CHAPTER 1

GROWING UP IN SEGREGATION

An adult sense of racial awareness began for me in the late 1940s when I was a young teenager. My mother and father took me and my older brother to Ford’s Theater, the only “legitimate theater” in Baltimore where one could see a touring Broadway show. The family was going to see the Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, II, musical Show Boat to celebrate my older brother’s birthday. To get into the theater, my family and I had to walk past a young white man holding up a sign protesting racial discrimination at Ford’s Theater. This lone picketer, I later realized, was probably claiming that a “whites-only” Ford’s Theater violated the “separate but equal” doctrine promulgated by the Supreme Court in 1896 to justify racial discrimina- tion. Since there was no separate theater where blacks could see a touring Broadway play in Baltimore, even the antiquated “separate but equal” principal required that black people be allowed to buy a ticket and watch the show at Ford’s Theater. The Supreme Court decision was Plessy v. Ferguson. The court ruled that, under the “equal protection of the laws” clause of the U. S. Consti- tution, facilities for African-Americans could be separate from white facilities as long as they were equal to the white facilities. As I was standing there, a white man walked up to the young white man holding the sign demanding that blacks be allowed into Ford’s Theater. The white man whispered something in the picketer’s ear. As 2 ON THE FORWARD EDGE TWO the white man walked away, the picketer turned and shouted after him: “Go ahead! You can burn your cross right on my front lawn if you want to.” Burning a cross in front of a home was a famous technique of the anti-black Ku Klux Klan for warning people not to openly advocate racial integration. My mother hurried me away from the scene. “Pay no attention to that picket,” she said. “He’s just causing trouble.” I later learned that was the same thing African-American mothers often said to their children, thereby teaching and encouraging them not to make the mistake of making trouble for white folks. There was a real point of irony, I later realized. Half the cast of the musical Show Boat was African-American. The most famous song in the production, “Old Man River,” was sung by a black man. The lyrics of that song lamented the unfair treatment of black men and women work- ing at menial jobs on the boats and docks along the River.

AT THE MOVIES IN PRINCETON

A male classmate and I from my private high school were going through the process of choosing a college or university to attend. We were at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, getting a look at the campus and interviewing at the admission office. After a long day of talking to admission officers and wandering the Princeton campus, my friend and I decided to take the night off by going to a local movie theater. We were slightly late arriving at the theater. We entered the auditorium and took our seats when the theater was dark and the movie had already started playing. When the film was over and the lights brightened in the theater auditorium, I looked around. I saw that, for the first time in my life, I was attending a motion picture with black people. I was, after all, from Baltimore, where movie theaters were rigidly racially-segregated. “Look, Harry,” I blurted out to my friend. “Bla....” I realized the inappropriate- ness of what I was saying in time to at least squelch the last part of the word. Harry leaned over to me and whispered softly in my ear. “Get with it,” he intoned with pointed disdain for my naivete. “We’re in New GROWING UP IN SEGREGATION 3 Jersey. They let black people into movie theaters up here.”

SEGREGATION AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Attending Williams College, a well-known men’s college in western Massachusetts, was a turning point in my lengthy journey toward racial awareness. At least I always thought of it that way. Abhorrence of racial segregation and support for racial integration were routinely expressed in the classroom at Williams, by both faculty and students alike. Later I realized, however, that there were few if any palpable actions to back up these strongly held and promoted views. In the entire four years that I was at Williams College, from 1953 to 1957, perhaps one or two African-American students were in attendance at a college of 800 young men. One black student was the son of a United States Government Foreign Service officer, or some high position such as that. This young African-American man was a graduate of an upscale private preparatory school. As a child, he had lived in a number of the foreign countries where his father had been posted, and he was fluent in a number of foreign languages. This particular black person virtually oozed international sophistica- tion. He in no way resembled the black persons that I saw and dealt with while growing up in Baltimore, Maryland. Welcome or not, the Balti- more version of an authentic American black male was not present at Williams College in the 1950s. What Williams did have was a wide-ranging and over-arching frater- nity system. There were fifteen national fraternities at Williams in the 1950s, and over 85 percent of the students at this all-male college joined one of those fifteen social units. That was all well and good, unless you were one of the 15 percent that was not asked to join a fraternity. These semi-private social clubs were defintely “selective.” Every year at Wil- liams, 15 percent of each entering class was politely informed that they were not “good enough” and “social enough” to be asked to join one of the fraternities. These left-out persons were known as “unaffiliateds.” I later realized 4 ON THE FORWARD EDGE TWO these young men were forced to identify themselves by what they were not (fraternity men) and not by some positive trait they possessed. Unaf- filiated students did not live and eat in a lavish and commodious frater- nity house the way the fraternity men did. They lived all four years at Williams in the dormitory and took their meals in a common, public dining hall in the college student union building. Williams College may not have been officially racially-segregated when I was there, but it definitely was officially socially-segregated. Being a conformist living in an Age of Conformity, as the 1950s were called, I routinely joined a fraternity at Williams and began to enmesh myself in the formal social life of the college. Upon reflection, I realized that the social orientation of the college, in direct contrast with its educa- tional purpose, was decidedly anti-intellectual. In a social world domi- nated by a formal fraternity system, the emphasis was on going to parties and listening and dancing to Dixieland jazz music, not reading books and engaging in deep academic discussions.

THE NAZI POSTER

My fraternity was housed in a three-story brick building with a two-story front porch comprised of four tall white wooden pillars capped by a triangular pediment. Inside the fraternity house, a grand staircase led upstairs between the living room and the dining room and opened out into an interior hallway leading to a series of three-man, three-room bedroom suites. It was in one of these bedroom suites that I first noticed a particular picture hanging on the wall. The picture was a black-and-white poster of Nazi storm troopers marching into battle during World War Two. The German soldiers, all in those uniquely shaped German army helmets, looked grim and deter- mined. A slogan in German at the bottom of the poster probably encour- aged the German people seeing the poster to work and fight harder for the eventual triumph of Nazi Fascism. The poster was scary at the same time that it was inspirational. This was not just a small photograph sitting in a frame on a table or GROWING UP IN SEGREGATION 5 something relatively obscure like that. This was a giant wall poster, covering the better part of one interior wall. Furthermore, the room in which the Nazi wall poster was displayed had been set aside by the suite’s occupants as a sort of little living room, with a sofa and a small table and some comfortable chairs. This was a room in which people were entertained, in which people socialized, with the Nazi storm troop- ers in full view of the room’s occupants and their guests. Fraternity men are “brothers-in-the-bond,” as the saying goes, so I never complained or criticized the Nazi wall poster or the fact that it was displayed in a relatively prominent place in my fraternity house. So far as I knew, none of the other “brothers” ever complained either. The poster remained on the wall, a permanent part of our daily lives.

THE NAACP AND WILLIAMS

During my final year at Williams, two of my fraternity brothers and I joined together to write a major research paper. Such a paper was required of all graduating seniors who were political science majors. It could be undertaken as a joint project. The subject chosen by the three of us was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The final paper that was turned in was exactly what was expected of respectable Williams students of the 1950s. The history of the NAACP was carefully reviewed with an emphasis on the organization’s many successful court suits on behalf of African-American civil rights. The traditional legalistic approach of the NAACP was highlighted, and the paper concluded with a ringing description of the NAACP’s most recent achievement, Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s famous school desegregation decision of 1954. The paper earned all three of us an A grade and many favorable written comments from James MacGregor Burns, the supervising politi- cal science professor. Respect for the NAACP and racial integration ended at that point. While researching the paper, I wrote to the NAACP’s national headquar- 6 ON THE FORWARD EDGE TWO ters for information. The NAACP responded in a most helpful manner, mailing back several publications, one of them a history of the organiza- tion that became the major research source for the paper. The NAACP also sent back a separate letter asking me and my two fraternity brothers if we wanted to found a chapter of the NAACP among the student body at Williams College. Unbeknownst to me, and definitely without my approval, the letter calling for the founding of an NAACP chapter at Williams College was posted in a prominent spot on the fraternity house bulletin board. One of my fraternity brothers with some artistic talent had drawn some decid- edly African-American faces, in caricature style, around the outer mar- gins of the letter. Someone else had decorated the letter with little sarcas- tic phrases, such as “Yes, indeedy!” and “Go to it, guys!” Both those who posted the letter on the bulletin board and most of those who read it considered founding an NAACP chapter at Williams College a big joke. Remembering the concept of “brothers-in-the-bond,” I again said and did nothing.

“BACK TO GOOD OLD DIXIE”

Chapin Hall was a large building containing a major auditorium at Williams College. It was the preferred site for all-college assemblies, major lectures, Dixieland jazz concerts, and visiting musical groups. The music presented ranged from piano recitals and classical string quartets to more popular forms such as dance bands and individual singers. One of the most popular solo acts to play Chapin Hall during the 1950s was a mathematics professor at Harvard University who, in his spare time, composed popular songs that made ironic comments on contemporary American society and college life. This professor was a very popular attraction on the New England college entertainment circuit, playing his own compositions on the piano and singing his lyrics in a slightly flat but wonderfully animated voice. His repertoire included a song entitled: “Take Me Back To Good Old Dixie.” The song humorously recited all the wonderful things the singer GROWING UP IN SEGREGATION 7 would get to do once he left the cold and unfriendly North and returned to the town he grew up in back in good old Dixie. The lyrics were filled with traditional Southern slang references such as “corn pone” and “grits” and “you all.” Toward the end of the song, the Harvard math professor would intone the lines:

“I want to put my white sheet on again, I ain’t seen one good lynching in years.”

At this point the professor would stop, wait for the audience to get the joke, and leave time for the waves of laughter which he knew were surely coming. Even in abolitionist and pro-racial integration New England, the waves of laughter always came. Remembering the professor and his song at a later time in my life, I realized that, when hearing the line about a lynching, I never visualized in my mind the black person who was going to be tortured, hanged, and mutilated. I only visualized a bunch of good old southern white boys out having a good time.

“AUTHERINE, AUTHERINE LUCY”

Was it only at Williams College that this sort of thing was going on in the 1950s? A good friend of mine from my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, had gone to Princeton University, in Princeton, New Jersey. My friend belonged to an “eating club,” the Princeton version of a fraternity. This particular eating club was popular with southern students attending Princeton, with a number of the members being from and Mississippi. On a number of evenings, my friend told me, the mem- bers of the eating club gathered for impromptu parties. At some point during the evening, the traditional, jovial, collegiate song-singing often began. One song, which the members of this particular Princeton eating club sang with great gusto, had new words applied to a current popular song. 8 ON THE FORWARD EDGE TWO The current song was entitled “Davey Crockett.” It had an opening line that went:

“Davey, Davey Crockett, king of the wild frontier.”

The Princeton version of the song was somewhat different. The opening lines were:

“Autherine, Autherine Lucy, bold as you can be, Autherine, Autherine Lucy, you’re not goin’ to school with me.”

The song, I knew, referred to Autherine Lucy, a young black woman who had tried to get admitted to the racially-segregated . A U.S. Court had ordered her admitted under the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, but the Board of Trustees at the University of Alabama had succeeded in keeping Auther- ine from registering for classes on a technicality. The entire Autherine Lucy affair was taken as a big victory for pro-segregation forces in the South. Another hometown friend of mine, Albert Kurdle, shared my discom- fort with the Autherine Lucy song and other racist songs similar to it. His explanation for why such songs existed and were sung with such gusto was that they reflected a common sentiment of the human race. He would often say in a judgmental voice: “Everybody but Cave Twelve can get lost!” Al Kurdle offered no further analysis of what the statement meant. It was what I called a typical “Albertism.” It was the explanation of some important aspect of human existence condensed into a single sentence. I took the phrase to mean that people are naturally clannish, that they instinctively form social groups, and that they come to regard all other groups as alien and inferior. Other Albertisms included: (1) “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” (2) “There are infinite varieties of the human experience.” (3) “There is no accounting for taste.” GROWING UP IN SEGREGATION 9 SUBLIMATED ATTITUDES OF RACISM

I graduated from Williams College in June of 1957 and left under- graduate college life behind me. There was something that stayed with me, however, much to my regret. It was the sublimated attitudes of racism, which I had found to be just as big a problem at Williams College in New England as at my childhood home in Baltimore. These attitudes were ingrained in a person, I concluded. They were hidden deeply inside, waiting to pop out at the most inopportune times.