I moved to Mobile, Alabama in 1957 when I was 3 years old with my mother and father. We returned in 1966 to southeastern Pennsylvania, where my parents had been born and raised. My father was a maintenance guy, and later the maintenance supervisor, at Scott Paper's pulp mill. My mother was a housewife, as were most white women of her day. I have a few vivid memories of witnessing what has turned out to be historical, and I document them now so they will not be forgotten. These lessons are so deep that I know they will remain with my soul after death.
My father had an employee from Citronelle, Alabama, home of Harper Lee. Before To Kill A Mockingbird was published, he told my father a story about getting in trouble with the law, and paying the local lawyer with bags of pecans. It's in the book.
Upon arriving in the deep south, my mother went to register to vote, and was shocked at having to pay a poll tax and take a literacy test. The test questions were, of course, not written, and adjusted to the color or the applicant. (Although poll taxes and literacy tests were abolished by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the practice continued in Alabama through 1966.)
When I was perhaps 7 or 8 years old, I witnessed a black boy of the same age as me walking down the highway across from my house. He was all alone, and it was very odd, because the only time I ever saw black people was when I visited a playmate's home, and the black maid was present, doing her child care and housework for the family. The maids were present in my playmates' homes most every weekday, and sometimes on weekends too. I can't imagine who put him out on the street in a white neighborhood, or why. I watched him walk up to the water fountain outside the gas station, which had a sign on the wall behind the fountain, more aptly described as masking tape with a handwritten message in pen, which said: "WHITES, AND I MEAN WHITES ONLY!" The boy was clearly tired, sweaty, and lost, and as he approached the water fountain to take a drink, the owner of the gas station chased the boy with a stick, cursing him and swinging the stick. He skedaddled down the road, without his drink.
The most accurate depiction I have ever seen of the black maid culture and racial attitudes in the deep south was depicted in the movie, The Long Walk Home. Sissy Spacek and Whoppie Goldberg play out a story of the drama that ensued in the community following Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The year was 1955. For a year, the black maids participated in the bus boycott, and had no way to get to their white employers' homes, except to walk.
My father was a square dance caller, and every Saturday night he and my mom went out. He called, and she danced. Often, he was a guest caller at other clubs, and sometimes, I got to go with them while my baby brother was left at home with a sitter. I recall one night we got lost. We were looking for a community hall where the dance was to be held, somewhere around Chickasaw, Alabama. We were driving around, lost in the black part of town, and we passed the schoolhouse. It's walls were made of cardboard, the roof was a thin sheet of tin, and there were no windows; the ground around the building was red dirt. I was shocked. I still see the scene in my mind's eye.
A fellow square dancer invited my father to join the Ku Klux Klan, and he declined. He had to then lay low for quite a while to avoid white retribution.
Our family doctor's office was at the intersection of Spring Hill Blvd and Grant Street. (Yes, the Grant Street that Bob Dylan sang about....) Inside the office, the receptionist and office workers sat behind an opaque glass privacy window that slid open and closed from the inside. One day my mother went the wrong way in the parking lot and ended up driving through the rear of the building. And what did we see? A "Colored Only" waiting room. Next time my mother was at the open reception window, she noticed an identical opaque glass privacy window on the opposite side of the room. Dr. Wright was a brave doctor.
Although public school segregation was held unconstitutional in the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the reality of this change in culture did not reach Alabama until September 1963, when I was in 5th grade. On September 10th, in 1963, 20 black children were scheduled to enroll in white public schools in Birmingham, Mobile and Tuskegee Alabama. I came home from school soonafter, and asked my mother, "Mama, what are my Orders?" "What do you mean?" she replied. This exchange went back and forth several times, until she finally pulled it out of me. "All the other kids have Orders from their parents, but I don't. What do I do if they bring a black into my classroom? Do I get up and walk out with everyone else, or do I have to stay?"
We left Alabama soon after this, in December 1965, for a variety of reasons. But one of the most pressing causes was this: if you are white but not racist, where can you safely send your children to school? I was in 7th grade, my brother was about to enter 1st grade, and my sister was a few years behind my brother. White students were being withdrawn from public schools and sent to be educated in the spare rooms of churches and community centers with unqualified and inexperienced white teachers. The public schools were rapidly turning into segregated black schools.
My years in Mobile are remembered as carefree and happy.... and that is largely why I returned to Mobile for my freshman year, at Spring Hill College. Spring Hill, a Jesuit institution dating back to 1830, led the way in desegregation among Southern colleges and
earned the respect of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who mentioned the
moral significance of Spring Hill’s initiatives in his 1963 “Letter from
a Birmingham Jail.” In 1956, Ms. Fannie Motley became the first African American graduate of
the college. She was one of only two Mobile area graduates to graduate
with honors that year. I entered in the fall of 1971, and was told stories of what it was like when the institution became the first southern white college to integrate..... it was an open campus, with small roads connecting the communities on either side of the school. So there was a little local traffic. But after integration, pick up trucks with good old boys armed with shotguns in the cab were frequent sights on these roads. They were looking to pick off black students. One evening, we decided to order pizza and dine in the dorm. A black student, who was from Mobile, was going to go get the food and bring it back. I said, "I'll ride with you." And she quickly replied, "You're out of your mind! A white man sees us together, and you're dead. A black man sees us, and I'm dead". Such was the state of race relations in 1971. I left in 1972 and never went back.
