Category: Do the Right Thing

“Civil Rights”–it’s a strange and highly loaded term. My own history with the term has been mostly as an observer. . . And “racial tension”? *sigh*

My maternal grandfather grew up “hardscrabble poor”. His family consisted of him, his father, and his mother. They lived as sharecroppers, growing tobacco in a county that had been shattered along a “North/South” fault line of sympathies, splitting communities and families, and the 30 that had lapsed between the end of Mr. Lincoln’s War and my grandfather’s birth had not healed all wounds.

So, divided communities, hardscrabble poverty, competition at the bottom of the economic barrel between poor “whites” and poor “blacks” for subsistence living: all just parts of his daily life growing up.

And then his father died, forcing him to leave school early to support his mother.

Between those early years and when I came to know him as a child, a lot of water under the bridge, a lot of growing. Yes, to his dying day he maintained some of the biased views that formed him as a child (don’t we all?), but. . .

When I spent summers with my grandparents as a child–one set and then the other–I experienced more education in life than in all my years of schooling. Some of the days I shadowed Dad-Dad at work (he was by that time a Southern Baptist pastor, and had been for decades), I didn’t give a thought to the things I learned, though they were planted deep within me. One of the things I learned unconsciously while shadowing him was learned during his perambulations downtown, visiting folks, mostly business people and their employees, in the area where his church was located. I didn’t think a thing about it at the time, but a couple of decades later, one of those business people brought it all back to me.

But before then, while in grad school, I lived and worked in a neighborhood its denizens labeled amongst themselves, “The Good Part of the Ghetto.” All my neighbors and friends in the area (save for a little “white” lady in her 80s who lived a block south of me and a Vietnamese family several houses north) were “blacks”. It was where I lived and worked. They were my neighbors. It just seemed natural to be friendly with friendly folks.

Several years later, I reconnected with one of Dad-Dad’s friends, while I was working with my Dad selling insurance and servicing clients’ needs. Part of that was simply calling on referrals clients made. One of those referrals led me to one of the two funeral homes that serviced mainly black folks in the community. I recall very clearly the moment the owner shook my hand and said, “You were that little boy that visited with Dr. Tom, weren’t you?”

Now, this man and his family had never been members of Dad-Dad’s church. He was “black,” Dad-Dad was “white”. Both had grown up in, frankly, bigoted environments. When I was a young lad visiting around with Dad-Dad, racial tension was rife.

This man and Dad-Dad were simply friends. As things progressed, I ended up having more referrals from that contact than any other in town. Why? Because my raised-to-be-a-bigot grandfather. . . wasn’t by the time he was my grandfather, at least not by the standards of his friend and his family and friends, all of whom remembered him with appreciation, at the least.

How did this color my own upbringing? Well, as I said, racial tensions were rife, in those days, but I never really noticed (I was just a clueless kid, after all, and the only black folks I knew were Dad-Dad’s friends), until I was laid up in the hospital for a month with little to do. . . and a black and white TV on the wall that could tune in soaps, game shows and. . . breaking news reports about civil rights clashes.

Blew. My. Mind. I had never been aware of racial tensions before. As I said, the only folks the prominent bigotry of the day was most likely to see as “other” were just like Dad-Dad’s friends, as far as I could tell.

Even before The Speech, family and life had just drilled into me the precept: People simply ARE NOT “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” It’s just the way it is.

But yes, I have experienced racial bigotry–some by direct observation of both “whites” and “blacks” and some by angry, unthinking blacks who DGARA about anyone else’s character, just the color of their skin. But examples of racism personally observed or experienced have been rare for me.

I suppose nowadays, I am some sort of “racist” for embracing the concept of looking at people as people, members of the human race and not just this or that “race” based on physical attributes. *sigh* I look at or hear or read people who view “race” as the defining characteristic of a man’s existence as mentally and morally stunted, so in today’s parlance, yeh, that makes me a “racist.”

I don’t get it. Oh, I do understand that such stupidity exists–I’m not in denial–but it baffles me. Maybe I’m just to old to get it. . .