Back before they started to “bus” kids around to mix up schools, my town had two elementary schools. I, a white kid, went to the school that was mostly poor kids, black kids, and immigrant Mexican kids. They other school was something like 95+ % white. (I think they had maybe 5 black kids?) I remember that the principal of the other school and a lot of the parents were very angry and not at all shy about saying so (and why) when the school district decided to send all of K-3 to one school and 4-5 to the other. (Sixth upward went somewhere else.) I thought it was only fair, myself. I also recall that in 4-5 grade, I discovered that the white school got all the funding for the “gifted” program and our school got the dregs, meaning they got to go places and do things and we got one teacher who taught us to do papier mache and similarly not-particularly academically challenging things. :rolleyes: This was as recently as 1972-75.
I was born in Baltimore in 1955. (Hey, Crotalus!)
When I was very young, probably 5 or so, my mother was briefly hospitalized at Johns Hopkins (where I had been born) for a detached retina. My sister and I went to visit her with my grandmother. We were playing in a playground outside the hospital with another child. After a while, my grandmother invited the boy to join us for lunch in a nearby restaurant.
The counterman said he couldn’t serve the black child. My grandmother bought sandwiches and we took them outside and ate with him.
I don’t specifically remember seeing “Whites Only” signs, but my parents were pretty strict about not patronizing places that discriminated. Although we did go to Gwynn Oak Amusement Park, which Crotalus mentioned. Perhaps after they started letting black folks in.
I had black friends in school, and I remember being rather surprised at how run down was the house that my black friend lived in, just a few blocks from us, but on the other side of “the tracks.” I didn’t know the term “redlining,” but I knew its effects.
[Informed WAG]
I think that the untouchables came about due to some of the restrictions in Hunduism (and Buddhism) on what are clean and unclean things to do. Touching feces, killing animals, etc. are viewed as “dirty” and, in a sense, sinful. Touching a person who had done such things can dirty you as well.
Slaughtering animals for meat, disposing of human waste, etc. are necessary to daily life though; so someone had to do them.
So probably over time the people who did do those jobs came to be shunned due to the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism, and since their children were necessarily in contact with them, their children became shunned as well and essentially forced into a similar job.
The Japanese had a similar group of people who were, again, butchers. The Burakumin (eta).
[/IWAG]
I was a flight attendant for The Flying Tiger Line in the 1960s. We moved military passengers to and from their overseas bases, with occasional trips within the US. One such trip in the early ‘60s (I forget the year) was for army personnel, all young men, fresh out of boot camp at Fort Ord (California), flying from Travis AFB to a base in No. Carolina. The destination airport was weathered in and we were diverted to Augusta, Georgia, where the passengers were to be put up for the night in a hotel close to the airport.
The senior flight attendant, a white woman in her mid-twenties, and the senior enlisted man in charge, a black man in his forties, went to the hotel desk to make the room arrangements. The hotel manager advised that Negros were not allowed in the hotel and asked the man to leave.
The flight attendant followed him out of the hotel and asked what they should do. She said she was absolutely mortified that this older man, one who outranked all of the passengers, white and black, was treated this way. The man chuckled and said, “You’ve never been in this part of the country before, have you?” He and the black passengers were directed to a Negro hotel in another part of Augusta, while the crew and white passengers were allowed in the airport hotel. This was something that our ‘stewardess’ training didn’t cover.
The young black passengers, mostly from the Los Angeles area, encountered their first institutionalized instance of racism on that trip, although I’m sure they encountered more subtle forms in their everyday lives during those times. It was an eye-opener for all of us.
My dad talks of segregated drinking fountains encontered during trips to the South in the 50’s. My grandfather, God bless him, would always insist that his children drink from the “colored” fountain. I don’t know how passerbys reacted to this, but grandpa was an angry sparkplug of a Broolynite who would have happily picked a fight with everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line. He had gotten to know Southern bigotry as a Jew during the war, and had several strong opinions on the subject.
I’m sure the ones who didn’t want coloreds drinking from their fountain would also not want a Commie Jew drinking from their fountain, if all I’ve heard is accurate.
I’m white and was born the year the Civil Rights Act was signed ('64–get off my lawn!) and grew up a minority in the Bronx 
although my neighborhood was and is largely Irish-American, with some people with attitudes that would not be foreign to the South; although that waned greatly when the Bronx stopped burning.
However, my NYC-born parents travelled a lot in the 50s and early 60s and saw the vestiges of Jim Crow up close. Both went to Catholic schools that were predominantly white just because most Catholic kids were white, but both schools (magnet schools we’d call them nowadays) were totally integrated, with faces of all colors in their yearbooks (OK, only a couple of Asians). One of my Dad’s best friends to this day is a Latino priest who doesn’t remember any prejudice in the school in the early 60s; it just wasn’t talked about, and the Christian Brothers who ran the school wouldn’t have tolerated any such nonsense anyway.
However, in the late 50s my Mom’s girl’s school went to Washington DC on a trip. She remembers two black classmates who went to stay elsewhere when they arrived, but otherwise stayed with them the whole time, including in ‘whites-only’ eating places. She thinks now that the prospect of the owners making a fuss to several stern habit-clad nuns to weed out two out of sixty girls was too much for them to bother with, but she could tell the proprieters were unhappy. They had a private bus so transporation wasn’t an issue, and she can’t remember whether the museums and national monuments were segregated.
My Dad’s a bit older and had the luck (as he says) to be assigned to Camp Drum in Augusta, GA, when he was drafted in '59 or so. The men gathered in the Kingsbridge Armory and after his harrowing first ride in a plane during a major storm, he arrived in Georgia to see his black friends have a double life–equal on base (although some of the Southern guys had trouble adjusting to taking orders or working with blacks, but they had to or else) and totally unequal off it. Dad had trouble finding a Catholic church to go to off-base, but it was nothing compared to what the Northern black guys had to go through, he says. There was a black middle and entreprenuerial class in decent all-black neighborhoods, of course, so there were always restaurants, theaters, bars, etc. for the guys, but what hurt them the most, he said, were the public facilities that they couldn’t use, and the signs everywhere. He said that he and the guys would just shake their heads and accept, grudgingly, that they were in a different place and just had to put up with it. On base at least they could have beers together.
There’s a nice old trolley car, #884 from Atlanta, at this trolley museum I used to volunteer at. Midway through the car there’s a few rows of seats with holes drilled into into the tops of the backs, and that’s for the ‘Colored Section’ sign. The conductor would move it forward or backward depending on what neighborhood the trolley was headed for and how many white and black passengers were expected. The sign itself exists, but the museum has decided not to put it back into the otherwise restored car; nor have they put in back in the main museum display cases. It is an important relic from the era but they know that it will cause many of their visitors a stab of pain. So it remains downstairs in the archives.
I don’t know where it belongs–I think that kids nowadays, of all colors, are not being taught enough historical perspective, and how far we’ve come in so short a time (otherwise how can you measure how far you have left to go?). But still…
I worked at a Burdines department store in South Beach, Miami around 1990. The building was pretty old and it was an odd building. There were TONS of bathrooms, the lunch room was HUGE, a TON of water fountains, etc. It just seemed like the most overbuilt building as far as infrastructure.
They were going to be doing some reconstruction of some areas and got the original blueprints for the building. It all became clear, very clearly marked were the colored and white bathrooms, lunch room and water fountains. The idiot new General Manager they had recently brought in said that that may have been on the blueprints but Burdines would NEVER have had that in practice. In a lesson that I hope he took to heart, a woman who had worked there since the store opened (and before to get it ready) very vehemently explained to him that she knew damn good and well that is EXACTLY the way it was because she lived it. Here’s a tip, don’t ever try to claim lack of segregation when you have a black woman standing in front of you who knows MUCH more about it than you do. He tried back pedaling, but it didn’t do much good. To her credit, she was far more respectful than I would have been had I been in her shoes.
I lived in a town called Otter Creek, it was the white town and the black town down the road was called Rosewood. A movie was made about the Rosewood Massacre. However, the folks of Otter Creek all claimed they helped hide the blacks trying to escape, not one ever admitted to being in favor of it.
Down the road a bit is Cedar Key, where my brother was told that our friend had better be off the island by nightfall. He was black.
My father the child molester, who had been shielded by his family for decades, called to tell us that our cousin had disgraced the family, he would never be able to hold his head up again, she was having a baby by a black man. Lesson learned: Diddle all the kids you want, don’t breed with a black person.
While working in a sporting goods store, I saw a manager (Cuban) throw away the application of a black kid that came to apply, he never even looked at the application. I confronted him and walked out. Cuban racism is so rampant I couldn’t even fathom him perpetuating another form of it.
My husbands grandfathers family was from Spain. There was so much anti-cuban sentiment in business here in Tampa that he changed his name to one more anglo. His wife (white) would have a mason jar that black workers could use for a drink of water.
We tried to adopt a kid in the 80’s and were denied because he was black and we were white. I saw him years later and he had been adopted and was an amazing kid still.
My neighbor bitches and moans about the cubans living behind us. They talk to loud, play their music too loud and their kids play out side. To her credit, she likes the quiet cubans that moved in next door to me. And she hated the white folks that lived there before.
When we got married, my husbands Grandfather asked me what color I wanted my waiters to be. I asked him for skin swatches and he apologized. 
I’m learning about indian society as I read “A Suitable Boy” and it doesn’t seem like racism the way that we think about it here. As with most things, perspective is everything and trying to understand another culture can be difficult because we bring with us our own prejudices. As a southerner, who folks will consider a racist by birth, I’ve seen lots of evidence of racism, I’ve also seen lots of calls of racism, where none existed.
When we were childless and discussing adoption, my husband wanted as white as possible. Now that he is a father? Heck, he’d take a purple kid. He has fallen into the trap of the “universal father.” When you open your heart, it is amazing what can fill it.
Sorry for the double post, I was posting as you were. If you ask me, with all the deniers out there, the sign should ABSOLUTELY be put on the trolley.
It disgusts me that people can say that this isn’t what happened, or this isn’t the way it was. So it gives visitors a stab of pain? GOOD. A museums job is to show the way things were, by not having that sign is saying they are willing to modify history to coddle the public. That is not their job.
a) I was a 2nd-3rd grade child in Lowndes Elementary School in 1966-7. Rather than being segregated it was so recently post-segregation that the self-consciousness was palpable. I was coming in from out-of-state (a part of New Mexico where they had almost no black people and therefore almost no attitudes) and I must’ve had half a dozen different “talks” from adults about “You’re going to see negro boys and girls and they are going to look different but they are the same as us inside, it is not right to judge people by the color of their skin, and they get to go to the same schools as you do but it wasn’t always that way. So you might hear some kids say mean or nasty things about them, or to them, or about them being there. They might say a mean and ugly word I hope you never use: ‘nigger’. Don’t join in with that. Always say ‘negro’. And don’t be scared of the negro kids. Just treat them like everybody else.”
b) About 16 years later I was working in a casual capacity at The Reading Room, a countercultural poetry and coffee joint next door to the Bluebird Cafe, in Athens GA right here. There were some other hippie-esque / alternative-scene businesses farther up Clayton (herbal apothecary, a small live-music joint, etc) as well. Meanwhile across the street diagonally on Thomas street was a restaurant, a liquor store, and some other businesses, and a pay phone, and only black people hung out over there and they never crossed over the diagonal to the white-hippie businesses. One day I needed smokes (I smoked back then) and the nearest place to get the was the cafe. I walk across, to the dismay of the folks who worked with me, go in and buy a pack, walk past staring black guys on the sidewalk (a couple hostile, most just curious) and go back the way I’d come, only to be attacked by one who had been drinking (liquor store, remember?) and who started cussing me out His buddies intervened and pulled him off and apologized to me and I went on my way. I was breaking the rules — each side just always pretended that the world ended at the dividing point; no one ever crossed. Just was not done. And this was 1982 not 1965.
AuntBeast:
I grew up in Jax, FL - I remember the same sentiments re: Cedar Key.
If anyone works in the real estate/title insurance biz - the next time you review a title insurance policy or the like - take a look at how old the property is. If you’re in Florida or California especially, the deed restrictions of certain developments will make your hair stand on end. Specifically - no Negroes (or whatever the term was at the particular time the covenants were written) unless they were farm hands or hired help in Florida; in California, you can usually add “Pacific Islander” or “Asian” to the restrictions.
I’ve had more than one processor or closer come to me in tears after getting ahold of an old set of deed restrictions.
VCNJ~
Being 20 years old, I never experienced official segregation, per se, but we were a white/Jewish family who stuck around during a major “white flight” period in the late 80s. The result was that by the time I entered elementary school in 1991 our county (Prince George’s, in Maryland, between Baltimore and DC) was close to 90% black. I caught a lot of flak and a lot of general blame for the evils of the world from my classmates, but what I remember most about the whole thing was I didn’t really think of anyone as “black” unless they were actively committing what would be called a hate crime if it were between adults, at the time. I remember my parents making generalizations about black people (mostly harmless–mostly) and me not understanding what they meant. I asked for clarification, but you can imagine how difficult it was for them to explain it to me. I mean, they could’ve said “Black people are the ones with slave ancestors”, but that wouldn’tve meant much to me. They could’ve said “Black people are dark-skinned” but that would just leave me confused, because I’d never noticed any significant difference in skin tone.
I never really got it until after we’d lived in San Diego for a year or two and I opened up my old yearbooks–I was shocked to find that my former classmates all had dark skin! (I would’ve been 13 at this point.) At first I thought there was no way I wouldn’tve noticed before, and there must have been a printing error, so I looked up the Indian kid, and the Mexican kid, and myself and the handful of other white kids and their skin tones all looked right. That really confused me for a while, until I realized that my perception of black people had changed when I moved from a place where they were the majority to a place where there were hardly any. It’s hard to put into words now, but I just didn’t see any difference in people more fundamental than who hung out with who, what music people listened to, etc. I was vaguely aware of the distinction between “white” and “black” but I never bothered to apply it to the people I knew, and if I would have been asked to classify them in racial categories I’m sure I would’ve gotten a lot wrong. Looking back at how their faces looked to me in the flesh, they looked pretty much like well-tanned white people look to me now. I wish I saw things the same way now, and sometimes I wonder if I would’ve kept that innocence if I hadn’t moved to San Diego, or if I would’ve grown up bitter and racist–after all, I underwent a lot of random violence and almost constant name-calling for being white and Jewish. Would the other kids have grown more tolerant and accepted me later? I’ll never know, but OTOH I’ll never forget my last day at that school–Manny, the kid who’d beaten me up the most, and a couple of other kids who did a lot to make my young life a living hell in their own ways, gave me a sincere apology, hugged me and wished me good luck in California. If closure exists, that was it.
Being an outsider among my peers for the entirety of elementary school did cause me long-term problems, though. It’s been tough to really feel comfortable in any social group since then, and every time there’s a major change in my life (different school, new apartment, nasty breakup) I become a recluse and it takes a few months to start opening up to people again. And I remember that I would’ve done anything to be accepted by some group of kids in elementary school. One group of white kids told me they’d let me hang out with them if I got new Airwalks and sat a rung below them on the playground structure they hung out on, and I begged and begged my mom to get me Airwalks, and when she finally did I ran to whatever that thing was on the playground and took my position a few feet below them to listen to their conversation and say something every few minutes, to which David would respond by shooting it down and making me look stupid for saying it. That was the happiest time of my life at that point. Pretty sad, looking back on it.
Sadly, as I understand it the “red line” blocking Mexicans from buying homes in the decent parts of both San Diego and Tucson took a lot longer to get removed.
Don’t forget that Chuck Berry’s career ended after he was arrested for crossing a state line with a non-“coloured” girl in his car.
What does that mean?
Wow! And I’ve always thought of Athens as such a progressive place, too. BTW, you couldn’t get cigarettes at the liquor store but you could get them at a diner?
Same in Tucson, AZ, plus “Jew” and “Mexican”. I saw this on the deed for the house my parents (dad’s 1/2 Jewish) bought there a couple years ago.
Liquor store and one of the two restaurants was catty-cornered across from the Reading Room, and were therefore on the “black corner”. The Reading Room didn’t sell ciggies and the Bluebird Cafe, I think, either didn’t, or was out, or was closed, I don’t remember which.
Wait, so you’re white and you walked to the liquor store to get cigarettes? I thought you were black and walked to the Bluebird Cafe to get cigarettes, from this:
I may be one of the youngest people you will find that experienced segregation directly. I was born in 1973 in Louisiana and our schools were segregated until 1980 when I was in the first grade. Technically they weren’t segregated. The whole town was segregated with the stereotypical railroad tracks being part of the dividing line so the town just invented two separate schools districts that happened to be 100% white and black respectively.
My parents taught at the all black school. Things were a little different than they are often portrayed. Whites weren’t viewed as general oppressors and overlords. We just had two separate cultures in the same town and that is the way that everyone viewed it. I know my parents didn’t view themselves as any kind of liberals by teaching in the black school nor did any of the other white teachers. It was just a separate population of people with different food, way of speaking, and everything else. The black school always killed the white school at basketball and the football coaches determined early on that there was no way they were going to be segregated in an area where high school football is so important so that was the one integrated thing. Sorry if it sounds like a stereotype but that was how it was.
We were integrated by mandate in 1980 and we split into an integrated elementary and high school. I got to go to the formerly black school which was a little odd because it still had much of the same faculty and staff. We ate soul food for lunch everyday for example because that is what the lunch ladies knew how to make.
Overall, some of this stuff even to this day is more complicated than it is often made out to be. When I go to the Virgin Islands, I notice the same thing there. There is dual cultures in place with neither side having a big incentive to change things.
I didn’t write it but I’ll take a crack at answering: There were white people in the Bronx in the 1960s with racist attitudes. Many buildings in parts of the Bronx burned in the 1970s, you can read a little bit about it here: the last paragraph under “History”
In my real estate class, the instructor told of one of his clients who was a black woman who had the deed to her property framed on her wall. She was extraordinarily proud of it, you see, according to the racist bastards that once owned the property, she should have never been able to own it, but she did, free and clear.
From what I understand, you can not enforce anything that is against the law and since the law is pretty clear on racial descrimination in property purchasing, I imagine that some title company somewhere has tapped a legislator on the shoulder and there is a work around because it really was very common to exclude “undesireables.”
I guess the flip side of this is the warring neighbors down the road from my grandmother (she who lives in the county with the 10 commandments in the courthouse) one of which who put their property up for sale with a huge sign that said “blacks, minorities, large families encouraged” or something like that.
fetus:
Sorry, that was rather unclear. The “black” restaurant is where I went to get the smokes, I think it was also called a cafe. Yeah, I’m a white fellow. I worked in the hippie-countercultural bookstore The Reading Room.
I’ve seen the antiquated restrictions stamped with a stamp that says something to the effect of “All covenants and restrictions hereby rendered illegal by the Civil Rights Act are hereby deleted/rendered invalid”, etc.
VCNJ~
I’m 45, my husband is 53, and we’ve both grown up and lived in Louisiana for the overwhelming majority of our lives. He remembers black/white water fountains and restrooms. By the time my memory kicks in, those had been converted to men’s and women’s restrooms the water fountains were used by anyone.
When I was a teenager and worked at McDonald’s our work crew socialized together often. I was once offered a ride to a tubing trip by a black male coworker. My father would not allow me to accept a ride with him.
In 1986 DH and I were completing work on our personal home and hired an elderly black man, Mr. Willie, who had worked for DH’s father for decades, to help with painting and sealing woodwork. DH’s parents prepared lunch for us all and Mr. Willie met my MIL at the back door to get his plate and ate his lunch sitting on the tailgate of his truck. When I questioned my elderly in-laws why he wasn’t joining us at the table, they were genuinely puzzled why Mr. Willie would want to join them. They truly believed he was more comfortable eating outside rather than at the table with the white folks because that’s the way it had always been. Amazingly, Mr. Willie later agreed with them and explained to this crazy young whippersnapper that that is just the way things were done in their generation.
When my husband and I briefly lived in St Marys GA, we joined the local country club in order to use the swimming pool and golf course. Our neighbors child was biracial (black/white) and on my first visit to the CC pool I invited her to join us. We were refused entrance and asked to reconsider our guest list before returning. This occurred in 1989. (We immediately dropped our membership)
In 1991 we adopted our biracial son. In 1992 we adopted our black daughter. Both were adopted through a private adoption agency. My elderly grandmother tenderly and lovingly held my son on her lap and explained to me that blacks and whites mixing were like horse and cattle mating. It just wasn’t supposed to happen, but she wouldn’t blame my poor son, especially since we would be rearing him white. (It goes without saying that my grandmother sees my children very rarely)
In 1994 we were attending certification classes to become foster parents and were assigned a black social worker. She sat on my sofa, in my living room, and asked me what Mr. AdoptaMom or I had ever done to a black person that we felt we had to “make up for” by adopting a black child.
In 1998 two of my white teenage daughters were out with one of the girls black boyfriend. Returning home from the movies they were pulled over by a middle aged white policeman who frisked them and then asked my daughters what they were doing out with that “boy”.
A few years ago I casually asked my boss why we have no black therapists at our center when 60% of our clients are black. She explained that she had not met a black speech therapist who could enunciate well enough.
Just this school year, Mr. AdoptaMom fussed heavily at AdoptaSon one day before school. Later in the morning, he felt he’d over reacted and wanted to make amends to AdoptaSon, so he went to school to apologize face to face. The school admissions clerk refused to allow Mr. AdoptaMom to see AdoptaSon until AdoptaSon explained that yes, the very tall white man really was his father.
Why yes, I’d like to move. Why do you ask? :rolleyes:
edited to correct the glaring spelling errors, but I’m sure there are more