All Race Relations are not Equal

Last night at the Newark Airport I had the most disconcerting experience. I had flown in from Atlanta where I had attended the 25th running of the Lillian Smith Awards, given each year by the Southern Regional Council to writers in the tradition of her 1944 novel, "Strange Fruit," an astonishingly frank (even today) appraisal of cross-race sex (a poor black woman and a doctor's son in a small Georgia town).

It had been a very satisfying experience, meeting the pioneers in racial integration like Harry Ashmore who won a Pulitzer for the Arkansas Gazette's coverage of the Central High School integration in Little Rock in 1956, and J.L. Chestnut, the black lawyer from Selma who organized the crucial March that forced Lyndon Johnson's hand to address a joint session of Congress for a Civil Rights bill in 1965 (Inquirer reporter Julia Cross collaborated with Chestnut on these political memoirs.)

Filled with euphoria, I was waiting for Dave's Limousine to whisk me back to Philly. As I stood on the curb with my luggage, I noticed a car boxed in by a white Lincoln Town Car which was not responding to their flashed lights or horn. I hollered at the driver to wake him up so he'd move a few feet and release the trapped couple. Finally, he did move ahead after much delay, and the liberated couple drove off. I began to daydream about what I had learned when suddenly a very angry black man of about sixty years confronted me in a rage, feinting punches at me and my gear, unleashing a tirade of non-sequiturs. "You mind your own business," pointing at my luggage, "and I'll mind mine." "Nobody calls me boy: you understand?"

I didn't because I hadn't even known he was black until he started to harass me. And I've never call a black "boy" in my life. If anything I tend to over-respect blacks, occult compensation for the dishings I figure their lives have been full of. I had actually only seen the back of someone's head in the total darkness of the Town Car. He railed on and on, never giving me the chance to say how far off base he was on all counts. I waited for him to calm down when I would tell him that far from being a racist, I had just returned from meeting with one of the groups which has done most to advance race relations in the South.

Then it dawned on me that I had seen this man before. Gaunt, face bashed from too much booze and bar fighting, mean and bitter looking: he was a dead ringer for the "colored" boy who swept the floors at the Lincoln/Mercury plant where I worked for college tuition money the summer of 1950. He is of a type, too old to be a rapper, or even to have been moved by the liberation movements of the sixties. Just a man who had led one hell of a life, constantly on the edge; but he had learned one thing: he could harangue Whitey with impunity.

I began to look for a policeman out of the corner of my eye, pushing my luggage away from what seemed to me to be an imminent violent incident. He went back to his car, but then returned again. His arriving passenger was a grandmotherly old woman of the kind that fought only her own sense of despair throughout a long working life. Mother and son, two generations separated by a short interlude of time but, psychologically centuries apart.

Curiously, at the Hot Springs Arkansas Greyhound stop last month, I fell into conversation with a retired black high school principal, who was putting his ninety-two year-old mother on the same bus I was taking to Little Rock. She was also a retired teacher and a Baptist lay person. She was on her way to their annual convention.

The same two generations, but what a difference a region makes. He told me easily and fully how they had survived the integrating of the schools some years after Little Rock gained national attention with Elizabeth Eckford and her black classmates. He was clearly a fighter, as was his sweet nonagenarian mother. But they were totally free of the bitterness consuming the Town Car illiberal at Terminal A / Newark.

Strangely, on the plane up from Atlanta I had been telling my seatmate who happened to be black how different the racial situation was in Atlanta compared with Philly. In the two days of the conference I didn't run into a single solitary hostile black. And I consciously sought out a spectrum of interviewees at bus stops, mainly construction workers, and on the subway may black women with children, obviously not single mothers, I should say a representative cross-section of Atlantans.

With the possible exception of some teenagers in gang-like gear, I never experienced the kind of pervasive dread I experienced on the Market Street subway. On the bus to the brilliant new Atlanta History Center, I was asking the black driver which was the closest stop. (Coincidentally he had been schmoozing the entire twenty minutes with a white woman in her sixties who had common work friends; their banter was a paragon of civility.) At the stop a twenty-something black woman volunteered she'd show me the way, gently counseling me on the jaywalking dangers of a peculiar intersection.

Later that day, standing outside the stunning new Michael Graves designed Emory University art museum, I fell into conversation with a 39 year-old black construction worker from Baton Rouge. He had experienced unfriendliness, from both blacks and whites since his recent arrival. Then he said something that I truly believe gets to the heart of America's racial dilemmas. He said, "You know I don't thing it's a matter of color as much as of class." Bingo! Amherst English professor Benjamin DeMott wrote two years ago a terribly neglected book, "The Imperial Middle Class" in which he explains the high costs of the American illusion of classlessness. The very fact that so few picked up on merely confirms this dangerous and debilitating myopia we have about class differences.

And J.L. Chestnut, the collaborator and subject of Julia Cass's "Black in Selma" made the most telling point of the whole conference with his notion of "strategic silences" in American political life. He told the story, new to me, that Lyndon Johnson invited the black leadership to the White House after he got a public accommodations act passed in 1964 and told them to cool it. "The public won't take any more for a while, Boys." J.L. Chestnut, the leading black lawyer in Selma, was not listening to L.B.J.'s condescending "Boys" talk. He went right back to Selma and organized the March which forced Johnson to go back two months later before a joint session of Congress to demand a Civil Rights Act. Johnson concluded his appeal by attempting to co-opt his heretofore enemies by using their familiar invocation, "We Shall Overcome."

I remember a "strategic silence" closer to home. In 1959 when Leon Sullivan was my neighbor in Greenbelt Knoll and I was a professor in the then new Annenberg School of Communications, we were lolling in the pool one Saturday afternoon when he said, "Pat, I don't believe all that crap about the Annenberg School's raising standards in the media; we've had a black ministers' boycott of Tastee Cake going for weeks and we can't get a stick of print in either the Bulletin or the Inquirer."

Bright and early Monday morning I was in Walter's office on the thirteenth floor of 400 N. Broad St. (having been frisked by the elevator operator--a new experience for me!). Annenberg was so puzzled that a lowly, 32-year-old untenured assistant professor would have the chutzpah to beard him in his own den that he turned me over to his legal counsel, Joe First. First sent for E.Z. Dimmitman, the paper's executive editor, who (I'm not making this up) said they had hired a "colored" copy boy the summer before, "but he hadn't worked out."

I countered by saying what the hell has that got to do with blatantly managing the news. He sputtered and beat a hasty retreat. I told Joe that "The Reporter" magazine was about the break a story and that if they had any decency they'd start covering the black community's concerns honestly. Then I took the bus back to Penn "to raise media standards" in the students taking my History of Communications course.

There was a marvelous epiphany at the conference between Cass, Chestnut and the audience. Chestnut had chided Cass for always wanting to make the book tougher ("assuaging liberal guilt, maybe," he teased her) while realist/activist Chestnut knew that Whitey would take only so much truth at one time, deformed as his mentality was by the Strategic Silence tactic of our "National Literature." (Chestnut shrewdly contends that all our media, from serious poetry to fiction right down to the sleaziest supermarket tab, are hobbled to lesser and greater degrees by this tradition of "strategic silence.") I myself have noted, for example, that only after the French planners had gone home after the Aesthetic Summit at the Bellevue did the Inky editorials begin to stress the crucial need to revitalize the neighborhoods if Philly is to be Beaubourged.

My own feeling is, after attending the Drexel University follow-up to the Summit, is that Ed Bacon (who trashed the memory of Louis Kahn disgracefully in his megalomaniacal remarks) is responsible for the "strategic silences" about our neighborhoods. He is so greedy to do down in history as the man who made Philadelphia's Center City a new Florence that he simply cut off the larger debate when he was city planner. And don't kid yourself: there is and was gobs of covert racism among the Preservationists and Center City centrists. I remember resigning in disgust from membership in the Franklin Inn Club in the 1960's at the racist remarks of Charles Peterson on getting the poor people out of Society Hill so they could make it nice again. ("Those people actually stored their coal in their bathtubs," was his brilliant put down.)

Which brings me back to the violent black man who couldn't see my new "Jazz: the Original American Art Form" T-shirt under my Chicago Institute of Art sweatshirt I had bought at the Atlanta History Center hours before our encounter. Nor could he know that I pioneered black studies courses at Beaver College in the 1960's, went to black studies seminars in Brooklyn and Atlanta, traveled to Africa and the Caribbean to get a better handle on the emerging subject. No, to him, I was just a guy who hollered "Boy" at oppressed blacks. Boy, is he fooling himself. A slave.