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Growing up White in the Segregated South |
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© Carroll Williams 2005 |
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Because I am a white American I cannot speak about segregation from the perspective of a black person. There is no way I can get inside the subject from the perspective of black experience. However, white people also experienced segregation. Every person black or white had their own experiences which were unique and no individual experienced every aspect of the racism enforced by the laws of the southern states of America. What follows are some of the things I experienced including threats of arrest and even being arrested once for breaking segregation laws while growing up white in the segregated south. Before the age of sixteen I had never traveled outside the segregated southern United States. Born in Arkansas and raised in Florida and Arkansas I had only seen one side of a racially divided country. To me segregation was "normal." That was the way things were and the way they always would be. It was common to hear the "N…" word used by young and old, white and black. When I was in second grade at Melbourne Elementary in Melbourne, Florida our school staged a Thanksgiving parade down New Haven Avenue through the heart of town. I was dressed up as a "Pilgrim" in cardboard and paper costumes along with my classmates. Another marching group wore white robes and pointed white hats with only eye holes through which to see. I wondered what they represented. My mom told me they were ghosts. She chose to spare me knowing that these were actually children of the local KKK chapter whose parents entered them openly in a public school parade. No one seemed to mind. We were never told explicitly that we were not to play with the black children in our town, but it was somehow understood that they were "different." I never saw any act of violence or aggression against black people in our town. I did hear adults talk about how black people were not allowed to live in certain neighborhoods, and were to "stay in their place." As a child I did not understand just what that meant other than to remain in their neighborhood. Later as a young adult I would learn much more about the implications of that terminology. When I turned sixteen I managed to lie about my age and join the Marine Corps in January 1951. While processing into the naval service and that is what the USMC is, a branch of the Navy, several of the recruits were taken to eat lunch at a restaurant on Capitol Avenue in Little Rock. There were several white young men and two black young men in the group. The two black men were served their lunch in the back of the kitchen while all of the whites along with two Navy recruiters in uniform were served in the main dining room. I was accustomed to that arrangement in the past, but in light of the Korean War and the commitment these two young black men were making to put their lives on the line it seemed very odd to me. In the course of conversation with the two recruiters it turned out the two black men were joining the Navy and not the Marines. One of the recruiters told us that the only thing the two black men would be allowed to do in the Navy was serve as mess stewards. At MCRD, the Marine Recruit Depot in San Diego I do not recall a single black individual in the entire Third Recruit Training Battalion. I know there were black Marines in the Korean War, but I didn't see any during my training days. My life took a different turn at the end of my basic training. The Marine Corps discovered my age and sent me packing with a General Discharge. On my DD-214 it was explained for "minority reasons." I was not to be deterred. On my seventeenth birthday I joined the U.S. Air Force at Conway, Arkansas and reported for duty at Barksdale Air Force Base outside Bossier City, Louisiana. The Air Force did not require a veteran to repeat basic military training. This along with my love of airplanes led me to choose the Air Force. At Barksdale there were a number of young black men and women serving in uniform. I would soon learn just how difficult life could be for a black person serving their country in the segregated Southland. I had several experiences in and around Shreveport, Louisiana that told me something was very much amiss in our society. On one occasion a black lady of advanced age exited the streetcar ahead of me and stood holding the door open for this very young and able bodied white man. I had been brought up to hold the door for a lady, not the other way around. This was embarrassing to me and I told the lady I should be holding the door for her. She just shrugged and said nothing. On another occasion I encountered a young black man about my age on the street. I spoke to him in a friendly manner, some greeting such as "Good morning." He stopped and stood motionless facing me. I tried to make conversation. Each time I spoke, all he would say to me was, "Yes sir." I soon learned that in Louisiana this was the way things were. A local white civilian told me, "The only thing a black man around here is allowed to say to a white man is yes sir, or no sir." I was sent to Keesler Air Force Base at Biloxi, Mississippi for electronics training. There were several young black men in our barracks there. One in particular was a young black man from Chicago who was part of the small group with whom I hung out socially after hours and on weekends. One warm spring Saturday four of us went down to the waterfront. Three of us were white and the fourth member of our group was our black friend from Illinois. We rented a skiff and rowed out to a small island at the mouth of Biloxi harbor. We swam and walked the deserted beaches on the island for an hour or so. When we started back toward the boat rental dock we took turns rowing the boat and using it as diving platform. We belly flopped into the water and then pulled ourselves back into the boat. It was great fun. As we came nearer to the shore we heard sirens and saw several police cars pull to a stop at the local public beach. We thought little of it, but as we came nearer to the shoreline we were told over a bullhorn to get out of the water immediately. We complied with the police orders and beached the skiff. We were immediately arrested and transported in a police van to the station. We stood dripping wet in our bathing suits at the police station. A sergeant sat behind a desk on a raised platform. Several officers stood just behind the four of us. Two of them were slapping the ends of their batons into the palms of the opposite hand in a threatening gesture. My friends stood silent not knowing what to say or do. We were all wearing our Air Force dog tags on chains around our necks. I spoke up. I held up my dog tags and said, "Sir, we are all airmen from Keesler. Do we have the right to make a phone call?" The sergeant was not pleased. Grudgingly he said, "Yes, and you better make it fast." I picked up the telephone on his desk and dialed the Air Police number at the base. I explained that we were under arrest in Biloxi and did not understand why. The Air Police sergeant said, "I'll have my men in town stop by. They will be there shortly." The civilian police were not pleased with this turn of events. They stood behind us muttering that if the sergeant would give the word they would take us into the cellblock and "Give us the treatment." I continued my conversation with the desk sergeant. I asked him why we were arrested. He pointed directly at our black friend and said, "You brought one of these things onto a white man's beach. That's against the laws of the sovereign state of Mississippi. That's why you are under arrest." I told him that I had grown up in Arkansas and I always thought that segregation was a social custom. I did not know until that moment that segregation was written into the laws of our southern states. How ignorant could one white kid be? My ninth grade civics teacher never mentioned segregation laws, nor did any other teachers in my presence. It was an unspoken subject. When the Air Police arrived we were released into their custody. We piled into the rear of an Air Force pick up and were driven back to the boat rental place to retrieve our clothes. We arrived back at the base in time for evening chow. After supper we sat in the barracks sharing our thoughts on the day's events. I asked our black friend if growing up in Chicago he had ever encountered anything like he had seen today. He said he had been hassled many times by white cops wherever he had traveled. The only thing that saved us from being beaten up in the cell block by the local cops was the fact that we were in the Air Force. Sometime prior to our experience Biloxi had been placed off limits to Air Force personnel for the protection of the young airmen. The commanding general had kept the town off limits for thirty days. When you consider that in those days the Air Force was the largest source of income for local merchants, the town cleaned up some of the dangers to young airmen in a hurry. The immediate cause of the action had been the alcohol related death of a seventeen year old airman. Alcohol was illegal in the whole state of Mississippi, but you could buy a drink openly anywhere in Biloxi. Liquor was served to airmen of all ages. The General put the brakes on alcohol to minors, but the Air Force did not address segregation issues. I am convinced to this day that if we had been civilian young men we would have been taken into the cell block and severely beaten. At Christmas time I took leave and bought a Trailways bus ticket routing me from Biloxi through New Orleans to Memphis and Little Rock on my way home to Conway. Around midnight on the road north from New Orleans to Memphis I found myself on a bus with no passengers in the rear. There was a long seat across the rear of the coach that looked perfect for sleeping. I stretched out on it and curled up inside my topcoat to keep warm. The driver noticed that I had gone to the rear and stopped the bus on the side of the highway. He came back there and ordered me to return to the white section at the front of the coach. I protested. I told him that I was exhausted and wanted to stretch out to sleep. He told me that if I didn't vacate the black section of the bus immediately he would stop the first state trooper he saw and have me arrested for violating the laws of the sovereign state of Mississippi. Now where had I heard that before? I reluctantly complied and slept sitting up for the rest of the run to Memphis. A perfectly good long seat went unused in the rear of the bus. Three years later in December 1955 Mrs. Rosa Parks made history when she refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama to a white man who demanded it. She remained seated in the "whites only" section and was arrested. The black people of Montgomery led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior organized a total boycott of the local bus system in protest. Economic losses to the city-owned bus company forced Montgomery to end racial segregation. I am sure that had I been arrested that night in Mississippi the white people of my region would not have boycotted the bus system and turned my arrest into a historic event to end segregation. I applaud Mrs. Parks and always have thought of her as a great lady with the courage to stand up for what is morally right. At the end of my Christmas leave I took a bus from Conway to Little Rock to make the connection back through New Orleans to Biloxi. At the Little Rock bus terminal I was seated at the lunch counter eating a hamburger and fries. Here I was in my Air Force blues warm and dry. Directly in front of me on the opposite side of the lunch counter there was a small service window marked "colored" opening onto the sidewalk along Markham Street. A young black United States Marine with a chest full of combat ribbons appeared at the window. He placed and received his order while standing in a cold drizzling rain. I immediately realized there was something wrong with this picture. I got up and took my food outside and joined this young Marine. We sat on a luggage wagon in the covered driveway where the busses loaded. We shared a meal and some conversation. The winter air chilled our food. We both agreed that segregation was dead wrong. When the Little Rock school integration showdown occurred I was working at the Boeing Company in Wichita, Kansas. My wife and I made the trip to Conway to visit family and friends. I went to Little Rock to see the United States Army paratroopers walking sentry side-by-side with federalized Arkansas National Guardsmen to keep order in the Capitol City of Arkansas. The crisis was precipitated by Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus. The United States Supreme Court had ordered an end to school segregation in our nation. Governor Faubus placed the Arkansas National Guard on state assignment to prevent integration from going forward. President Eisenhower trumped Faubus by placing the Arkansas Guard on federal duty and insuring their compliance by placing the 101st Airborne paratroopers from Ft. Campbell, Kentucky over the situation. Every Arkansas Guardsman on sentry duty at Central High walked with a 101st Airborne trooper at his side. Little Rock schools and thousands of other schools in the nation were integrated through court actions. Most complied without the need for military intervention. Sadly, through the years our public schools in many cities have become segregated again through "white flight" to the suburbs and through the creation of "white-flight private schools." If we are ever to have a truly integrated society we need to see our people interacting socially and culturally. The United States today may be more segregated in many ways than we were a half century ago. Today's segregation is more subtle and harder to eliminate. Today's segregation is not enforced by state laws, it is the result of fear of differences and a reluctance to break down age old social and cultural barriers. In some ways our nation has made great strides in the past half century, but we still have a long way to go. Today Dr. Condoleezza Rice serves our nation as Secretary of State. When she was a child, Condoleezza heard the bomb which killed four young black girls explode at a Baptist Church in Birmingham. What a distance we have traveled! I am proud to say that Condoleezza and I share something in common. We are both alumni of the University of Denver. Our future as a people is entirely up to each of us as individuals. Our nation will be what we choose to make of it. We are all in this together.
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