In 1957, there was much publicity about the attempt to integrate “black” students in to a formerly “white-only” public school (Harding High School) in Charlotte, North Carolina. The primary subject of the coverage was Dorothy Counts, who was 15 at the time. That Counts shortly left North Carolina to attend school in Pennsylvania is a subject of discussion elsewhere.
I was a year older than she. I have tried to recall my response to the controversy at the time. It was as though the flap was about having Lithuanians trying to attend a school with non-Lithuanians. I had little knowledge of what black people were (or Lithuanians for that matter). I had heard of Germans, for which there had been a certain amount of enmity in our country. I had met one or two Japanese, who were by no means offensive. The few encounters with “people of color” were not particularly mild ones for me.
The Fox Senator theater, in Sacramento, ran a promotional special, in conjunction with Pepsi-Cola, during the summers. This would have been in the mid-1950s, perhaps 1955. For the price of three bottle caps from Pepsi Cola, you could gain admission to that august theater, and watch old black and white films from The Little Rascals (otherwise known as Our Gang) comedies to Laurel and Hardy, all productions of Hal Roach. These were gold, at the time. For many of us, they were the first exposure to the era of slap-stick comedy. For others, it would have been their first introduction to films depicting “colored folks” as subservient to whites and generally ignorant puppets of the Hal Roach studios in search of comedy at the expense of those of African-American descent … to say nothing of poor Stan.
On a particular day in summer, I stood in line with many others, Pepsi-Cola bottle caps in hand, when some sort of skirmish broke out in the line ahead of me. It was not clear to me at the time (and less so now) as to what was the source of the controversy. Some black youths were badgering some white kids in line. I did not know any of them. A black girl of roughly my age came up to the people in line (including myself) in a very confrontational way. Perhaps she had been denied admission. I shall never know for sure. She was very angry at several of us in line, and confronted a number of us boys in a violent language involving sexual innuendo that I barely understood at the time. The confrontation did not leave a lasting impression of good will.
A couple of the guys coalesced after she left in anger. It suddenly occurred to us (as a parting insult - for she had indeed departed) that, “Yeah! She probably would suck my dick, but it would come out hot”. It would be many teenage years and a number of adult years until that phrase would have much meaning.
So it was that, many years later, my judgement as to whether or not Dorothy Counts should be admitted to a formerly “all white” school, was informed by an incident two years earlier in which I had encountered someone who had perhaps 1) been denied access to a theater, and 2) had a background that supplied her with a command of a crude form of the English language that the young teenager that I was found strange, shocking and quite unfamiliar.
Dorothy had no knowledge of either myself or the black teenage in my particular encounter, nor I of either of them. Dorothy, forced by her parents to endured the spectacle of jeering white boys responding to her presence, was removed from the situation in which her parents had placed her. Oddly, little attention seems to have been placed on those parents. Had the angry black teenage girl, who had been subject to some offensive behavior on the part of the Fox Senator theater, or on the part of Pepsi-Cola, spoken up in an articulate manner, civil rights may have been advanced on that summer day in Sacramento. I doubt it. We were just kids. We didn’t know shit. Well, maybe the black girl, with the way advanced vocabulary of a prostitute, knew shit. But I didn’t know shit.
I don’t apologize for being 14 years old. I don’t apologize for being white. I don’t apologize for not being one of those high school boys who voiced racial epithets at a person of a race that they did not understand, and of whom only one has since been apologetic. That is for them to apologize for having been brought up by parents who also had no capacity to understand.
All of this guilt-tripping mus stop because it is to no avail. There are facts about the behavior that black people have exhibited that must be acknowledged. There are facts about the behavior that white people have exhibited that must be acknowledged. We are not he same. We must learn to celebrate our sameness and our differences.
That people of African descent and people of European descent can live together in our American culture has already been proven. There have been race-baiters seeking to stir shit up because of this or that shooting of someone by “the white racist police”. That is all bullshit. Punks be gettin’ shot all the time become they are punks. You and I are not punks.
We, who deserve to live in peace and harmony, whites and blacks together, have, as our common enemy. those who are lawless … (those who would game the system by “putting pistols on folks and robbing them), (those would rob the local liquor store).
The fact that there are so many who would choose a non-productive life in order to get governments to pay they’re way..
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