by Jon Meacham
He backed off the emotion to speak of the need for unity, the dignity of protest, the historical precedent of the labor movement. Comparatively speaking, his subject matter was mundane, but the crowd stayed with him even through paraphrases of abstruse points from Niebuhr. “And I want to tell you this evening that it is not enough for us to talk about love,” he said. “Love is one of the pinnacle parts of the Christian faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which would work against love.” He said that God was not just the God of love: “He’s also the God that standeth before the nations and says, ‘Be still and know that I am God—and if you don’t obey Me I’m gonna break the backbone of your power—and cast you out of the arms of your international and national relationships.’ ” Shouts and claps continued at a steady rhythm as King’s audacity overflowed. “Standing beside love is always justice,” he said. “Not only are we using the tools of persuasion—but we’ve got to use the tools of coercion.” He called again for unity. For working together. He appealed to history, summoning his listeners to behave so that sages of the future would look back at the Negroes of Montgomery and say they were “a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights.” He said they could do that. “God grant that we will do it before it’s too late.” Someone said, “Oh, yes.” And King said, “As we proceed with our program—let us think on these things.”
The crowd retreated into stunned silence as he stepped away from the pulpit. The ending was so abrupt, so anticlimactic. The crowd had been waiting for him to reach for the heights a third time at his conclusion, following the rules of oratory. A few seconds passed before memory and spirit overtook disappointment. The applause continued as King made his way out of the church, with people reaching to touch him. Dexter members marveled, having never seen King let loose like that. Abernathy remained behind, reading negotiating demands from the pulpit. The boycott was on. King would work on his timing, but his oratory had just made him forever a public person. In the few short minutes of his first political address, a power of communion emerged from him that would speak inexorably to strangers who would both love and revile him, like all prophets. He was twenty-six, and had not quite twelve years and four months to live.
Prime Time
Colored People, 1994
HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
I guess some chafed more than others against the mundane impediments of the color line. “It’s no disgrace to be colored,” the black entertainer Bert Williams famously observed early in this century, “but it is awfully inconvenient.” For most of my childhood, we couldn’t eat in restaurants or sleep in hotels, we couldn’t use certain bathrooms or try on clothes in stores. Mama insisted that we dress up when we went to shop. She was a fashion plate when she went to clothing stores, and wore white pads called shields under her arms so her dress or blouse would show no sweat. We’d like to try this on, she’d say carefully, articulating her words precisely and properly. We don’t buy clothes we can’t try on, she’d say when they declined, as we’d walk, in Mama’s dignified manner, out of the store. She preferred to shop where we had an account and where everyone knew who she was.
As for me, I hated the fact that we couldn’t sit down in the Cut-Rate. No one colored was allowed to, with one exception: my father. It was as if there were a permanent take-away only sign for colored people. You were supposed to stand at the counter, get your food to go, and leave. I don’t know for certain why Carl Dadisman, the proprietor, wouldn’t stop Daddy from sitting down. But I believe it was in part because Daddy was so light-complected, and in part because, during his shift at the phone company, he picked up orders for food and coffee for the operators, and Dadisman relied on that business. At the time, I never wondered if it occurred to Daddy not to sit down at the Cut-Rate when neither his wife nor his two children were allowed to, although now that I am a parent myself, the strangeness of it crosses my mind on occasion.
Even when we were with Daddy, you see, we had to stand at the counter and order takeout, then eat on white paper plates using plastic spoons, sipping our vanilla rickeys from green-and-white paper cups through plastic flexible-end straws. Even after basketball games, when Young Doc Bess would set up the team with free Cokes after one of the team’s many victories, the colored players had to stand around and drink out of paper cups while the white players and cheerleaders sat down in the red Naugahyde booths and drank out of glasses. Integrate? I’ll shut it down first, Carl Dadisman had vowed. He was an odd-looking man, with a Humpty-Dumpty sort of head and bottom, and weighing four or five hundred pounds. He ran the taxi service, too, and was just as nice as he could be, even to colored people. But he did not want us sitting in his booths, eating off his plates and silverware, putting our thick greasy lips all over his glasses. He’d retire first, or die.
He had a heart attack one day while sitting in the tiny toilet at his place of business. Daddy and some other men tried to lift him up, while he was screaming and gasping and clutching his chest, but he was stuck in that cramped space. They called the rescue squad at the Fire Department. Lowell Taylor and Pat Amoroso came. Lowell was black and was the star of the soccer team at the high school across the river in Westernport. He looked like Pele, down to the shape of his head.
They sawed and sawed and sawed, while the ambulance and the rescue squad sat outside on Third Street, blocking the driveway to the town’s parking lot. After a while, Carl Dadisman’s cries and moans became quieter and quieter. Finally, they wedged in a couple of two-by-fours and dragged out his lifeless body. By then it made little difference to Carl that Lowell was black.
Maybe Carl never understood that the racial dispensation he took for granted was coming to an end. As a child, I must once have assumed that this dispensation could no more be contested than the laws of gravity, or traffic lights. And I’m not sure when I realized otherwise.
I know that I had rich acquaintance early on with the inconveniences to which Bert Williams alluded. But segregation had some advantages, like the picnic lunch Mama would make for the five-hour train ride on the National Limited to Parkersburg, where you had to catch the bus down to the state capital, Charleston, to visit her sister Loretta. So what if we didn’t feel comfortable eating in the dining car? Our food was better. Fried chicken, baked beans, and potato salad . . . a book and two decks of cards . . . and I didn’t care if the train ever got there. We’d sing or read in our own section, munching that food and feeling sorry for the people who couldn’t get any, and play 500 or Tonk or Fish with Mama and Daddy, until we fell asleep.
The simple truth is that the civil rights era came late to Piedmont, even though it came early to our television set. We could watch what was going on Elsewhere on television, but the marches and sit-ins were as remote to us as, in other ways, was the all-colored world of Amos ’n’ Andy—a world full of black lawyers, black judges, black nurses, black doctors.
Politics aside, though, we were starved for images of ourselves and searched TV to find them. Everybody, of course, watched sports, because Piedmont was a big sports town. Making the big leagues was like getting to Heaven, and everybody had hopes that they could, or a relative could. We’d watch the games day and night, and listen on radio to what we couldn’t see. Everybody knew the latest scores, batting averages, rbi’s, and stolen bases. Everybody knew the standings in the leagues, who could still win the pennant and how. Everybody liked the Dodgers because of Jackie Robinson, the same way everybody still voted Republican because of Abraham Lincoln. Sports on the mind, sports in the mind. The only thing to rival the Valley in fascination was the big-league baseball diamond.
I once heard Mr. James Helms say, “You got to give the white man his due when it comes to technology. One on one, though, and it’s even-steven. Joe Louis showed ’em that.” We were obsessed with sports in part because it was the only time we could compete with white people even-steven. And the white people, it often seemed, were just as
obsessed with this primal confrontation between the races as we were. I think they integrated professional sports, after all those years of segregation, just to capitalize on this voyeuristic thrill of the forbidden contact. What interracial sex was to the seventies, interracial sports were to the fifties. Except for sports, we rarely saw a colored person on TV.
Actually, I first got to know white people as “people” through their flickering images on television shows. It was the television set that brought us together at night, and the television set that brought in the world outside the Valley. We were close enough to Washington to receive its twelve channels on cable. Piedmont was transformed from a radio culture to one with the fullest range of television, literally overnight. During my first-grade year, we’d watch Superman, Lassie, Jack Benny, Danny Thomas, Robin Hood, I Love Lucy, December Bride, Nat King Cole (of course), Wyatt Earp, Broken Arrow, Phil Silvers, Red Skelton, The $64,000 Question, Ozzie and Harriet, The Millionaire, Father Knows Best, The Lone Ranger, Bob Cummings, Dragnet, The People’s Choice, Rin Tin Tin, Jim Bowie, Gunsmoke, My Friend Flicka, The Life of Riley, Topper, Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theater, Circus Boy, and Loretta Young—all in prime time. My favorites were The Life of Riley, in part because he worked in a factory like Daddy did, and Ozzie and Harriet, in part because Ozzie never seemed to work at all. A year later, however, Leave It to Beaver swept most of the others away.
With a show like Topper, I felt as if I was getting a glimpse, at last, of the life that Mrs. Hudson, and Mrs. Thomas, and Mrs. Campbell, must be leading in their big mansions on East Hampshire Street. Smoking jackets and cravats, spats and canes, elegant garden parties and martinis. People who wore suits to eat dinner! This was a world so elegantly distant from ours, it was like a voyage to another galaxy, light-years away.
Leave It to Beaver, on the other hand, was a world much closer, but just out of reach nonetheless. Beaver’s street was where we wanted to live, Beaver’s house where we wanted to eat and sleep, Beaver’s father’s firm where we’d have liked Daddy to work. These shows for us were about property, the property that white people could own and that we couldn’t. About a level of comfort and ease at which we could only wonder. It was the world that the integrated school was going to prepare us to enter and that, for Mama, would be the prize.
If prime time consisted of images of middle-class white people who looked nothing at all like us, late night was about the radio, listening to Randy’s Record Shop from Gallatin, Tennessee. My brother, Rocky, kept a transistor radio by his bed, and he’d listen to it all night, for all I knew, long after I’d fallen asleep. In 1956, black music hadn’t yet broken down into its many subgenres, except for large divisions such as jazz, blues, gospel, rhythm and blues. On Randy’s, you were as likely to hear The Platters doing “The Great Pretender” and Clyde McPhatter doing “Treasure of Love” as you were to hear Howlin’ Wolf do “Smokestack Lightning” or Joe Turner do “Corrine, Corrine.” My own favorite that year was the slow, deliberate sound of Jesse Belvin’s “Goodnight, My Love.” I used to fall asleep singing it in my mind to my Uncle Earkie’s girlfriend, Ula, who was a sweet caffè latté brown, with the blackest, shiniest straight hair and the fullest, most rounded red lips. Not even in your dreams, he had said to me one day, as I watched her red dress slink down our front stairs. It was my first brush with the sublime.
We used to laugh at the way the disc jockey sang “Black Strap Lax-a-teeves” during the commercials. I sometimes would wonder if the kids we’d seen on TV in Little Rock or Birmingham earlier in the evening were singing themselves to sleep with their Ulas.
Lord knows, we weren’t going to learn how to be colored by watching television. Seeing somebody colored on TV was an event.
“Colored, colored, on Channel Two,” you’d hear someone shout. Somebody else would run to the phone, while yet another hit the front porch, telling all the neighbors where to see it. And everybody loved Amos ’n’ Andy—I don’t care what people say today. For the colored people, the day they took Amos ’n’ Andy off the air was one of the saddest days in Piedmont, about as sad as the day of the last mill pic-a-nic.
What was special to us about Amos ’n’ Andy was that their world was all colored, just like ours. Of course, they had their colored judges and lawyers and doctors and nurses, which we could only dream about having, or becoming—and we did dream about those things. Kingfish ate his soft-boiled eggs delicately, out of an egg cup. He even owned an acre of land in Westchester County, which he sold to Andy, using the facade of a movie set to fake a mansion. As far as we were concerned, the foibles of Kingfish or Calhoun the lawyer were the foibles of individuals who happened to be funny. Nobody was likely to confuse them with the colored people we knew, no more than we’d confuse ourselves with the entertainers and athletes we saw on TV or in Ebony or Jet, the magazines we devoured to keep up with what was happening with the race. And people took special relish in Kingfish’s malapropisms. “I denies the allegation, Your Honor, and I resents the alligator.”
In one of my favorite episodes of Amos ’n’ Andy, “The Punjab of Java-Pour,” Andy Brown is hired to advertise a brand of coffee and is required to dress up as a turbaned Oriental potentate. Kingfish gets the bright idea that if he dresses up as a potentate’s servant, the two of them can enjoy a vacation at a luxury hotel for free. So attired, the two promenade around the lobby, running up an enormous tab and generously dispensing “rubies” and “diamonds” as tips. The plan goes awry when people try to redeem the gems and discover them to be colored glass. It was widely suspected that this episode was what prompted two Negroes in Baltimore to dress like African princes and demand service in a segregated four-star restaurant. Once it was clear to the management that these were not American Negroes, the two were treated royally. When the two left the restaurant, they took off their African headdresses and robes and enjoyed a hearty laugh at the restaurant’s expense. “They weren’t like our Negroes,” the maître d’ told the press in explaining why he had agreed to seat the two “African princes.”
Whenever the movies Imitation of Life and The Green Pastures would be shown on TV, we watched with similar hunger—especially Imitation of Life. It was never on early; only the late late show, like the performances of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington at the Crystal Palace. And we’d stay up. Everybody colored. The men coming home on second shift from the paper mill would stay up. Those who had to go out on the day shift and who normally would have been in bed hours earlier (because they had to be at work at 6:30) would stay up. As would we, the kids, wired for the ritual at hand. And we’d all sit in silence, fighting back the tears, watching as Delilah invents the world’s greatest pancakes and a down-and-out Ned Sparks takes one taste and says, flatly, “We’ll box it.” Cut to a big white house, plenty of money, and Delilah saying that she doesn’t want her share of the money (which should have been all the money); she just wants to continue to cook, clean, wash, iron, and serve her good white lady and her daughter. (Nobody in our living room was going for that.) And then Delilah shows up at her light-complected daughter’s school one day, unexpectedly, to pick her up, and there’s the daughter, Peola, ducking down behind her books, and the white teacher saying, I’m sorry, ma’am, there must be some mistake. We have no little colored children here. And then Delilah, spying her baby, says, Oh, yes you do. Peola! Peola! Come here to your mammy, honey chile. And then Peola runs out of the room, breaking her poor, sweet mother’s heart. And Peola continues to break her mother’s heart, by passing, leaving the race, and marrying white. Yet her mama understands, always understands, and, dying, makes detailed plans for her own big, beautiful funeral, complete with six white horses and a carriage and a jazz band, New Orleans style. And she dies and is about to be buried, when, out of nowhere, comes grown-up Peola, saying, “Don’t die, Mama, don’t die, Mama, I’m sorry, Mama, I’m sorry,” and throws her light-and-bright-and-damn-near-white self onto her mama’s casket. By this time, we have stopped trying to fight back the tears
and are boo-hooing all over the place. Then we turn to our own mama and tell her how much we love her and swear that we will never, ever pass for white. I promise, Mama. I promise.
Peola had sold her soul to the Devil. This was the first popular Faust in the black tradition, the bargain with the Devil over the cultural soul. Talk about a cautionary tale.
The Green Pastures was an altogether more uplifting view of things, our Afro Paradiso. Make way for the Lawd! Make way for the Lawd! And Rex Ingram, dressed in a long black frock coat and a long white beard, comes walking down the Streets Paved with Gold, past the Pearly Gates, while Negroes with the whitest wings of fluffy cotton fly around Heaven, playing harps, singing spirituals, having fish fries, and eating watermelon. Hard as I try, I can’t stop seeing God as that black man who played Him in The Green Pastures and seeing Noah as Rochester from the Jack Benny show, trying to bargain with God to let him take along an extra keg of wine or two.
Civil rights took us all by surprise. Every night we’d wait until the news to see what “Dr. King and dem” were doing. It was like watching the Olympics or the World Series when somebody colored was on. The murder of Emmett Till was one of my first memories. He whistled at some white girl, they said; that’s all he did. He was beat so bad they didn’t even want to open the casket, but his mama made them. She wanted the world to see what they had done to her baby.