I grew up in Medford, Oregon. I was 17-turning-18 and had never met a Black person. Or an Hispanic. Or a Jew. Or a Muslim.
Those two things are related.
The lawsuit alleges Harvard discriminates against Asian-Americans and gives special privilege to Black and Hispanic students. Harvard says not so. It says the whole person is considered in its admissions, of which race is just one factor. It says it tries to create a diverse student body, for the benefit of all students.
I entered college woefully unprepared for life in America. Oregon has a history on race. The original Oregon constitution forbade Blacks from living in the state. White settlers, including groups that called themselves "The Exterminators," removed native people from Southern Oregon in the Rogue River Wars of 1851-1855. It was fought on and around my farm. I had no inkling whatever of that history. It wasn't taught in school. As a child and youth I accepted the world I saw. Everyone was White except the family that owned a Chinese-American restaurant. I thought that was normal. That was the world I saw. I watched on television the civil rights struggles taking place in the American South in the early 1960s. It seemed distant and baffling. My lack of exposure did not make me prejudice-free. It made me blind. I was culturally incompetent.
Larry Slessler was 10 years ahead of me in the Medford school system. His story parallels mine. His story is a window into the changes over the past 60 years. Those changes didn't just happen. They were resisted, and still are.
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| Slessler, 1961 |
Guest Post by Larry Slessler
Back in the “horse and buggy days” of my 1950’s Medford High School athletic career, there were 5 teams in the Southern Oregon Conference. Klamath Falls was one of them. In basketball we played each conference team four games for a total of 16 conference games.
During that time there was no Interstate-5 or Highway 140, with a mostly-straight, 55-MPH route through to the other side of the Cascades. The only route to Klamath Falls was the slow, winding Highway 66 over the Green Springs, steep grades, narrow shoulders, and passengers getting car-sick from the tight curves. Winter travel by bus was tricky at best. Driving back from Klamath Falls in the middle of a winter stormy night was not a risk school leaders were willing to take. Thus, Klamath Falls became an overnight trip for our team. Except for the state tourney, then held in Eugene, going to Klamath Falls was a rare, exciting overnight bus trip for me. We stayed in the Winema Hotel in downtown Klamath Falls. Heady times for a 1950’s West-Medford kid.
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| Medford Hotel, circa 1971 |
Underclassman Glen Moore on the Klamath Falls team was the best player in the conference and one of top players in the state. Glen was taller, faster, quicker, and an all-around better player than anyone on our Medford team. We squeaked out one victory but Glen took us to the woodshed in the other three contests. Klamath Falls got three wins out of four.
A few weeks ago I was comparing notes with a former Klamath Falls basketball player 3 years younger than I am, and a year behind Glen. He related a basketball trip to Medford after I had moved on to college. The Klamath Coach had booked team reservations in the Medford Hotel. The Medford Hotel was the best hotel out of the three or four in downtown Medford in those days.
After the game, the Klamath Falls team rode the bus to the Hotel. The coaches went in to make final arrangements and were gone a long time. When the coaches returned they announced a change in plans. The team would stay at a motel, near Central Point as my friend remembered it.
You may be wondering why the change in plans and why the coaches were gone so long. Glen Moore, the best basketball player in Southern Oregon and arguably in the state of Oregon, was Black. The Medford Hotel would not allow a black Klamath Falls athlete to stay in the hotel.
I forgot to mention there were no, none, zero Blacks in the Medford School system in my day. The good old days were true for me. I am white, male, a three-sport athlete and musical. If you were black, brown or a girl -- well not so much. My father-in-law attended Medford Sacred Heart Catholic School in his youth. He remembered the KKK, in their robes and mounted on horses riding around the school playground. I sometimes forget that Catholics and Jews were/are also the targets of the KKK.
My unknown future in the late 1950’s would lead me to military assignments in the segregated South in 1962, 1963 and 1964. Medford of the 1950’s looked better than the South. However that was a superficial look only because no Black people were allowed to live in Medford.
28 comments:
We had one girl who was “black” in 4 th grade and I remember it was a big deal. At the 10 year reunion for the 1971 graduating class I saw her and was amazed to see how white she was. She and others may have viewed her as “black” but I wouldn’t guess that if she walked by me.
Peter said: “I had no inkling whatever of that history. It wasn't taught in school.”
In a lot of places, such as Florida, they’re still trying to spare White children the discomfort of learning American history. Too “woke.”
I was raised in the integrated military, but spent some of my childhood in segregated Florida. I still remember all the Whites Only signs. At the pools that didn’t allow people with too much melanin in their skin, Whites lay around in the sun trying to increase their skin’s melanin content.
The KKK may no longer strut around in their bedsheets, but racist attitudes haven’t changed. Even in my youth they seemed stupid to me, but now that I’m older I’ve broadened my perspective. Now they seem stupid, cruel and entitled.
Peter, you were prejudiced, blind and culturally incompetent. You were woefully unprepared for life in America. So was almost everyone else and even those who try to overcome such prejudice and blindness still have things to learn.
Listen to Vera Myers in the TED talk linked below as she describes two instances of personal shortcomings she and a companion had. Her talk is compelling in many aspects and particularly in the idea of how efforts of color blindness only produce blindness and prejudice.
I appreciate Larry Slessler's observation that the good old days of the 1950's were not very good for the majority. Making the future into good days for everyone does not involve trying to go back to those bad old days that you and he write about, but rather it involves embracing our diversity and including everyone.
While not suggesting they are all not, this is an important column. Thank you and Mr. Slessler for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYyvbgINZkQ
The sins of the past (racial discrimination motivated by racism) do not justify the sins of the present (racial discrimination motivated by anti-racism). Two wrongs don’t make a right.
“Equity“ is a euphemism for racial discrimination. Demands that an institution “look like America“ are clever rhetoric for demanding a racial quota system.
I was always against racial discrimination against anyone. I still am, and that includes racial discrimination against me.
My Dad brought us to Medford on the Christmas break from school in December 1962, the middle of my Sophomore year. There were still no black kids in the School which as I recall was larger than SOC (Southern Oregon College), nor were there any Hispanic students. In a school of nearly 3,000 students, there were perhaps 5 or 6 children of Chinese descent. I entered the Army not long after graduating Medford, and it was a somewhat rude awakening for a whitebread kid from Oregon, to be thrown into a very diverse culture, with Black's from all over the West Coast, Latinos, including a few Cubans, refugees from Castro.
I honestly can't say that Medford is all that much different now, for in my occasional forays downtown, I rarely see people often Color, and I well remember the young black man who worked with my wife for a local trucking company, and was attacked and savagely beaten riding his bicycle home from work one night, and a Black Doctor, in the ear L y 90s who had to close his practice and move because the local medical Community would not refer him any patients.
Whether or not schools bothered to teach it, the fact is that Native Americans were nearly exterminated in the U.S. Meanwhile, Blacks endured centuries of slavery, abuse, terrorism and the denial of basic human rights, leaving a legacy of gross inequities between Blacks and Whites in health, wealth and education that persist to this day. In spite of all this, we now have many of the well-fed privileged and entitled whining that they’re the ones being discriminated against. It brings to mind “White Man’s Blues” by Martin Mull, which goes something like this:
Well I woke up this morning and saw my Beemer was gone.
Yeah I woke up this morning and saw my Beemer was gone.
I got so damn mad I threw my martini across the lawn.
Wanting not to be discriminated against is not “whining.“
In the civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s we used to sing, “Black and white together, we shall not be moved.“ MLK had a dream where all children would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. That was a goal that every decent person could get behind.
There are people in this country who are in trouble; we should help them. But we will never get the consensus we need for that by splitting the country into tribes and demanding that one particular tribe agree to be discriminated against. That’s a recipe for generating backlash and polarization.
Look around; what do you see? I see the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
Good song, exactly.
Also, as Abigail Adams wrote in a letter to her husband, John Adams, on March 31, 1776, "Remember the ladies..." At least she tried.
With the Tennessee General Assembly being in the news again lately, it is worth noting that Tennessee was the last and deciding state legislature to vote to "allow" adult female citizens to vote, when the 19th Amendment finally was passed in 1920.
That was only the beginning of gaining our rights to "wealth, health and education." Also assistance and recourse for victims and survivors of domestic violence, sexual harassment and sexual assault.
And now women are fighting to be recognized as "women" because some radical transgender people and their allies think that being female or male is merely a state of mind. God help us all.
Postscript: I neglected to include that women and girls must also, yet again, fight to be "allowed" to decide how many children we want to have. Fifty years of freedom and self-determination were wiped away by a small group of religious, mostly male, dishonest judges.
It really is very difficult being a real woman living under patriarchy on planet earth. We know that males are bigger, stronger, richer and have most of the power. But I am so proud of what we have accomplished against the odds. "Ain't no stopping us now."
Just as Peter, I graduated from MHS in 1967. I lived on the SW side of Medford (Griffin Creek and Jefferson were my grade schools) Griffin Creek was all white, I don't remember any other races or cultures.
Jefferson had one family of Klamath Indians, and almost all the kids associated with the restaurant known as Kim's. I'm sure Larry, Peter, and Ed remember it. I remember 4th grade and being seated alphabetically. Ivan, the Klamath young man, and Gary from the Kim's families were in front and behind me respectively. I really had no idea they were "different". I was fascinated when Ivan's family got a large settlement from the federal government when the reservation for the Klamath got bought in order to create a national forest. $50,000 as I recall. They squandered the money because they had no training or education as to how to manage such a sum. For example they bought a washer and dryer, that remained on the front porch. They had no plumbing and only basic electricity. The BIA certainly didn't care, but I wondered why they were treated this way. I still resent what happened to them. My friend had all this money, and then his family again had none. Not even indoor plumbing, just west of King's Highway in Medford on Garfield.
Gary brought a black egg to school for show and tell. He explained it was a Chinese delicacy, and gave all his classmates a small taste. This was our only foray into other cultures in all my years of school in Medford.
There is a remnant of the migrant worker culture in Medford that still exists. On South Stage Road near it's intersection with King's Hwy, on the north side, are some small houses that the Naumes Orchard built for migrant workers hired to work in the orchards.
Lastly, in 1930 my mother and her family migrated from Georgia to Phoenix. They had lost everything at the beginning of the depression. They came to Phoenix to live with a relative, and to help run the "Motor Court" that sat alongside Hwy 99. It was called Ever Shady, and was the forerunner of Golden Horizons Mobile home park. It was close to Blount's Fruit and Produce an orange building fronting Hwy 99. (It all burned in the Almeda Fire) Along with the four kids, they brought their black nanny. Before they could unpack what belongings they had, the city demanded that the nanny be sent back to Georgia before sunset. She was not to be allowed in town for even one night. So they bought a Greyhound bus ticket and sent her back to Georgia never to be heard from again. Nonetheless, my grandparents and mother remained unrepentant racists their entire lives.
I saw my first black person at age 10 on a bus in San Francisco. Does that count?
Post Script to my comment above:
My father's family came to Oregon from Illinois in 1852. They settled in the far reaches of the upper Applegate in 1854. I have no idea if they were racist or not, but an article I just read today about a small town in the upper Applegate made me wonder. Oregon was constituted as a whites only state. I am proud to have voted to strike that from the Oregon Constitution. It is sad that such a correction took over 150 years to take place.
Michael says, “ I was always against racial discrimination against anyone. I still am, and that includes racial discrimination against me.”
My response, sir? Sorry to be so rude. POOR BABY. No offense.
Moving on.
As an ESL tutor, 40-50 years ago, maybe, I was invited o a kermesh at riverside park. About 300 Latinos, two whities, including me and another ESL tutor.
I was blown away! I asked a nearby hombre, Are all these folks from Medford? They certainly don’t live in Grants Pass!
Wrong. He told me they were almost all from GP. I asked where they hung out, as I’d never laid eyes on so many. He said they mostly stayed home, or with friends, because when they went anywhere with gringos they got hassled. Made me sad. And mad.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The price that America must pay for the continued oppression of the Negro and other minority groups is the price of its own destruction.” He also reminded us: “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
The U.S. is polarized because the far-White never stopped fighting the Civil War. Now they're freaked out about becoming another minority due to our changing demographics. White nationalists can whine about it all they want, but the days of White privilege will soon be just another shameful chapter in our history.
No problem with your rudeness, Malcolm. It just reflects poorly on you.
The “basket of deplorables” approach worked out so well for Hillary. Keep it up, maybe you will get a different result this time…
After they stole most of land from Native Americans and killed off most of the population, white men, primarily from the Christian tradition, got a HUGE headstart on everyone else. Our society was set up that way by, what a coincidence, white men. Therefore, certain remedies are necessary.
Some black families, at this point, are very well educated, prosperous and well-connected. The Obamas are only one obvious example. Some white kids are dirt poor from very disadvantaged backgrounds. We should focus on helping disadvantaged and marginalized people in general, not people who are already doing very well for themselves.
The only thing that didn't work out for Hillary was that she was, objectively speaking, one of the most baggage-laden presidential candidates whose ever run for office. The deplorables were going to vote against her regardless of if she called them deplorable or not, the main problem she had was that outside of mainstream capital D Democrats, she wasn't exactly generating enthusiasm. Even sleepy ole Uncle Joe gets alot more enthusiasm than Hillary did, in large part because 4 years later he was A. Not Trump and B. Not nearly as baggage laden (fair or unfair) as Hillary was.
On a different note it I'd always amusing to see old rich white guys whining about being the "victim" of racism. It's a legit LOL for those of us who don't live in the Fox News bubble. But by God it's damn good entertainment.
Goll darn it Mr. Trigoboff, you use your typing purdier than a $20 whore!
Thanks, woke guy.
Totally lacking anything substantive to say, woke guys resort to snark and juvenile attempt at humor. Or, when they can be present in large groups, they do everything they can to shut down anything resembling rational discussion, the way they recently did at Stanford and Yale Law Schools.
Actually, Woke Guy's observations about Hillary were far more substantive than Trigoboff's, but whatever.
"Whatever" hits the nail on the head perfectly Mike. Pretty hard to engage in a "rational discussion" with folks who think white people are being racially discriminated against haha. When your starting point is wildly irrational, attempts at humor are about the only non-waste of time. I thought my plagiarized almost-quote from Blazing Saddles was a real knee-slapper!
Woke Guy -
Sadly, there is something to the complaints about folks being overly sensitive, whether it's the Trumplican deplorables or the progressive pronoun people. Imagine the reaction if Mel Brooks came out with Blazing Saddles today! They're "revising" Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl books, for Christ's sake.
For just one of many examples, the DEI movement is now opposed to blind auditions for symphony orchestras. It turns out that not enough minority musicians were being hired when the judges only had the quality of the music to go on. They had to be able to see what race the musicians were in order to make the numbers come out “right”.
Take a guess which race they were discriminating against. Take a guess what that did to the quality of the music.
Michael, bullshit. References in order.
Malcolm,
Ever heard of Google? Look it up yourself.
Maybe try doing that before you break out the expletives? Just a thought…
Malcolm,
I decided to help you out in case the challenge presented by the user interface of Google is too much for you. Here’s just one of many links you can find out there on the Internet about ending blind auditions for symphony orchestras:
link
Mike said,
Sadly, there is something to the complaints about folks being overly sensitive…
Occasionally, Mike and I agree; maybe there’s hope for the world.
I hate to admit it but Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” was one of the most astute comments of her campaign. Makes her seem pretty untouchable compared to her opponent who had ZERO astute comments, not only in the campaign, but during his entire life. Yes, you can fool some of the people all of the time…
“ Malcolm,
I decided to help you out in case the challenge presented by the user interface of Google is too much for you. Here’s just one of many links you can find out there on the Internet about ending blind auditions for symphony orchestras:
link
OmidoG” You’re right! Congratulations. This is the rare example of a bad practice regarding an attempt at equality. I do hope, however, that this one example doesn’t encourage your propensity to paint anyone who’s not a racist with a filthy broad brush!
Malcolm said...
Michael, see what you think of this article whose writer opposed blind additions. Nothing to do with racism, or mysogeny, by the way.
https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/eyes-wide-shut-the-case-against-blind-auditions/
Good article. I agree with most of it.
It doesn’t advocate the “anti-racist” racial discrimination that I am opposed to.
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