Racism in My Experience -- Part 3
Going Somewhat South for Law School
In the fall of 1967, I entered UVa Law School. There was one African American law student in our 250 person law school class; she went on to a distinguished career with the Legal Defense Fund and helped lead me to a career in Legal Services. I ran into an old family friend, and as we passed the time, I asked what the undergrads thought of the law school. He replied “they think you’re a bunch of commies”; I responded “sounds like my kind of people, what do they mean by that”. He answered, “over at the law school, you believe in Brown v. Board of Education and school integration; many of the undergrads here are still stuck in Massive Resistance”. That made for an interesting introduction to a “public” university in the South. The next spring MLK was murdered, and RFK was assassinated. I’d been walking precincts for Kennedy’s presidential bid. The nation burst into flames, especially Washington DC, not far away. I remember reading every word of the Kerner Commission report, trying to understand what was going on. Later that summer, anti-war protests at the Democratic Convention were disrupted by a police riot and running battles between the officers and the young white protestors throughout downtown Chicago. Nixon rode the white law and order backlash to electoral victory and proceeded to further enmesh US troops in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and slow and divert the nation’s progress towards the Great Society.
That summer I was driving a cab in Boston learning the city’s neighborhoods and communities, reading Dostoevsky and Malcolm X while I waited for passengers. One night I was driving my passenger and his guitar from the South End to Roxbury; there was a riot going on in Dudley Square after a Smokey Robinson concert in nearby Franklin Park. As we approached, I asked uncertainly “what do we do now”; he replied “keep your head down, your foot on the gas and don’t stop for anything”. In the smallest of small worlds, the next summer we remembered each other as we were working together in the Franklin Field legal services office – that night seared in both of our memories.
The next fall back at the law school, I began working with local Community Action Project on what was for me a mind opening survey of food and nutrition needs in two nearby poor, rural counties – Cumberland and Buckingham. This survey was to collect data in support of what would become the Commodity Foods and Food Stamps programs. Most of the community members I surveyed were black subsistence farmers who occasionally worked in a local saw mill for cash. Some were living in tarpaper shacks, and others lived in solid, hand-built wood homes. They had lived in these communities for generations. They often had no regular monthly income, and electricity use was limited, making it difficult for their children to read their school books in the winter evenings. I was advised to always leave the county before sundown as the Klan ruled the night, and my little VW was easy to spot and confirmed my outsider status. Nearby Farmville was the last community in the Commonwealth of Virginia to integrate its public schools, which happened while I was in law school (they had been closed for a decade due to Massive Resistance).
During this period, we often went to DC for anti-war protests and poor people’s campaign events. They drew very different crowds, but many of the same singers and performers from Richie Havens to Joan Baez. The high point in my memory was Richie Havens performing “Freedom” on the Washington Mall. There was a lot of tear gas afterwards as the police attacked the crowds that they wanted to disperse.
My final year was marked by the killings of young unarmed protestors at Kent State, Jackson State and the Orangeburg Massacre in South Carolina. UVa students came out of their fraternity houses, their prized lodgings on the university’s Lawn to protest and were met with volleys of tear gas and indiscriminate mass arrests, from the head of the YAF to the head of the fraternity council. I had come to appreciate the enormous moral courage of Southerners black and white as they confronted segregation and the residues of Jim Crow in the South. I did not yet understand or comprehend how completely and just as badly racism infected the North.
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 9/3/20