In this day and age of heightened awareness of racial strife and inequality, I feel compelled to chronicle, as a white man brought up in a small southern community, my own racial evolution.
In my first eight years in grade school in Hawk Point, Missouri in the late forties to the mid-fifties, I never saw a black student. Nor did we study any history about racial divide in the classroom. It was as if blacks didn’t exist. I didn’t discover until long into my adulthood that Hawk Point had, like so many other small southern towns, a “Negro Sundowner Clause”—so if you were a person of color, you’d better not be caught there letting the sun go down on you; the message being, this is a whites-only town and blacks are not welcome.
I must admit my homelife was devoid of overt racism. My mom was a single parent raising six kids on a garment worker’s sweat shop salary, and our family life swirled around her bitterness and hatred for my absent, alcoholic father. I couldn’t really say where my mom stood on the prejudice scale then. When we got a TV in the early fifties, the few blacks we saw were almost all caricatures in subservient positions to rich whites—maids, chauffeurs, gardeners.
When I started high school in Troy, Missouri, I encountered my first flesh-and-blood black students. It was 1955 and the previous year the Supreme Court, in their Brown vs. Board of Education decision, declared school segregation unconstitutional. So now Buchanan High School was integrated, but I didn’t know why because my teachers didn’t talk about it in any of my classes. I sat beside blacks in the classroom and played alongside them in sports, so to me the transition was seamless and devoid of racial strife. My naivete knew no bounds.
It didn’t take long for my innocence to evaporate. Within my first two weeks of trying out for the basketball team, I heard upper middle-class boys refer to my black colleagues as the ‘N’ word. Those same boys called me “poor white trash.” In my limited understanding at the time, I figured that my black friends and I were in the same boat and that the elite students were just jealous of us in sort of a normal nasty sports-competitiveness way and wanted us to feel bad because we were good basketball players. And we were good. The racist and classist adversity only made some of us better. Made us try harder.
I floated through my first two years in high school only dimly aware of issues around racism. In history classes, we learned about the Civil War, but not one word about the KKK, black lynchings, or the 100 years of Jim Crow subjugation. Nor were we taught about the awful work conditions behind the working-class struggle to unionize.
The summer before my junior year, I got a job in a tavern/pool hall in Troy. Missouri was a “Blue Law” state restricting the sale of alcohol on Sundays. In addition, some taverns, according to the alcohol percentage of served beer, allowed underage kids to work there and be customers, but not served alcohol. This was the era of ‘separate but equal’ facilities. The pool hall was divided into two rooms: the front room, with the only pool table and a row of about twelve seats along a counter, was for whites, and it was accessed from a door on main street; and the back room, with two seats at the counter for blacks, was entered from an alley, going past an open door/open pit toilet. We didn’t have any black customers. I was totally unaware my first year working there of the significance of this discrimination.
The signature and life changing lesson I learned in high school about racism never came from a textbook or a classroom, or even from my workplace. And, while it was precipitated by sports, it didn’t come from the playing field or a contest. It did come, however from a coach or coaches. Luckily, Buchanan High at that time had two coaches that believed that positions on the team were a product of skill rather than skin color.
In my junior year, our basketball team caught fire toward the end of the season and went to Jefferson City for the state tournament. Alas we lost the final game. And this is where my tale of racial awareness and entitlement picks up the thread. On the bus ride home, dejected and defeated, we had not eaten before the final game, so we stopped at a popular truck rest stop and eatery on I-70, between Jefferson City and Wentzville. Famished, we all piled out and quickly filled up the café and picked up menus to order. Suddenly, the adults in charge of us (two coaches and a Methodist minister) instructed us to put the menus down and get on the bus. After we were all back on the bus, Coach Jameson told us the reason why: turns out the restaurant staff wouldn’t serve the black players unless they went to the back window. I think most of us white players were confused. Certainly, I was. I would like to say we had an engaging discussion on the bus ride home about racism, but the silence was as palpable as in a medieval morgue.
Quite simply, that event changed my life. Oh, I’m not saying I immediately started advocating for civil rights, but I took small steps; I went to the school library to research racism but found little information. I asked my boss at the pool hall why the “separate but equal” facilities. He said, “That’s the way it was and would always be.” No, I didn’t quit my job (my family needed the money). It was that civil rights purgatory time between the Brown vs. Board of Education decision and the mid-sixties Civil Rights movement. And I, frankly, with scant to no guidance, didn’t have a clue what to do with my new social consciousness.
It took being drafted into the service during the Vietnam era and my subsequently attending Northeast Missouri State College to help solidify my understanding. I became a leading member of "Vietnam Veterans Against the War,” so you might say I was poised for protest. My first year in college there was a movement to teach black history. One of my professors with a PhD proclaimed to his class that it was ridiculous, that there was no black history. I disagreed vehemently with him, and he kicked me out of class. I marched right over to the student union and reported the incident to the black student section. I asked how I could help. That very day, I joined a black student 'sit-in' in the administration building to advocate for teaching black history. That was my beginning of a lifelong commitment to civil rights. Fast forward to the present and I’m glad to say that my old alma mater (now Truman University) has changed for the better, having a more diverse faculty and offering courses on black history and workshops on anti-racism, as well as celebrating black history month.
Years later, I visited my mom in Hawk Point, Missouri from my adopted home in the Pacific Northwest, and she, in her nineties, had an Obama for President yard sign. From what I could tell, it was the only Obama sign displayed in my small hometown. When it was stolen the first night it was up, she insisted on getting another. I put up that new sign, under her direction, for all to see. My mama showed her true colors.
Like mother, like son, I hope to continue to evolve. John Lewis said: “We’ve come a long way, but we still have a distance to go before all of our citizens embrace the idea of a truly interracial democracy, what I like to call the Beloved Community, a nation at peace with itself.”