The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  Lloyd King, who closes the book, envisions a somewhat more secular trip. “I have faith we can mature. Stranger things have happened. Maybe America, maybe the world is in its adolescence. Maybe we’re driving home from the prom, drunk, and nobody knows whether we’re going to survive or not.

  “I am guardedly optimistic—definitely guardedly. If everything is going to hell, it would be hard for me to get up in the morning. But I can’t honestly say, ‘Sure, things will get better.’ We might not make it home from the prom.”

  JOSEPH LATTIMORE

  “I am a typical African-American.”

  He is fifty, an insurance broker with another small business. During my appearance as a guest on a black radio station, he, a listener, responded. We subsequently met.

  I was born and raised in Mississippi and after a stint in the army, I came to Chicago to make my fame and fortune.

  I grew up in a small community. Piney Woods. My mother was a music and math teacher: my father was blue-collar, a plasterer.

  Piney Woods was founded by a black man at the turn of the century for underprivileged black boys and girls. We had a lot of northern white people who would donate their time. They were not your typical Southern whites. I played with their small children as equals. It had an integrated staff.

  I didn’t have any real southern experience, but I was well aware. If I went to Jackson, which was twenty-two miles away, I had to sit in the back of the bus, and there were the ‘Colored Only’ fountains and bathrooms.

  Some things are better today and some things are worse. In 1954, when the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, it felt like Christmas was coming. I was fourteen. A year later, Emmett Till was killed. It made me realize that going into Jackson, I could have gotten the same treatment. I was a pretty spirited kid. If I saw a pretty white girl, I might say something, go beyond the borderline of what a black kid could say. It was all in innocence, but it could get you killed.

  When I was about five, I was making noise in the classroom. The principal, a white woman from the North, said, “Little Joe, will you be quiet? I used some profanity that the big boys had put into my vocabulary. I think I call her “a white s.o.b.” She was going to tell my mother, I said, “I don’t care, ’cause mama don’t like white folk anyhow.” When I would hear my mother and father talking about the dirty things that had happened, not by someone like this woman, I didn’t know one white from another. It was real embarrassing to my mother, and I couldn’t sit down for a week. [Laughs.] In another environment, I might have been lynched.

  We used to go to the black drugstore in Jackson. They were just ordinary people, but someone we could look up to. We didn’t think about it as anything glorious. It was just a fact of life. The neighborhood I live in now, all black, still has no black businesses. You’ve got a few in the city, but not nearly enough where kids in the summertime could work at somebody’s drugstore or cleaners.

  We encouraged our children to go to college and become computer experts. We didn’t encourage them to come back to the family business, help it grow, and become owners. We told them to go to IBM where, even if they were geniuses, they’d never be president. After they finished college, they bought houses in the suburbs or a middle-class community.

  We have left the hard-core underprivileged poor, have moved away from them and, as a result, they don’t see us, the professionals.

  My idea of Chicago, pre-1962, was almost like going to heaven. It was coming to integration, where you could sit anywhere you wanted on the bus, anywhere you wanted in the theater. Utopia. After I got here, I began to realize there was not the integration I had envisioned.

  I had just gotten out of the army. I used to hitchhike home across Highway 80, and go through Montgomery and Selma. I could hardly count the number of state police cars. I didn’t know what the heck was going on. It was some Freedom Riders or somebody.

  I never had any trouble with southern whites. They would give a person a ride if he knew “his place.” I wasn’t threatening them in anyway. My soldier’s uniform. Yet I began to realize the dangerous situation I was in.

  Vietnam was heating up. We were talking about going over there to fight for freedom, and all these buses were getting bombed and people were getting their heads cracked. I began to wonder, “Why should I go and fight for something that I don’t have on my own?” I began to take a closer look on the America that I love. Until that time, although I was aware of things, I would have jumped on a hand grenade. I loved the United States. I had seen all the John Wayne movies. [Laughs.]

  Mama, who is going on eighty-nine, was in academia and living in a world few blacks knew. She just closed her eyes to everything. My father was pretty close to militant. Mama used to get scared that somebody would overhear him talking about this country. He would be talking about Russia in a favorable way. He wasn’t political, but he just knew that we were the one meddling rather than them meddling us. And he’d talk about injustice in this country. I’d get a little ticked off, though I never said anything to him. Oh yeah, I was patriotic.

  In Chicago I started out as a bus driver for the CTA. That ended in 1968, with me getting fired and put in jail. I was a so-called leader of the strike. We had a great number of black CTA employees, but nobody in the hierarchy. It was during the Martin Luther King years. We were going to a union meeting one night. We had the numbers and were going to make changes. The president gaveled the meeting to a close as soon as it was opened. One of us jumped up and said, “If you don’t bring your ass back here, ain’t a bus that’s going to move tomorrow morning.”

  It wasn’t really planned. We went back to somebody’s house and to our separate bus garages and didn’t know what was happening at the other ones. The radio picked up the news. Other drivers on the way to work heard this. It helped us.

  Finally it happened. We were babes in the wood up against the sharks in the water. We weren’t going to budge until they gave us our demands. It’s difficult to take a working person past payday and keep him loyal. [Laughs.] We had a negotiated settlement that was really in a forked tongue. We were outmaneuvered.

  They fired us in the leadership positions. Some of us got five days for violating an injunction. We didn’t spend but a couple of hours in jail.

  During the turbulent sixties, I remember driving the Archer Avenue bus. I’d look back and see a bunch of white folks just reading their papers and feeling very comfortable. I was up there bored over whatever the hot issue of the day was and I said to myself, “Boy, I ought to run this bus right into Lake Michigan, fly it, and jump off.” [Laughs.]

  I’d driven a charter bus of policemen over to Marquette Park during one of Dr. King’s marches. That was the first time I had seen him with my own eyes.

  I saw the mob. I remember down South we used to say as soon as the old heads die out, things will be better. I didn’t challenge it. But now I saw women with two- and three-year-old children hollering, “Niggers, get out of here!” I knew that a parent was as close to God as a child would encounter. If mama was doing this, it had to be the right thing to do. Now these kids are on their own and I’m sure they have these same attitudes. I know that just living will never end bigotry. There’s a lot of things that got to be changed before these attitudes will be changed.

  I was thinking about how we celebrate George Washington. If we do anything to knock him off his pedestal, we’re really gonna run into opposition. But we got to start telling the truth. He owned other people. If they were good slaves, somebody made them good by beating them half to death or whatever you have to do to a person. It’s kind of like the Jews being made to celebrate Hitler. That’s the way black people have to celebrate slaveowners of our past.

  Remember what you asked on the radio? Is race always on a black person’s mind from the time he wakes up to the time he goes asleep? Wouldn’t that drive a person crazy? Remember my answer? We are already crazy.

  Being black in America is like being forced to wear ill-fitting shoes.
Some people adjust to it. It’s always uncomfortable on your foot, but you’ve got to wear it because it’s the only shoe you’ve got. You don’t necessarily like it. Some people can bear the uncomfort more than others. Some people can block it from their mind, some can’t. When you see some acting docile and some acting militant, they have one thing in common: the shoe is uncomfortable. It always has been and always will be.

  Unless you go back to the roots and begin to tell the truth: everybody who participated in slavery was dead wrong. Sure, black folk are probably a little insane. If a soldier back from Vietnam was captured when the war began and had been in a bamboo cage and beat half to death, first thing we’d do is rush him to a psychiatrist.

  Same thing with black people in America. Some children were sold from their mothers. A mother seeing her teen-age daughter raped by the slavemaster—I could talk forever about that. If someone would rape my daughter in front of my eyes or sold my daughter and I’d never see her again, sure I’d go crazy.

  And if I didn’t get any help, for me to raise another child with my insanity, I’d have to pass some of that along. The segregation and discrimination that the next generations went through, it was enough to drive them mad. So our foreparents have been driven mad.

  When you see a black like myself proud to call myself Joseph Lattimore, I don’t even attempt to find out who my folks were: the African name that I would truly have. It doesn’t cross my mind. Nor does it cross many blacks’. Some, like Malcolm X, yeah. But the vast majority of blacks, none of us are trying to find our way back after we have gotten out from under slavery. I don’t know where the story will end, but we are all kind of messed up.

  In the black community, we saw the same TV shows as everyone in America. So it is natural for me to want Liz Taylor more than I want Aunt Jemima. And it’s normal for my sister to want Tony Curtis over Stepin Fetchit. How would you define madness? [Laughs.]

  To get out from under this yoke, black people will try to be lighter if that’s what it takes. It’s like a mouse in a cage with a boa constrictor. The mouse will do everything he knows how to please the boa constrictor, but when the boa is ready to eat, the mouse is gone. [Laughs.] Same thing with us. I don’t care what we do, if they want to rub out King, they rub out King.

  A lot of us are still praying and trusting in God and hoping for a better day. I don’t have a lot of faith in a better day coming. 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 got the heck out of there.

  When World War II was over, the Jews didn’t break bread with the Germans and be brothers and all integrate. They said, “These people was trying to wipe us off the face of the map. Let’s get the heck out of here.”

  The Indians, as meager as their reservations are, are not in the civil rights marches saying, “Let’s integrate.” They say, “Hey, I’ve still got this little piece of dust, but I will stay here because this man will annihilate you.” I just don’t have the faith in integration I used to.

  I feel like I’m going over to someone’s house and they mistreat me. They make me sleep on the floor, they just do me all ways. I say, “Hey, I’ll go back home and anybody that visits me, I’ll treat you fair. Anybody can come visit me and I will make them feel just as welcome as the flowers in spring. But I’m not coming back to your house anymore, because you made it obvious you don’t want me.”

  You once believed in integration. . . ?

  I guess I still do. My daughter is going to the Eastman School of Music. [Laughs.] She got pissed off at me the other day. She said, “Dad, I was talking to someone and I sounded just like you.” She had protested a tiny bit because Eastman was not respecting Martin Luther King’s birthday.

  I don’t want to build up any hatred in my children, but I want them to know the truth. And the truth is not gonna be found in an American history book. We grew up with these false notions, with these rip-off things. Somebody cheated some Indians out of some land and today history books tell us what a great thing it was to get Manhattan. Taking advantage of another man...

  As far as integrating with you—we have sang “We Shall Overcome,” we have prayed at the courthouse steps, we have made all these gestures, and the door is not open. I’m just tired. Pretty soon I’ll have grandkids and they will want to sing “We Shall Overcome.” I will say, “No, we have sang that long enough.” We should not make a lifetime of singing that song. I refuse to sing it anymore.

  I respect Farrakhan. He’s an honorable man. I don’t go along one hundred percent with anything anybody says. I would question anyone who went along one hundred percent with me, as smart as I am. [Laughs.] But I thinks he’s got a lot on the ball and he is scratching where it itches—on me and whole lot of other folk.

  I don’t think he wakes up in the morning and says, “Let me tell off Whitey” I think he tells the truth as he sees it. Whitey interprets that as being told off.

  He’s advocating starting black businesses and whatnot. I agree with him. Booker T. Washington hit the nail on the head with “Cast down your bucket where you are.” It was shortly after slavery and he said, “Hey, let’s build up a community.”

  I don’t think college is a total solution. If a kid is gifted and intelligent, he should be encouraged to go. If after about ninth grade, you give him a bite of the apple and show him the way to the library, he will go and get it. And let him do something the neighborhood needs. But in the black community, we’re all saying, “Let them be computer analysts.” I don’t think that will do it.

  As for Farrakhan and anti-Semitism—In Mississippi, I didn’t distinguish between Jew and white. They were all white people as far as I was concerned. Even today I feel that. Jews might be the step-children of the white race, but they are still white. Tomorrow, if he decided he was no longer religious, he is still white.

  There was this thing about Jews having bad meat and inferior merchandise. I’m sure there is some truth in that. I think Jews got caught with their fingers on the scale, but I don’t think they were born to do this. Anybody in this capitalistic society will try to get over.

  I think Farrakhan is having a bigger and bigger influence. I don’t think it’s his religious doctrine. I don’t think there is any shortage in the Baptist churches of black people. His social ideas are what is scratching where the people itch.

  It’s like the black community has been hit in the jaw in a prizefight and they have been stung. If there are two fighters in the ring and one doesn’t know he’s in a boxing match, this other guy is going to hit him mercilessly. Black folk are still courting white folk, and white folk don’t have it anywhere on their mind.

  We went out for integration and it hasn’t happened. We put our eggs in that basket and they’re cracked. You can march, you can shout, you can do anything you want to, but I think we have to cast down the buckets where we are.

  I did really believe there would be a harmonious getting along. I was all for Dr. King’s March on Washington in ’63. But I wouldn’t take part in that now. I understand a little more now than I did then. I thought all we had to do was march and let them know we weren’t going to bomb them. And put on nice clothes and let them know we bathed and everything. And they would accept this... [Laughs.]

  I never really thought much whether I would be living next door to whites; that wasn’t a burning desire. When I’m in an elevator with all whites, I have said, “Hey, they feel uncomfortable.” I have always felt it. But I am not going to let their problem be my problem. I know the problem is there for them. I’m trying to get over mine: wearing an ill-fitting shoe every day of your life. I’m a practical joker. Sometimes I want to say, “Boo!” [Laughs.]

  I have no desire to make anyone uncomfortable. I pity misinformed white people. Here we are, a nice, gentle race that has a great desire to be friends. I imagine if I had raped your sister and cut your mother’s neck off and castrated your father and you came and told me
you wanted to be buddies with me and live next door to me, I would feel awfully uncomfortable. I think white folk, deep down inside, do have that uncomfortable feeling. He feels that if he, the white, was treated the way he treated the black, he’d want to get even. That isn’t the case, but he thinks it is.

  DIANE ROMANO

  1965

  She is thirty-five. A mother of six children, she is separated from her husband. A devout Catholic, she is awaiting Vatican approval for a chance at remarriage, though it is out of the question for the immediate future. She provides for her family with a county job as “babysitter” for jurors. She reads law books, listens to hearings in courtrooms, and hopes one day to go back to school and become a lawyer, “even if I’m sixty.”

  She has lived in the same neighborhood on Chicago’s Near West Side all her life. It is predominantly Italian, with some Mexican families nearby. Much of the community has been “renewed out” to make way for the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois. The area has the feel of an island surrounded by cement.

  I’m in sympathy with Negroes. I’ll go march with them, if it’s something big. I don’t use the term “nigger” in the house, and I never allow it. I don’t know if the oldest is testing my authority; I know he has to conform to the rest of his group. Their parents are not really anti-Negro. It’s just fear of the unknown. People here are afraid of the new. I know changes are coming and it’s not all bad. I feel just as sorry for the white people who are scared as I am for the poor colored people who don’t have much of a chance in the city.

  A Negro girl is a good friend of mine. I’ve invited her to the house four or five times. Definite dates. “I’ll expect you Sunday, three o’clock, and you’ll have dinner with me.” She always said the same thing. You see she was concerned for my welfare. “Now what do you want me to do, come up your front stairs, and stay half an hour and have your windows busted before I leave?” I don’t know what my neighbors will do. I believe I am well liked and respected by the majority of the community. Now she’s married so I’ll have to invite her husband, too. But I want my children to see these people are no different from any other people, that they talk and they have manners and they eat like we eat, and they think and they have feelings, and they’re sensitive and they’re artistic, and some of them are strange and some of them are dumb—they are just like we are. And I think I’ll do that before the summer’s out. So that everybody will be sitting outside and they’re gonna see these people come in. This is the step that’s gotta be taken. Somebody’s gotta take it.