Culture & Community: Black History: Another Perspective

Time is a funny thing. Not only does it serve the positive function of healing wounds, it also erases memories that shouldn’t be forgotten. I was treated to an example of this a few months back while conversing with a student at the school library where I’m employed.

The student was a bright young man who’d grown up in the Piedmont Triad. He was about twenty years old, which meant that he’d been born during the age of Reagan. Like many conversations that I have with students at work, our talk was forgettable to a point. I don’t remember how the conversation started or the details that led to the meat of the discussion. I just remember that for some reason I mentioned to him that I grew up under segregation and that I could clearly remember when black people were compelled by law to ride in the back of the bus.

The young man was amazed by this. Although he’d been raised in the same part of the South as I and knew about segregation and the battle for civil rights in our area, this was all ancient history to him, something that happened long, long ago. The South that he knew was integrated and striving to be fair to all of it’s citizens. He was as startled to find himself in the company of someone who lived under segregation as he would be to find himself in conversation with someone who knew Caesar Augustus first hand.

And I was surprised by his surprise. Certainly, I thought, his parents would’ve told him about how things used to be around here, to warn him to be vigilant lest such a thing should happen again. Then I realized that his parents would probably be about ten years younger than I, which would make them toddlers about the time that the Jim Crowe laws were being dismantled. To them, segregation would also be a part of history that they never experienced first hand.

But I wanted him to know how it was, so I told him about how there used to be signs in the front of city buses that read, “North Carolina State Law: White patrons fill from the front of the bus; colored patrons fill from the rear.” I told him about the rules of conduct that existed in those days, that if a young and healthy white rider was to board a bus that was full, the black person who was closest to the front was required to give the seat to the white – even if the black patron was old, feeble or crippled.

I told him more. Like how the Carolina Theater used to have a special “Colored Entrance” and how black people had to watch movies from a special balcony that was above and behind the balcony used by whites. Other movie theaters didn’t cater to blacks at all. There were, of course, black schools and white schools, the black schools getting the textbooks that were discarded by the white schools.

I explained how downtown restaurants, if they served blacks at all, made them take their lunch in a bag “to go” to be eaten outside on the sidewalk, and how a black person didn’t dare use a public rest room unless is was specifically labeled “colored.” There were black taxi companies and white taxi companies. Bluebird, City, Sun and Arrow cabs wouldn’t allow “colored” riders. Daniel-Keck served the black community.

As I say, the young man was amazed. I had become a living history book, a person who had lived under the southern version of apartheid. But if he was amazed that I could remember all of these things, I hope that he was disturbed by what I told him next. “We all accepted it,” I said. “Hardly any white person saw anything wrong with this. It was just the way it was.”

Indeed, this acceptance is the thing that disturbs me the most about this aspect of our shared Southern heritage. “Good” people, like my family, people who despised groups like the Klan and open expressions of racial hatred, accepted segregation as if it were a natural law and part of God’s plan. I was raised to think that it was only fitting that an old black woman should give me her seat on the bus if there was none other available or that a black person should just “hold it” in the absence of a colored rest room.

Which brings me to my point.

Although I am ashamed that I ever accepted segregation as fit and proper, I do not deny it. In fact, I am humbly proud that I’ve overcome this aspect of my upbringing. I find, however, that most white Southerners of my generation and before have short memories. Not a single person I know will admit to having accepted segregation, which makes me wonder why it took an act of Congress to change the way things are done around here.

We should all remember how easy it was for us to accept segregation as a way of life, and we should tell our children and our children’s children the part we played in supporting this system. This takes great inner fortitude, but it’s the only way we can make certain that such a thing never happens again. We must not let our children think that we were all innocent and that the evil of segregation was only supported by others. We should always remember that even good people like ourselves can support evil causes.

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