years old. She was always dressed in a long dress and bonnet that looked like something from 100 years prior.
The first time I remember seeing a black child up close and personal was at a lawnmower repair shop that I believe was called Alton’s. Alton’s was in an area of McDonough that was called Blacksville on the map, but I never heard it called that in real life. What it was called then cannot be uttered today. Anyway, Daddy had taken his lawnmower in for a repair, and there was a young black boy there about my age. I think we were equally fascinated with each other, but it was nothing more than a head nod of an interaction. Neither of us dared speak to the other.
At the beginning of the year, when I was in the 5th grade, there were one or two black children placed in our classes. I don’t know what that must have been like for those kids, but I can’t imagine it was good. I think we white kids mostly ignored them, and maybe that was as good as anyone could have hoped. At the beginning of the 6th grade, the schools were fully integrated. When that happened, some of my friends went to newly formed ‘Christian’ schools. In theory, a black child could have gone, but there were strangely never any openings for them. Other things happened, and I’m sure I missed most of them, but I do remember they closed the pool in McDonough rather than having white and black children share it. There were brief periods of unrest where white people walked with only white people and vice versa, but mostly we learned to live together by staying out of each other’s way.
That started to change for me as I got into high school. As a nerdy smart kid, I was clumped with the other nerdy smart kids for most of my classes, and that included black nerdy smart kids. From that, I learned we weren’t that different after all. Maybe it’s just hard to be prejudiced against someone when you see yourself in them.
In my lifetime, I have seen the end to systemic racism. Some are interested in seeing it where it doesn’t exist, but I have seen it in reality and know the difference. That doesn’t mean we don’t have our prejudices. I knew my mother and her mother were different from most regarding racial issues, which was curious to me. Not really knowing my maternal grandfather, I asked my mother about her father’s view on black people. She told me he didn’t have any issues whatsoever with blacks. Then she paused for a couple of seconds and said something I will never forget. She said: ‘He didn’t like Catholics, though.’ I thought he must have found Dutchtown as the promised land because I didn’t know any Catholics around here. Maybe there were some, and I didn’t know it. I realized something I would hear years later from the character Tony Manero in the movie Saturday Night Fever: ‘Everybody has to dump on somebody.’ Maybe it’s true.
As I’m writing this, maybe it sounds judgemental, but that is not my intent. I’m just documenting my memories. We like to think our generation is superior and that we’ve made great strides. Well, we haven’t. Sure, we’ve overcome some racial issues to a degree, but we may be more intolerant now than we’ve ever been. Rather than look on previous generations with contempt, we should take some advice from Matthew 7:5 and remove the planks from our own eyes
‘Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.’ – George Orwell