How Quickly We Forget (one cent)

I have been reading a book entitled Liberators: Fighting onTwo Fronts in World War II, by Lou Potter (with William Miles and Nina Rosenblum), published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1992. It’s an oversized (almost coffee table) book, with both text and pictures dealing with Afro-Americans in the American military during the second world war. It is a fascinating book, both with respect to the heroic efforts of black troops in both Europe and the Pacific (including their important role in liberating the German death camps), and with respect to how blacks were treated in this country in general during the 1930s and 1940s, and in particular how African Americans in the military were treated by their white military colleagues and by residents of the communities located near the military bases where they were stationed.

How were they treated? In one word, appallingly.

How quickly we forget what America was like before the Civil Rights Movement and the civil rights legislation, and how different society was then. Extraordinarily different.

I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in St. Louis. St. Louis was a segregated city. No, we didn’t have segregated drinking fountains (I don’t think), or bathrooms (at least I don’t recall any), but other than that we were in the deep South. Of course, the schools were segregated (I remember in 8th grade, when two black girls and one black boy were unceremoniously dumped into my class in the middle of a day, with no advance notice whatsoever; no big deal, I thought, and wondered where they had gone to school the day before, but some people were aghast at the idea). The restaurants were all segregated; I remember sometime in the late 1950s eating at a Howard Johnson’s with my grandmother, who was surprised to see a black family at a nearby table (”Look at them”, she said, and I did and wondered what she was talking about). The hotels were segregated (you remember the stories of the visiting sports clubs, of Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby who could not stay with the rest of the teams, and no one seemed to care). The sports facilities themselves were segregated (you could attend a baseball game at Sportsman’s Park if you were black, as long as you sat on the bench seats in the right field “pavilion”). The movies were segregated, and the parks (Shaw Park in Clayton closed its swimming pool for a few years in order not to have to let blacks swim with whites). Blacks could not get retail jobs in establishments that served whites.

And if course, being a young white boy, I saw very few blacks. Almost the only ones I saw were domestics, including Alice Tennyson, who lived in the basement of my grandparents’ house in less than perfect accommodations. And then I saw blacks when I drove with my father downtown, and we crossed through Mill Creek Valley, the area east of Grand Avenue torn down in the late 1950s for none too successful redevelopment under a major urban renewal plan.

I did not know there was a parallel black society, and that there were some educated and wealthy black St. Louisans. It never would have occurred to me, just as it never occurred to me that anything was wrong with the way society operated.

Then one day, after looking at the shadows in Plato’s cave and thinking I was seeing reality, the blinders came off. And I couldn’t believe what I saw. And I couldn’t believe what I hadn’t seen before.

We have come a long, long way. But people (of all colors) still think along racial, and sometimes racist, lines, and the African Americans are still victimized (sometimes, they are victims of their own making, of course) to the detriment of all of our citizens. And, frankly, the lessening of today’s lingering racial and economic divisions seem well down the list of national priorities.

What is the key to improvement?  Time?  Education?  Affirmative action?  No affirmative action? Requirement for universal national service?  I don’t think anyone has a clue.  And that is bad.