Racism in My Experience -- Part Two
Going Back East for School
In 1960, I went off to a small WASPy prep school back east. I heard more racist commentary from some of my fellow students in my three years there than I’ve heard in the rest of my life. Much of the commentary concerned the Portugese kitchen staff, who prepared our meals. It was concentrated among a few, but I was unable then and have never been able to comprehend it from such intelligent and well-educated young soon-to-be men. It was painful; they were talking about my public high school friends from black, Asian, Jewish and Hispanic backgrounds, and about my step mom, brothers and sisters who were Jewish. At the time, I thought the kids talking this hateful drivel were just poorly brought up, and this came from their parents and their home lives, and I looked down on them for it – not that I had any stature at all to do so. I think that Mom, Dad and our grandmother taught us that’s not how well brought up people think and talk; that was for uneducated bigots. Now I think and understand it was the norm for too many from privileged and exclusive circumstances, from upper class WASP upbringings, and at the particular time in their personal development. In reflection I wonder now what the Latin American students attending our school thought about all of this. I don’t think the teachers or the school leaders encouraged it, but certainly most did not do enough to educate and disapprove the racism and classism and to model right behavior from the top. I went to visit with one of my classmates for a weekend, and we went out for the evening to hang out with some of his neighborhood pals. At the end they turned to petty vandalism of front yard ornaments in poor working class neighborhoods yelling “white trash” and “proles”. I still cannot understand this from a fellow classmate who prior to that event I had always thought a good friend, and I do know he grew out of it in a big way once he was in college.
The education we received was excellent, but narrowed to the US and Europe, to Greece and Rome – a classical liberal arts education, very focused on “white” history, literature and culture. One class in Asian History has stuck with me, as the only time I learned about Asia, which was about to play such a large part in our nation’s immediate future. I still vividly remember the Cuban missile crisis and wondering and waiting for the nuclear destruction about to rain down on us from Russia.
This was the period of two towering, charismatic figures -- JFK and MLK who in their shortened brilliant lives and early deaths inspired all of us of my generation and in so many ways marked all of us for the rest of our lives. We, as a generation, have fallen far short of the early idealism they inspired in us. The March on Washington and the “I Have a Dream” speech was the bookend – the end of our high school and the start of our college years. It was riveting and inspirational, but in some ways it did not prepare and prefigure our nation for the horrors of the coming assassinations and the war in Vietnam that would wrench our nation apart.
I went to a private college with a student body and a campus and orientation virtually the same as prep school. We had only one African American in our freshman class of 250; I cannot begin to imagine the loneliness he likely experienced. I did not know him well; he became a campus leader of SNCC and went on to become a bankruptcy judge. Our freshman year, a senior named Ralph Allen gave a talk on his experience in Freedom Summer with SNCC; he had been registering voters in Americus, GA, was arrested, held without bail for three months, and charged with and convicted of sedition against the state of Georgia. The following year, Ivanhoe Donaldson, by then a prominent SNCC organizer, came to campus to recount efforts to register voters and feed starving sharecroppers in Mississippi. I was riveted by his ability to switch back and forth between the argots of the campus academic, the sharecropper, the college kid, and the ghetto kid as he told his tale and inspired me.
I spent my Junior Year in Paris, learning the history of the US, Europe, the Middle East, Russia and Africa from the very different perspectives of the French academie. The French were still fresh from their humiliating colonial defeats in Algeria and Vietnam, and they had much to teach us about the rest of the world. We not only failed to learn; we tore apart our nation in Vietnam, radicalized our youth and did indescribable and long lasting damage to our nation’s unity and the progress of LBJ’s Great Society programs. To my eyes, the French at the time seemed immune to the racism that infected the US and looked down on us as uncivilized Americans for it, much as we would much later look down on South Africa. Africans and African students seemed at ease in French society -- very little did I know or understand about either the French or the Africans living, working and studying there. When back at Trinity for my senior year, I took a class in African History that began to fill an absolute and total void in my 16 years of education to that point and provided a start in understanding Pan-Africanism, the impacts of colonialism, and the post colonial efforts to craft and create modern nation states in Africa, and the sharp divides by tribe and religion that made it so difficult. We learned the writings and thinking of Franz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure and the other great African thinkers and leaders of the age.
I returned to the US, enlightened, naïve, inspired and exceedingly self-righteous. While driving back home after college graduation, a friend asked me whether Cincinnati was likely to have a riot as Detroit and Newark had. I replied “no, not a chance, it’s a very conservative place”. Shortly after we arrived, riots broke out in Avondale, where some of my friends from junior high lived. The next day, we went down to City Hall; several black ministers were explaining to the City Council the conditions of life in the black community. The National Guard paraded outside the Council Chambers, and the ministers walked out saying they would not be intimidated by a show of military force. Dad and his friends from the business community became engaged at this time with many other local business and civic leaders to improve economic opportunities in the black community. I can remember only one of my parents’ friends who stayed deeply engaged with the black community and its struggles for economic opportunity in Cincinnati.
Later on that summer, I went to visit a friend from our year in Paris who lived in Jackson, Miss. We were discussing the future of the nation, the emerging Black Power movement and the ideas of Stokeley Carmichael and H. Rap Brown that blacks should organize in black communities and committed whites should organize and work in poor white communities. He suggested that we drive down to meet and talk with Charles Evers (whose brother had been murdered by the KKK) in Fayette to seek his insights and wisdom. When we arrived, we had no idea where his office was. So we screwed up our courage and went over to a white state trooper on the side of the road and asked for directions, me thinking that we might end up in a ditch. He politely pointed out where we could find Mr. Evers. He was in the middle of leading a local boycott of white merchants who were mistreating their black customers. He spoke to us of the importance of organizing first and foremost on the issues of direct impact to the local community – the issues that you could change locally. Begin locally and branch up and out from there.
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 9/2/20