By Donald Wright
Black History Month has come along — as I hope it will continue to do — and as one who taught black history for several decades, I feel the urge to write about it.
As the month progresses, we are reminded of people of African descent in America’s past, of local manifestations of black culture, and of how African Americans fought for their own freedom and risked their lives in our country’s wars to better the existence of us all. This is most welcome. What I see less of are personal stories, especially told by those generally regarded as white, as I am, about the racism that surrounded them as they grew up. Here are a few of my stories.
I spent my youth in Indiana, a state with its share of Ku Klux Klan supporters in the 1920s — my father told me he remembered a cross-burning down the block from his home — but by mid-century was no longer a hotbed of overt racism. My city was a mid-size industrial center, where job-seeking African-American migrants from the South had given it a racially mixed population.
My early introduction to the racism of the day was more subtle than glaring. Nothing in the city was segregated by law nor were there separate facilities for blacks, but, as in many places, most African Americans lived in a particular section of the city.
In mine, it was “The North End.” Each of the city’s elementary schools served students from nearby homes, making the schools largely segregated. My guess, in looking back, is that of the city’s dozen elementary schools, nine were all-white, a couple were racially mixed, and the one serving The North End, Nicholson School, was all black.
I was on my school’s 6th-grade basketball team. For games against the other schools on their courts, we’d wear school clothes on the ride over, bring along our uniforms, and change in the school’s locker room. When a Saturday-morning game against Nicholson came along, our coach called a team meeting the Friday before, solely to warn us that this was not like playing at the other schools and that we should be sure not to bring anything of value with us to the game, implying that it was likely to be stolen. When I came home and told my mother, she rolled her eyes and used her most extreme expression: “Oh, for goodness gracious!”
No one had anything stolen; I think we lost the game.
A few years later, when I was in junior high, my city began discussing building a public swimming pool. A couple of country clubs had pools for their members, but for everyone else there was nowhere to swim and cool off during the humid summers.
The problem about having a public pool was, in a word, race. A group of white city residents didn’t want to swim with blacks or even swim in a pool where Blacks had been swimming. The idea was floated at a city council meeting to build the pool, have it open only to white swimmers Wednesdays through Sundays, open it to Blacks on Mondays, and then close the pool for draining and cleaning on Tuesdays. I was old enough to be appalled by the discussion.
The city ended up not building the pool for all the time I lived there.
Then, there were my college years. I attended a liberal arts college, which had a reputation for educating future leaders of the business world (Boy, did I miss out on that, eh?). My fraternity had a “no-Blacks” clause, which we successfully petitioned to have removed during my final year on campus. That didn’t matter, however, because I do not remember a single non-white student coming through fraternity rush.
Recalling this prompted me to look through my yearbooks from the years I attended. Of the 1,624 students who graduated between 1963 and 1966, eight were Black. (For those interested in next month’s focus on Women’s History, seven of the eight were men).
A few years after college came the sobering experience — in lots of ways — of my years in the U.S. Air Force. My station was Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. When my wife and I arrived there, Aug. 15, 1968, she sought work in public schools. The county was overjoyed to have her because, as the state desegregated its schools “at all deliberate speed” following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, it was required to have two white teachers in each of its still all-Black schools.
One of those schools needed a white teacher just two weeks before school year started. Though her license was to teach music, my wife was hired to teach 2nd grade. Her classroom was “auxiliary,” meaning it was a made-over mobile home set in the school yard beside a larger building.
On the first day of school, more than half the students showed up not wearing shoes and many never had money for the cafeteria lunch. During the term, when one of the students fell and badly cut her arm, my wife rushed the 7-year-old girl to a nearby doctor’s office, only to be instructed to exit the building and bring in the still bleeding girl through the door at the building’s rear.
The school closed the next year as, 15 years after the famous court decision, integration finally came to Montgomery county’s public schools.
These and similar stories make Black History Month, for me, a time of reflection. May it work the same for others — for a long time.
Donald R. Wright is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of History, Emeritus, at SUNY-Cortland. In 2005-06 he held the Mark Clark Chair of History at The Citadel. He is author of books on African, African-American, and Atlantic histories. Don and his wife Doris live in Beaufort.
