Eyeless in Dixie

Several years ago I attended a panel discussion on “Race Relations  . . . Where Do We Go from Here?”  Evidently it was a landmark meeting considering the size of the audience and comments to the effect that such a meeting would not have been as well attended in the past, and even that it would not have taken place. 

From that analysis encouragement might be taken that times are changing. However, if the intent was to formulate a strategy for resolving some of the local racial problems I am sure many who were at that meeting would admit we have a long way to go.

I saw none of the mayors of the county’s three major communities at the meeting. I saw a chief judge, but no other elected official that I recognized. If they were there they had nothing to say.

  There were sincere, wise and thought provoking opinions expressed by the eight panelists and from members of the audience. Perhaps the most succinct was the then current, “Can’t we just get along?”

This certainly should be corollary to the Golden Rule. If we followed that simple instruction, the eleventh commandment, everyone would get along. Well, maybe, most of the time, we’re not perfect.

I have no solutions to offer. Considering the complexity of the problem—the many problems—and the many viewpoints on the causes of those problems. 

Are “prejudice” and “racism” the same? Can someone harbor prejudicial attitudes towards others yet not be a racist? 

I don’t think there is a human being on this earth that doesn’t hold some prejudices. We are conditioned to prejudice by experience. We react emotionally to events in our lives and are influenced by the attitudes of our peers and parents. My grandmother being of Scottish lineage never met an “Englishman” that she didn’t hold a grudge against. To her they were all “Johnny Bulls.” It you are aquatinted with the history of the Scots and the Brits you might understand why she felt that way. (And because my affection for her, I have a twinge of resentment when I see that symbol of colonialism, the Union Jack.) 

My grandmother’s prejudice was not a racist cant; it was social and political, arising out of nationalist feelings for Scotland. She did not see the British as a separate race, but as oppressors; she did not advocate boiling all Englishmen in their plum puddings, but she wouldn’t invite them to supper. 

Prejudicial people can also be racists.

Racism is a far more virulent and deadly. Racism condemns whole populations to exclusion. The Holocaust in Europe during World War II happened when segments of society were portrayed in organized propaganda to be the cause of moral and economic corruption. The majority of these people were Jews, defined by “the master race” as an “inferior race” by way of a flawed fabrication of ethnic identity. In a totalitarian society that worshiped the myth of racial purity and claimed to tolerate nothing less, the remedy to inferiority was extermination. 

My education in the effects of racism came when as a callow 19-year-old airman I was assigned to an airbase at Jackson, Mississippi. During the next six-and-a-half years I spent time in Florida, Puerto Rico, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. The first lesson I learned was it wasn’t polite to say the Civil War was over, and that the South had lost. In the ‘50s, when Illinois first garnished its license plates with “Land of Lincoln,” parking your car on the streets of Biloxi, Mississippi, risk having your ties slashed or worse. As one of those pre-civil rights, small town raised “Yankee soldier boys,” blind to the implications of the deeply held and rigidly adhered to tenets of racial segregation, I was perplexed, but not necessarily angered by segregation’s ramifications. I was told by a genteel southern lady that the ”Nigrahs” were like so many children, who had to be restrained from improper behavior, and kept in their place. It really was for their own good,she said. 

Sure, I had had some experience with prejudice having grown up in the 1930s and ‘40s. I attended a grade school where the student population was 30 or 40 percent African-American. But as I recall whatever racial tension existed there came from the usual childish rivalries for playground status, territorial disputes and bullying by older students both black and white.

Down in Dixie in the ‘40s and 50s it was a whole different ball game.

Riding the West Capitol Street bus between Hawkins Field and downtown Jackson introduced me to the ground rules of segregation in the South. Black people entered the bus by the front door, dropped their fares into the box and then exited the bus and walked to the rear entrance where they again got onto the bus and sat in the seats at the rear. Once I saw a man who evidently had been shopping and was carrying some packages. He did not get to the back door in a timely manner in the opinion of the bus driver. As the man grasped the edge of the door it snapped shut trapping his hand and the bus took off. The man ran beside the bus for a block until it stopped at the next corner and the door opened. Out of breath and shaking, he climbed into the bus. 

I saw that black people could buy a sandwich in a restaurant, but had to eat it outside. Drinking fountains, bathrooms, even movie theater seating, all segregated, and as I saw it, ironically, keeping both blacks and whites in their place. 

One winter evening I boarded the bus and found it empty except for one African-American woman sitting in a seat that was ahead of the back entrance. The significance of this seemed unimportant until a few blocks later a man got on and as he dropped his fare in the box I looked up and saw him staring intently toward the rear of the bus. I had been daydreaming about the young lady I was going to take to the movies. Then, as if my dreaming had become a nightmare, I was suddenly keenly aware that something frightening was about to happen. Everything seemed to come sharply into focus: the harsh penetrating light inside the bus, the darkness outside the windows, the menacing way the man walked down the aisle toward the woman, the rumbling of the bus as it picked up speed. The man bent down, shouted, and grabbed the woman by both arms. I saw her face contorted, anguished. He pulled her to her feet and walked her to the last seat at the back of the bus. He pushed her down, said something again. She shook her head and glared at him. He turned, and then I saw how pale and passive his face was, how his eyes caught the overhead light, how neatly he was dressed in shirt and tie. He sat in the seat where the woman had been sitting, folded his hands in his lap. He looked toward me for a long moment, then turned and confronted his own reflection in the dark window.

Once, while sitting in the small cafe that was attached to the operations room at the airbase, I noticed a bird colonel come in. He wore the wings of a senior pilot and a 12th Air Force patch on his sleeve. I later learned he was just passing through, and was waiting for his plane to be refueled. The colonel ordered coffee and a sandwich, but instead of sitting at one of the tables he went back into operations. A few moments later, on my way back to the weather station, I saw the colonel eating his sandwich seated in a chair in the operations lounge. For him, apparently, being an African-American, the cafe run by a Jackson concessionaire was off limits. He could buy his food there, but he had to eat it somewhere else.

Did I, back then, as a young white man in the segregated south, become angry, did my conscience rise up in righteous indignation? A little angry, perhaps, after a while, but there was the feeling this was the way things were, and I could not conceive of any way that they would be changed. Yet, within a few short years Sarah Louise Keys, Claudet Colvin, and Rosa Parks would refuse in acts of civil disobedience to give up their bus seats. The Montgomery bus boycott followed, and the Civil rights movement began to gather momentum.