I just watched a great movie that brought back some long faded memories: The Butler. It wasn’t so much that I could identify with the characters. And the politics was only peripheral. What made the flick so personal were the reenactments of the Freedom Rider activities, the sit-in at the lunch counter, but mostly, the actual archive footage of the one-sided hate filled street battles.
I’m old enough to remember the violent spasms that contracted our society and culture in the sixties. I also remember cheering on George Wallace and Bull Connor and the white people as they beat the marchers senseless, sicced the dogs on them, or dragged them out of Woolworth’s by the hair. It was a very confusing time and the memories are tainted by a red mist of hate that stained my thinking for years.
I thought that I would share some of my memories with anyone who doesn’t understand just how powerful cultural influences are and how tough they are to escape. I was just a youngster when this struggle for equality finally festered to the point of explosion. I was born in Georgia to two full blown KKK-loving racists. My parents were born around the turn of the 20th century in the heart of Jim Crow country. If you weren’t a white Christian, you were the target of the worst kind of hatred and my parents were very vocal about their feelings.
In Georgia in the sixties, everybody my parents socialized with was an unrepentant racist. It was just there, permeating the culture. My siblings and I were steeped in it. When the blacks got what they had coming, we all cheered. When the government intervened to force order, it was like refighting the War of Northern Aggression.
I still remember my folks’s reaction when Kennedy and Johnson started pushing for the Civil Rights Laws. They didn’t believe that the Democrats from the South would ever go along with such an outlandish attack on their culture of supremacy. They were very disappointed and angry when Johnson bulldozed the southern block. Their disillusionment eventually forced them to switch to the Republican Party. It didn’t happen right away. I think they voted for Nixon, though.
We were living in San Bernardino, California, 60 miles from ground zero, when the Watts riots occurred in 1965 and I remember my dad railing against those goddamn n*g*ers. He cleaned his guns and prepared for the attack. Although I was in my teens, it was about this time that I became aware that a lot of the animus seemed to emanate from fear. We were sixty miles from the action and he seemed to be AFRAID of them.
After I left home and started working and I was away from my folks for awhile, I started to shed the layers of hate and animosity and, yes, fear that I had been shrouded in. I was in California and worked with whites, blacks, and Mexicans. I made friends that I would never take to my mom and dad’s house. I found that losing all the hate relieved a lot of stress. The amazing thing is that I felt more comfortable around white people, too. That, I cannot explain.
Sadly, racial animosity is still an ugly part of our culture. But it is fading. My kids are more open and my son married a beautiful African-American woman. My grandkids cringe when they watch that archive footage of racial hate just like they cringe when they see footage of the victims of the holocaust. They find it unbelievable that shit like that actually occurred on such a massive scale.
There are those who want to repeal the Civil Rights Act as a failure and a waste of government resources and an unnecessary intrusion into people’s lives. There are those who want to repeal it because it is an impediment to free market principles. Hopefully, not too many people are fooled by the Civil Rights naysayers. Without strong men like Truman, who ended segregation in the military; the richboy Kennedys who recognized the injustice that was occurring under their very noses; Dr. King, who peacefully forced Americans to witness the injustice through the magic of the boobtube; and Johnson, who forced Congress to pass the laws, we would never have made this much progress in the last fifty years. Take it from a former racist, I know the laws work. Period.
