(The First in a Series of Incidents that Came to Shape a Life)

Fifty years ago, I thought exactly that way. I grew up in a home where words like nigger and spick, kike and Heb were used. Not often and enough. Every time I heard the words, I cringed. I didn’t know exactly why and I knew nothing was innately true about an entire group of people. I knew those words were wrong.

There weren’t any people of color in Simsbury, Connecticut that I remember from 1952 until 1960. It may be that there were people of color and I had never seen them; it might be that in those days I could not have seen them under any conditions. Often, I was dropped at the YMCA in Hartford for a Saturday morning because both my parents worked. There were kids of color in the pool were we swam and I remember thinking, well one thing is for sure, the color doesn’t come off. At least not that I could tell. I didn’t tell my parents because I figured there were probably lots of places not nearly as much fun as the “Y” I might end up.

I had never heard of segregation. Jewish people were supposed to be really good with money and always to their own advantage.

All those other people lived in the ramshackled buildings along the railroad tracks on the way in to New York City. That was because they were stupid and didn’t care about the places they lived. Did I mention I had never heard of segregation?

Following are excerpts from a talk given by Sandra Gantt, a City Counselor in Pendleton, South Carolina in 2009, about her experience of growing up in that city in the 50′ and 60’s.

We were in the days of segregation – that means to the few who are too young to remember, black people, or colored people as we were called then, were not allowed to partake of the privileges we have today. The national anthem did not apply to people of color because we were not in the land of the brave and the home of the free. In fact, we were thought to be less than the animals in some households.

We had to drink water from a “Coloreds Only” water fountain and that was hard to find. Our water drinking was done at home or in a café that catered to “Coloreds Only”.

If we went to any other restaurant our place was at the back door of that restaurant where we placed our food order. Eventually, they let us in the front door but we had to stand at a corner of the counter and place our orders because we were not allowed to sit down. I often wondered how was it that if we were not good enough to come in and sit down in those restaurants – how could there not be a problem with us cooking the very food that we could not enjoy.

Back to how it was then…at the drug store soda fountain, we were not allowed to sit down – we stood at a corner of the counter until we were recognized or until everyone else that was white had been served. One time a young black woman, that had moved to the North, came home for a visit and went to the soda fountain where she proceeded to place her bottom on the stool to place her order. Well you guessed it – she was refused service. They went so far as to remove the stools from the soda fountain to prevent it from happening again. Talk about overkill! I was told by Mr. Robert Thompson that when he was a young boy, we were not allowed to order a Coca Cola. It seems that was a forbidden drink for people of color.

The schools were separate with all black teachers trying their best to give us an education with used books and equipment.

Can you imagine the first day of school and getting your books for the year to find that they had been written in and torn from the previous owners? It was a rare thing to get a new book for school. Can you imagine teaching science classes with only 1 Bunsen burner in the whole school?

It took a student sit-in a few years after I graduated from high school to correct this injustice. The school district had the money but because no one had ever stood up to the superintendent and said enough is enough they did not bother to hand over new supplies.

Albert Boothby was my history teacher at Millbrook School, a small (150 students then) independent high school to which I was lucky enough to go first as a day student, then on all but full scholarship from the Headmaster, Ed Pulling. Mr. Boothby wanted us to understand history so that we could understand what was going on in 1960. One of his primary interests was traveling around the south and teaching in all negro colleges (the designation Black did not arise until the 70’s). He showed his students hundreds of slides and explained that these institutions came about because children of color were restricted from most colleges and universities in the United States. Children of color were restricted from most schools in the United States. Segregation included hotels and restaurants as well as schools.

Mr. Boothby arranged an exchange program between our high school and an all negro secondary school in Sedalia, North Carolina, Palmer Memorial Institute. This was a rare institution, a private secondary school for children of color. Their parents had to pay tuition and the expenses for travel, room and board. There were hundreds of thousands of people of color who had created businesses and been able to break the color barrier, and not many who could afford such an expense. Palmer went out of existence in the early 70’s because doors that should have been open years ago were beginning to open.

To this day I am not sure why my parents allowed me to be one of the students to go on this exchange and I am so deeply grateful to this day. I am not sure I can imagine a life without that experience. Mr. Boothby drove Ben and me down to Sedalia along the main highways at the time. The interstate system was only a few years old, so much of the trip was along U.S. highway # 1, that ran the entire length of the Eastern Seaboard from Fort Kent, Maine to Key West, Florida. We did not stay in places that were segregated, nor eat in places that were not open to all. The first time I really needed to pee and was told it would be a while and why, I began to understand a tiny bit of what segregation really meant.

The experience at Palmer was incredible. I roomed with Woodrow Odum, the captain of the basketball team at Palmer, traveling with them to other all negro schools, all public, for games. South of the Mason-Dixon Line, the schools were segregated openly, because that is the way the white ruling class wanted things. The buildings were often run down, the books hand me down from years past and what was left from white students, if there were books. The schools in the North were segregated by real estate red lining. There were only certain places people of color could live and there were their schools.

The students at Palmer were bright and eager. Because of my Father’s aptitude, I was a very good math student. When my Palmer classmates found out that I knew a great deal of math, they wanted it. While well intentioned, their teacher was not well trained and struggled with the concepts. After class we worked the problems and they took turns exploring the answers.

I rode in the back of the bus and on every trip I knew it was by choice. We were told to stay away from the Woolworth lunch counter demonstrations in Greensboro and would go watch from a negro clothing store across the street. The police brutality was unbelievable and grossly mis-reported in every publication up to and including Time magazine.

The spring following the exchange program, Mr. Boothby and I wrote a grant to the Ford Foundation to begin a Summer Institute to give young people of color an opportunity for a leg up experience in an inspired environment. We hired twenty teachers and staff from independent schools and colleges of every color, took in sixty students.

That was the straw that broke the camels back.

My Mother told me that if I went to North Carolina for the summer, I should not bother to come back. She said I had become the “nigger lover” in the family. One of her best friends and an aunt of mine used exactly those words on the lawn following the Millbrook graduation. I told my Mother she was right, I was a lover of people of color and I went to North Carolina. I might have well have said, “I love you Mom, and you don’t know Sha-Na-Ne!” I am sure my tone said it without the words.

That first summer in North Carolina proved to be an incredible experience. Probably the most profound of all the impacts on my life was the attitude of the parents toward Al and me and the staff in general. They were timid and grateful. There was no residual resentment. Think for a moment about their sending their children to an integrated staff, at an institution hours away from their homes. Their faith in us and their desire for great things for their children was spectacular.

In fact they and even we should have been more fearful. During the first meeting of the staff, about ten days before our students arrived, the recreation hall caught on fire. Nick Thomas, a six foot, five, former linebacker from Grambling University and an opera singer and I had the fire pretty much under control with a hose that had no nozzle.. The fire department, which was eight miles away, took forty-five minutes to arrive. When they did, they looked at Nick and I and said, “You BOYS need to back away and let us professionals handle the work.” The fire flared and the building was seriously damaged.

One day, Jerry (faculty head of Choate School) and Polly (an editor at Reader’s Digest) Packard, and I were at the Laundromat in Gibsonville, the nearest town to Palmer outside of Sedalia. They had brought their beautiful, German born, German Shepard, Fafner, as they always did everywhere they traveled. About half an hour into the laundry, the local sheriff arrived on the scene wearing a set of pearl handled revolvers, handles reversed, butt end forward on either side of his considerable frame and said, “Gee, I wish I had me one of them dogs (Fafner was by the way growling in a low tone) to keep the niggers in their place. What do you think?” Jerry and I looked at each other knowing that anything we would say was what he would use to find a reason to create real trouble. We said not a word and he leftwithout incident. And all of this over the simple idea of supporting a few wonderful young people get a leg up in life.

I knew in my heart that what we were doing was right and we moved forward. Something huge had shifted, however. With one swift decision, I had withdrawn the safety net and I knew I was on my own. What I didn’t know at that time was that my Mother’s attitude came from her own insecurity and fear. My anger didn’t actually help her at all. Later on my love for her was useful and that’s another story. What I had really learned was to trust my gut and a few other things as well:

that the entire country could be wrong minded,
that authority had nothing to do with rightness,
that prejudice is about fear and insecurity,
that the media were not unbiased,
that actions not words were what counted,
and that loving-kindness was stronger than any form of slavery.

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