by Studs Terkel
Professor Franklin was interviewed during the centennial celebration. “I was reminded of Frederick Douglass’s comment on the Fourth of July, 1852. ‘This holiday is yours, not mine.’ The same can be said of the Statue of Liberty celebration, 1984.”
Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, with a sense of irony close to despair, reflects. “One thing white immigrant groups could do in America was to believe they were moving upward because the blacks were always there: down below.
“What I found fascinating is the tragically humorous condition of northern whites. The civil-rights movement made the white ethnic groups more democratic. The Poles, Jews, Italians, and Irish could all get together in their hostility to the blacks. It has become another aspect of the democratic creed.
“Being white in America made them feel equal to all other whites, as long as the black man was down below. They voted this way. Consider the blue-collar vote for Reagan. He may not have been their friend, but they felt equal to him.”
The poor southern white had earlier teachings in this matter. Lillian Smith, in her short story “Two Men and a Bargain,” writes of the rich white who persuaded the poor white to work for fifty cents an hour and, when the other complained, said, “I can get a nigger for two bits an hour. You’re better than him, ain’t you? We’re the same color, ain’t we?” Martin Luther King was more succinct in his 1965 Montgomery speech: The poor white was fed Jim Crow instead of bread.
Little Dovie Thurman had never met poor white people before her arrival in Chicago. “I thought all whites were rich. I began to understand there’s somebody in control that I couldn’t get to. It wasn’t the person I could see. If white people hate black people so much, how come there’s so many poor whites? Why are they doin’ this to their own people, callin’ them white trash?”
The maverick southern preacher, Will Campbell, dislikes the word “redneck.” Remember the Edwin Markham poem? ‘Bowed by the weight of centuries/ He leans upon the hoe/ And gazes on the ground.’ As he so leans and so gazes, this parching, searing midday sun turns his neck red. We’ve equated that with racism.”
“I began to seek knowledge about power,” says Little Dovie. “Who’s got it? Who’s benefiting from keeping people separated? If you keep us divided, we will continue to fight each other, while the one has all the pie for themselves and we will scuffle over the crumbs. He can’t eat it all by himself.
“As long as you holler ‘Black Power’ or ‘White Power,’ that’s fine with them because you’re never coming together. Dr. King was knocking a dent because he was pointing a finger not at race, but at who was really in control. He was gettin’ at it.”
Peggy Terry, her “hillbilly” friend from Kentucky, quit school after fifth grade, but she and Kenneth Clark share the same thoughts. “When a wave of immigrants came here, there was always some just above them. There has to be a top crust and a bottom crust in our society. Somebody has to be on the bottom.
“I think you become an adult when you reach a point where you don’t need anyone underneath you. When you can look at yourself and say, ‘I’m okay the way I am.’ One of the things that keeps my class of people from having any vision is race hatred. You’re so busy hating somebody else, you’re not gonna realize how beautiful you are and how much you destroy all that’s good in the world.”
Leona Brady is vice-principal of a black high school. She was seeing “good signs when things opened up a bit after the sixties. We had a smart group of students. They had IQs, good study habits, and marched for their inalienable rights. Then a more docile group of students came along. It was right after the rash of assassinations and the Vietnam War. We ran into the Reagan years. They stopped asking questions.
“The white American is not innately racist. I sense innate docility. He will follow the law if the leadership tells him to do that. He would not rebel if he thought he’d be punished. But if the laws are flouted and winked at, he’ll wink, too. We should have a beautiful country by now. We have no business having to go back and remake this wheel.”
During the sixties, the dream, so long deferred, was by way of becoming the awakening. Marches, gatherings, voices from below, and a stirring of national conscience led to the passage of civil-rights laws. It appeared that this nation, white and black, was on the threshold of overcoming. It seemed prepared, though stubbornly resisted in some quarters, to make the playing field more even. After all, the law was the law, and we prided ourselves on being a law-abiding society.
It was a difficult moment, a strange one, for many white working people, let alone the middle class, accustomed to old “comfortable” ways. It was a discomfort to make room for those whom they had been taught most of their lives to regard as invisible or, at best, below them. Some considered it an assault on their family-taught virtues.
“I went through a bad time,” recalls a fireman’s wife. “I felt like being white middle-class had a stigma to it. Everything was our fault. Every time I turned on the TV, it would be constant trying to send me on a guilt trip because I had a decent life. I was sick of people making the connotation that because I was raising a good family, I was responsible for the ills of the world. The white middle class was getting a bum rap. Even when I went to church, I was really getting angry.”
She was ready for someone to calm her condition, to assuage her hurts: someone with simple answers. Along came Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1980, with anecdotes of welfare queens and Cadillacs. In winning the presidency, the Gipper reversed the field and made the eighties the decade unashamed. “I liked the things Reagan did,” said the woman, absolved of sin and imbued with a newfound innocence.
Yet, a still, small voice disturbs the fireman’s wife. “People’s expectations are too high. You can’t expect us to like black people without knowing them. I’m very Christian, but not overly Christian. There’s only a couple of people I dislike and they’re white. I don’t know black people well enough to hate them. Those I know, I like.”
The embittered black man, sensing the dream once again deferred, responds in metaphors. “I’m not coming back to your house anymore, because you made it obvious you don’t want me. I think we’d best be getting on, separating from these people. When Moses led the people out of Egypt, they didn’t say, ‘Let’s integrate.’ They said, ‘Let’s get the heck out of here.’ ” He sighs. “But I guess I still believe in integration. My daughter goes to the Eastman School of Music.”
During the eighties, “the races have drifted apart in so many ways, have fallen out,” observes Douglas Massey, Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago. “Even in language. Black English is farther than ever from standard American English. Increasingly, blacks isolated in ghetto poverty are speaking a different language with its own rules of grammar. It may not be inferior, but if speaking standard English is the minimum requirement for a good job, an increasingly large share of our population is frozen out.
“I don’t think most whites understand what it is to be black in the United States today. They don’t even have a clue.”
“They don’t like to work, the blacks,” the young construction worker said. Yet why was that long line of job-seekers, mostly young blacks, snaking all the way around the block? In the building where I work, there’s the hiring office of a large hotel chain. There were at least three hundred hopefuls, patiently waiting. I asked the personnel director how many jobs were available. “About thirty,” she replied.
Even though it was cold, even though only one in twenty could make it, even though the pay isn’t so hot, about 5,000 people waited up to six hours outside the Cook County Building in the Loop Monday, hoping for a job.
They were responding to an ad placed Sunday for 270 guard jobs that will open next year with the expansion of the Cook County Jail.
“We had people waiting in line since three in the morning, and by nine, we had thousands of people out there,” said William Cunningham, spokesman for Sheriff Michael F. Sheahan.
The line, four abreast, circled the
Cook County-City Hall Building at Clark and Randolph. About 4,600 single-page applications were distributed for the $21,000-a-year job of jail correctional officer. 78
A ghetto schoolteacher tells of the new fast-food chain in the neighborhood. “They were gonna hire about twenty kids. Four hundred showed up for the interviews. This is common. They don’t want to work in a job that pays below minimum wage and never get out of it. But they’re as hardworking people as you’d find anywhere. I’m talking about full employment.”
“Affirmative action” has become an explosive phrase as well as an idea. The president vetoes a civil rights bill because he’s against “quotas.” Respected journals sound the righteous battle cry: “Reverse racism.” Ben Hensley makes no public pronouncements on the subject. He’s from Harlan County, Kentucky. He’s driven buses and trucks, and is now a chauffeur for big-time executives.
“When I worked in Nashville as a helper on a delivery truck for Fred Harvey, a black fellow was working with me. He was older and had been there more years than me. They gave me the job driving and I became his boss. He knew the area better than I did, had to tell me where to go. I don’t know how many guys he trained for that job. I always wondered about it, but never mentioned it. He didn’t either. This was 1954.
“I never owned any slaves but I profited at that black fellow’s expense. I think it’s very fair to have affirmative action. For hundreds of years, the black people have had negative action. So they’re not starting even.”
Big Bill Broonzy laughs as he remembers his work-days at the foundry in the thirties. “I trained this white guy for three months. They kept him and fired me.” Black laughter swells forth in the recounting of a hurting experience. It is both a survival mechanism and a saving grace. Else you go crazy. Or sing the blues:Me and a man was workin’ side by side
Here is what it meant:
They were payin’ him a dollar an hour
They was payin’ me fifty cents
Sayin’: If you’re white, you’re right
If you’re brown, stick aroun’
But as you black, oh brother,
Get back, get back, get back.
Frank Lumpkin, a retired steelworker, has seen it all, from the Great Depression to our current troubles. “This whole business of affirmative action was no problem at all till the jobs run out. It’s no big thing when you’re on the job. If the lion and the deer is both full, nobody attacks. It’s only when the lion gets hungry, he really fights for the thing.
“At the mill, the Latinos said if the blacks gonna get up, we wanna get up. I says, ‘Look, you got twenty white foremen and one black foreman and you arguing about the one black that come up!’ It seems that we’re just fighting against each other.”
Howard Clement, a conservative black executive in North Carolina, favors affirmative action, “though there’s a bit of unfairness to it. I see it as a way to level the playing field. There must be some other way, but what it is, I don’t know. I do believe self-help is going to be the order of the day. We shouldn’t go with our hands out, depending on white society to help us.”
“When I found out I was an affirmative action case, I was devastated,” remembers a black teacher of music. “I was not that hot spit I thought I was. I understood the historical reasons for it, but I found it tough to take.”
Charles Johnson, winner of the 1990 National Book Award for fiction, teaches literature at a university in the Northwest. “On one hand affirmative action is justifiable. You need a structural solution to a problem that is centuries old. On the other hand, it’s humiliating. A person, otherwise deserving, may be perceived as something special, having gotten a degree of help he didn’t need. But without affirmative action, the first step toward hiring blacks would never have been taken.
“I suspect when I was hired at this university, it was an affirmative-action decision. It was in 1976 and there was only one other black in the English department. One out of fifty. Now there are two. So it’s not that big a change.”
What is to be made of Scholastic Aptitude Tests? The findings are, of course, devastating. As expected, black students fare poorly, in contrast to whites and Asiatics. Very poorly.
The irreverent Reverend Campbell has his own ideas. “What does it mean if the tests are written by white values? If the question has to do with pheasants under glass, white and black ghetto people will flunk. If you ask them about the breeding habits of cockroaches, they’ll make a good score. You ask a black ghetto kid why his grandmother had iron beds, he’ll know: to keep the rats from crawling up. A kid from Scarsdale will flunk. He’d say, I don’t know. I guess she just liked iron beds.’ ”
A couple of years ago, I asked a black street boy about his grandmother. His “auntie,” he called her. For the next forty-five minutes, there flowed forth tales, some apocryphal, some true, some hilarious, some poignant, all enthralling. He was Garrison Keillor, all five feet two of him. Others, freshmen members of a gang, danced around, eager to get in their two-cents’ worth. They had gran’ma stories, too. I was an hour late for dinner.
A week or so later, I asked a little white girl, attending a posh private school, about her grandmother, who was living in a retirement community in St. Petersburg, Florida. “Oh, she visits us every Christmas and brings me nice presents. She’s very nice.” That was it. She undoubtedly scored much higher in the IQ tests than the black storyteller. They were approximately the same age.
A high-school teacher, who has had trouble with black students, remembers an especially difficult one. “The girl can barely read, can barely comprehend what we’re doing. Odd thing with this girl. We did Romeo and Juliet. We’d listen to a recording, chunks at a time. She was the first to go up and interpret what she had just heard. She just had that innate way. I can’t understand it.”
Hank de Zutter feels he understands it. He teaches at a black urban college. “There may be a literacy problem in terms of the written word. But there is no literacy problem when it comes to reading people.
“If I come into class not feeling good, my students will know it immediately. They’ll say, ‘What’s wrong?’ They’ll want to know if I had a fight with my wife. They’ll want to know my feelings first. Then they’re ready for teaching.
“I think this amazing ability to read people must be able to translate itself into riches in the job world. How many jobs rely on the written word, anyway? They can wire computers to change every ‘he don’t to ‘he doesn’t.’ The highest-placed executives don’t write their own letters. Why aren’t my students, who have this unique ability to read people, working where this quality is so important? They’re experts and could be marvelous at managing people.”
In order to read other people, knowing them is the sine qua non. “We know more about you than you know about us,” the invisible folk had been saying long before James Baldwin so informed white America. “Look at me!” cried Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas. We didn’t, until he killed somebody. Somebody white. He was quite visible then, as the young gang member is when a white is his victim. Otherwise, the shades are drawn. And he’s still invisible.
As I walk down the street, mumbling to myself, I see an elderly black woman, toting two heavy bags. She’s finished a day’s work at the white lady’s house. She is weary, frowning. I say, as a matter of course, “How’s it goin’?” She looks up. Her face brightens. “Fine. And you?”
Three young black kids are swaggering along. As they come toward me, I say, “How’s it goin’?” The tall one in the middle is startled. “Fine. And you?”
A presence was acknowledged. That was all.
I am not suggesting a twilight stroll through the walkways of a public housing project. The danger is not so much black hostility as a stray bullet fired by one black kid at another. What I am suggesting is something else: Affirmative Civility.
Mamie Mobley serves as the Prologue to this book. She is the mother of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy murdered in Mississippi by two white
men. They were acquitted. It was 1955, one year after the Brown vs. Board decision, desegregating public schools. The Till case was regarded, along with the Supreme Court resolve, as a turning-point in black-white America. “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.” Or so it seemed.
Those of a certain age, both black and white, remember the boy’s name and the circumstances. Neither this knowledge nor its significance has been passed on to today’s young. To an astonishing degree, when asked to identify Emmett Till, their usual response is in the form of a question: Who? It is not a commentary on them so much as on our sense of history. Or lack of it.
On remembering her sons battered face, Mrs. Mobley’s grief is infused with awe. “I was reading in Scriptures where the Lord Jesus Christ was scarred. His face was marred beyond that of any other man, and I saw Emmett. Oh, my God! The spirit came to me and said: ‘If Jesus Christ died for our sins, Emmett Till bore our prejudices,’ so...”
The spirit that spoke to Mamie Mobley is the same one buried in Diane Romano. “One part of me is fighting the other part, which is my real deep, deep-down feeling.” Have we the will as a nation to exorcise the one and evoke the other? In order for us, black and white, to disenthrall ourselves from the harshest slavemaster, racism, we must disinter our buried history. Only then can we cross the Slough of Despond. Though John Bunyan’s stagnant bog was of the spirit, it is, in an earthly sense, the same patch of swamp that separates slave from free state. We are all the Pilgrim, setting out on this journey.