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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 Mississippi 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).

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