Great commentary, Tom. I suspect many of us on our side of the racial struggle "fence" had similar experiences. I grew up on Long Island and until I went to high school, I had never met a black person "in person", only in the movies..... But even then, literature and PBS did a job of educating me on how things were not so rosy for many p…
Great commentary, Tom. I suspect many of us on our side of the racial struggle "fence" had similar experiences. I grew up on Long Island and until I went to high school, I had never met a black person "in person", only in the movies..... But even then, literature and PBS did a job of educating me on how things were not so rosy for many people of color.
Two things stand out. On PBS, a black entertainer described his childhood in a mixed neighborhood. One day, the other kids, all white, started a game - when they saw him, they'd run down the street yelling "here comes the nigger, here comes the nigger!" He joined in, running down the street, yelling the same thing, not realizing that HE was the "nigger"..... That was #1.
Second was a well-known short story "A Short Wait Between Trains" - based on a true incident, it tells the story of several black soldiers waiting to be sent overseas to fight in North Africa, getting off a train in the south to have lunch. They are told they cannot eat in the station's dining room, but have to go out back to the kitchen where they will get what's left over from the meal being served inside. They happen to look inside the dining room and see that the people being fed inside are German prisoners of war being sent to a prison camp - being treated better than black soldiers fighting for the country..... Needless to say, it made quite an impression - fortunately one that has stuck with me over 60 years later. I'm with Rodney King - can't we all just get along?
That memory of German POWs happened a lot. I remember listening to a presentation out at Planes of Fame 20 years ago by one of the Tuskeegee Airmen pilots, about how he came back from combat, a Captain in the air force, as an instructor at Randolph Field in Texas. He went to the BX to order a hamburger and was told to go around back to get it, where he looked inside and saw all the German POWs who did the gardening and picking-up around the base, sitting inside having a "fine old time" as he described it. That audience - lots of conservatives in it - was dead silent, listening to someone they'd come to "pay their respects to" tell them that story. I talked to him afterwards - he told me he'd been telling the story for 40 years "sometimes, some of them 'get it.'"
Great commentary, Tom. I suspect many of us on our side of the racial struggle "fence" had similar experiences. I grew up on Long Island and until I went to high school, I had never met a black person "in person", only in the movies..... But even then, literature and PBS did a job of educating me on how things were not so rosy for many people of color.
Two things stand out. On PBS, a black entertainer described his childhood in a mixed neighborhood. One day, the other kids, all white, started a game - when they saw him, they'd run down the street yelling "here comes the nigger, here comes the nigger!" He joined in, running down the street, yelling the same thing, not realizing that HE was the "nigger"..... That was #1.
Second was a well-known short story "A Short Wait Between Trains" - based on a true incident, it tells the story of several black soldiers waiting to be sent overseas to fight in North Africa, getting off a train in the south to have lunch. They are told they cannot eat in the station's dining room, but have to go out back to the kitchen where they will get what's left over from the meal being served inside. They happen to look inside the dining room and see that the people being fed inside are German prisoners of war being sent to a prison camp - being treated better than black soldiers fighting for the country..... Needless to say, it made quite an impression - fortunately one that has stuck with me over 60 years later. I'm with Rodney King - can't we all just get along?
That memory of German POWs happened a lot. I remember listening to a presentation out at Planes of Fame 20 years ago by one of the Tuskeegee Airmen pilots, about how he came back from combat, a Captain in the air force, as an instructor at Randolph Field in Texas. He went to the BX to order a hamburger and was told to go around back to get it, where he looked inside and saw all the German POWs who did the gardening and picking-up around the base, sitting inside having a "fine old time" as he described it. That audience - lots of conservatives in it - was dead silent, listening to someone they'd come to "pay their respects to" tell them that story. I talked to him afterwards - he told me he'd been telling the story for 40 years "sometimes, some of them 'get it.'"
Only a very few, I bet. We are seeing the current version of that story play out.