A look back. We've come a long way.
"We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."
Martin Luther King, Jr. 1968
Republican myth-making imagines an earlier period of national greatness, a Golden Age of MAGA prosperity. There was social order. Traditions were observed. Blacks and Women knew their places. One nation under God. Democratic thought leaders have been sharing another mythic past, one that posits that unequal power between the races is a central force in American culture and politics, there from the beginning. The myth understands racism and injustice to be better hidden now, but they persist. They are systemic, hard wired into American laws and institutions.
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| Slessler |
Larry graduated from Medford, Oregon's one public high school in 1957. There were no Black students then, nor were there any in 1967 when I graduated as part of a class of 800. Larry's life experience widened after college and his entry into the military.
Guest Post by Larry Slessler
In early 1962, two years before the Beatles' U.S. musical invasion, before segregation was repealed, and 6 years before Martin Luther King was assassinated, I was a brand new 2nd Lieutenant assigned to a duty posting in the Jim Crow state of South Carolina. I was 21 and my wife, Kathie, was 19. Both of us were naive “kids” from Medford, Oregon. South Carolinian culture felt like being in a foreign land.
Money was tight for us. Even adjusting for inflation, my monthly military pay of $305 did not allow for frills. My wife was pregnant with my first daughter, Jennifer, later born in May, 1962. We were lucky because the bus line ran a block from our newly rented house. Kathie could take the bus to and from appointments.
In late March Kathie waited at the bus stop for her first South Carolina bus ride and appointment with a military doctor. Kathie lived in the country growing up and school buses were her norm. Kathie climbed aboard the bus and went directly to her favorite spot, the bench seat at the very back of the bus. She paid no attention to her surroundings. After a short time the bus driver walked back to her and suggested she would be much more comfortable up front. Kathie politely replied that she preferred the back and didn’t move.At this point there was a culture and legal problem. South Carolina buses were segregated, and this 19 year old blond, fair skinned and obvious mother-to-be was sitting in the “Colored” section of the bus. She was oblivious.
The driver, by now in a mild panic, insisted that the ride up front would be so much better. Again Kathie said she liked the back. Finally the driver said, “You can’t ride back here, it is the law.” Sunrise dawned in my wife’s mind. She noticed there were only Black folks in the back area and all of them were avoiding eye contact with the bus driver and that dumb blond girl from some other planet besides earth.
The driver finally realized this crazy White girl was not going to budge. He knew what to do if a Black tried to sit in the White section. He likely had never considered what to do if a White tried to sit in the Black section.
Kathie told me that night over dinner that the bus driver rushed to the driver’s seat and attempted to break the land speed record before depositing “Crazy White girl” at the military stop. Today there would be a dozen camera phone recordings on a dozen news channels of the event. I suspect there were a number of dinner table discussions that night in 1962, in both White and Black homes, about the crazy girl.
A few weeks later Kathie went into labor. Adventures continued. About 20 minutes after my daughter Jennifer was born, another mother on the ward came down with Chicken Pox. All the moms and newborns were sent home.
A few weeks later I was assigned to a three month Intelligence School in Texas. Lt. Slessler, Kathie, and five-week-old daughter Jennifer headed to Texas. I would return to South Carolina in October, 1962 in time to deploy to Florida and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I served in South Carolina, Texas, Florida and Alabama from late 1961 to August 1964. I got to live in and observe the segregated South, the laws, the upheaval of de-segregation, and the chaos of that early de-segregation. My early world was segregation in my civilian life and integration when on my military duty stations. I could socialize with blacks on any place that was military, but could not in the town I lived in.
I am proud that Kathie defied the color barrier in 1962. In July of 1964 Kathie, Jennifer, and I visited the closest national park to witness the desegregation in action. The park was deserted. Blacks and Whites stayed home. The next month, August 1964, came the Gulf of Tonkin event and escalation of the war in Vietnam. I was on tour in Vietnam for a year. I saw Black and White blood flow in an equality not yet achieved back home.
7 comments:
"Republican myth-making..."
The operative is "myth".
Mr. Webster: "a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events."
A second definition: "a false belief".
Nuf said...
The folklore in question here is in regard of the institution of slavery which, while abolished in principle never stopped in practice. Republicans, who used espouse a belief democratic values, have abandoned this pretense and now openly advocate a return to Jim Crow, with the attendant mythology of white superiority. Every day in every part of this nation civil rights laws are violated in ways small and large because bigots can operate with impunity. Until this nation faces economic discrimination it will continue to decline because its founding principles are cynically compromised.
One example is reparations, a completely reasonable proposal to address economic inequality, that is vehemently, viscerally opposed by those who cannot admit their biases, and convenient historical amnesia.
Posted on behalf of Art Baden:
In 1942, my mother was working in a clerical job in Washington DC. On the weekends, she and her friends would take the bus to Arlington for a picnic. When the bus reached the middle of the bridge over the Potomac, the driver would stop the bus so all the black people could move to the back of the bus and the whites to the front. The bus was entering Virginia. My mother, having grown up in NYC, riding busses and subways every day, was incredulous.
In 1945 my mother who was 26 at the time, was employed as a civilian for the US Army at the Port of Embarkation, in Brooklyn, NY. Working in the personnel office, she reviewed the files of the troops returning from a Europe on the troop ships, and found them positions on the base, for the period before they were mustered out of the service.
One day she got a call from a Major. “Are you Miss Bremer?,” the southern drawled voice asked. “Do me a favor and start sending me better looking troops for my unit.” Having no idea what he was talking about she ignored the call. A week later the Major showed up at her work station. “Miss Bremer, I did ask you to send me better looking troops, did I not?” He about faced, and left. She went in to see her supervisor, another officer, to get an explanation. There were no WAC’s flowing through the base, only men. He explained to her that this Colonel was from the South, and didn’t want any black troops in his unit. This was before Truman desegregated the armed forces.
As a child, my pediatrician was Dr. Friedman. Once in his office for a check up in the late 1960’s, I noticed that his medical diploma was from the University of Berne, in Switzerland. I remarked to my mother, “Wow, Dr. Friedman must have come from a wealthy family, to have been able to go to medical school in Europe!” “No,” she replied, “When Dr. Friedman got his undergraduate degree in the 1930s, there were tight quotas on Jewish students at all the medical schools, so he had to go to Europe to become a doctor.
When I was beginning my insurance career in the 1980’s, I was working for a firm, one of whose principals was a haughty older woman who did a lot of business in London, at Lloyd’s. One day she took me aside and told me that I should work at not being so Jewish. As an aside, I was the most successful producer in the office. Later on, on a business trip to Lloyds, having tea, an Oxford educated underwriter recounted how he used to visit the North Shore of Long Island as a child before the riff raff moved in. I hadn’t lived on the North Shore, I grew up in a housing project in Queens, but I knew who he meant by riff raff… me.
My son, who is African American, when he was a five year old, would be followed around the Walgreens in our suburban Chicago community, by store clerks. His mother had to tell him to never put his hands in his pockets in stores. At the food court in the mall, customers would grab their bags and purses as our little boy walked by to get another soft drink from the McDonalds.
America sure was great.
Art Baden
Yes, we’ve come a long way. But as a measure of how far we have to go, a ‘birther’ ex-president of the United States spent the MLK, Jr. holiday weekend telling an adoring crowd that whites are being sent to the back of the line for COVID treatments and vaccines – pure racist bullshit.
As of 2019, Oregon’s Black population was just over 2%. Portland remains the whitest big city in the United States. These small numbers are not an accident. They reflect policies, practices and ideologies in effect for 180 years.
No doubt the usual suspects will lament the quest for social justice and insist America’s racial history is inappropriate for children (“Woke!” “CRT!!”). Whether they like it or not, whites will soon be just another minority. What makes America great is that people of all races and religions can live together in relative peace. Let’s not allow Trumplicans to ruin it.
Perhaps even more important than acknowledging we've come a long way is refusing to go back to toxic, segregated race-group determinism. The pop-CRT of America's most prominent civil rights thinker, Ibram X. Kendi, author "How To Be An Anti-Racist", now proliferates in nearly all societal venues.
For Kendi, King's wish for post-racial, color-blind amity, and his ultimate trust in America and her institutions, was naive at best; at worst, a haven for repurposed white supremacy. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, et al, define racism itself as "whiteness", and vice versa.
Dr. King's most famous words are in essence inverted by a new generation of self-anointed black leaders, and by their ingratiating white-savior allies: "I have a dream that one day my four children will live a nation where the content of their character is determined by the color of their skin".
African Americans suffered about 350 years of brutal, state-sanctioned racial oppression in the colonies and the United States. There are people who would like to pretend that it’s no longer relevant – that it has no bearing on current events, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding – and would just as soon erase it from memory. To that end they’ve even co-opted one sentence from one speech by MLK, Jr, imagining that it sums him up and rationalizes their cluelessness. It doesn’t.
Here’s a quote that goes more to the heart of his message: “It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle — the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic.”
On a vacation in 2007,my family and I stopped in Medford and were impressed what a nice place it would be to finish raising our sons, so we moved in. Over a short time it became clear that we were right. It is a good place to raise kids, as long as they are white. Our two adopted sons are Black.
In the 1980’sI was a sales manger for a copier company located in Stockton, California. We were trying to hire a salesman for the Modesto area when a personable Black man applied for the position. I took him into the streets of Modesto to give him an idea how a copier salesman approaches the public. As we began cold calling various businesses looking needs and generally introducing ourself as a company from Stockton with a great reputation and a wide variety of products. Suddenly, I was brought up short by a subtle move made by a prospect as we entered his store. The owner looked blankly at us then his hand reached under the counter. No gun was drawn. But the move and cold look told the whole story. My sales trainee said, “I knew this was going to happen” ;you should see when my church basketball team comes to a Modesto to play another church at the school gym on the weekend” “No thank you.” This place is not for me, I’d starve to death.”
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