Witnessing history

Gaithersburg, with a population of 1,020, wasn’t much more than a crossroads in Maryland when we moved there in 1942. About 20 miles outside of D.C., it was a decent commute for someone working in Washington, like my dad.

A perfect family town. Looking back now, it was pretty rural; the “old folks’ home” at the end of our street had a field with cows and the occasional calf us kids loved to pet. Even into the third grade, some kids came to school barefoot. Our telephone number was 9W, though it had grown to 68R by the time we moved away five years later.
We all ran around loose, you might say; there weren’t privacy fences, and the street was for bike riding, softball, and hanging out after dark.

When the trash collectors came by they had to drive their truck all the way down our very long driveway to where the household garbage cans were kept. My little sister and I were just fascinated by that huge truck (though I can see now that it was quite ordinary). We pestered the trashmen for a ride and finally one day, with our mom’s consent, we got to ride in it, all the way back up the driveway!

In the somnolent days of small town life you can understand how little kids might consider this the high point of a week.

Not for long, as it turned out, because the guys who so cheerfully gave us little kids a few minutes of their time and a lot of fun were black.

The neighbors two houses over had 13 kids, and by the end of our ride it seems every doggone one of those kids was lined up along their wire fence to chant, “N----lover! N----lover!” Thus was I introduced to Jim Crow.

It didn’t help that our family were known to be damyankees, of course. We still played together, kids being kids and the town being small, but we were always considered outsiders.

I guess you could consider it an awakening, and as time went by I began to be aware of the signs in front of houses FOR SALE to WHITE ONLY. And at the Saturday movies, where we paid a quarter to sit in a smelly old theater I was told that the black kids sitting on the fire escape had paid their money (but only a dime) to watch the movie through the windows up there. Didn’t seem fair, but that was the way it was in Gaithersburg.

In 1947 we moved to damyankeeland, where discrimination seemed to be based on whether you liked the Yankees or the Dodgers, and life moved along fairly smoothly.

Television came along, though not so early to our house, but those without gathered in the homes of those with, so I got to see Milton Berle in black and white. Back then there was a show called “The $64 Question,” by the way.

In college in Ohio I found kindred souls in the jazz club, whose membership, not surprisingly, was biracial and about half the white members were Jewish, and it became the group I ran with. I learned about jazz, and I learned about race. And, as it turned out, I got another lesson.

I’d taken a job off campus, waiting tables in a local restaurant. The owner, a formidable woman anyway, one day called me to task for having been seen talking to a --- (black man) out in front of her restaurant. To be fair, she was an equal opportunity bigot: when I responded to her tirade by shrugging “What do you want me to do?” she finished with “Aha! A Jewish gesture!” And fired me on the spot.

After a year in Ohio I took a break from college and found a job as a “girl Friday,” eventually becoming quite accomplished on the manual Remington typewriter. (And later came the IBM electric, which evolved into the IBM executive with proportional spacing. Amazing! The Selectric was a wonder, but nowhere as miraculous as the self-correcting Selectric – you had to see it to believe it. Remember those round little erasers with brushy tails? Gone.)

Meantime, the computer came onto the scene. From punch cards to Macintosh: What an evolution! And, free at last, no more carbon paper!

In the late 1950’s I went back to college, supporting my education habit with a job serving cocktails at the Starlight Lounge (it was quite respectable, folks). A majority of the customers were young men from the nearby Air Force base, and by now the military was integrated. But it was still a while before there came an evening when a couple of black servicemen showed up and sat at a table, and my boss instructed me not to serve them.

Quitting a job with tray in hand can feel good; it gives you something to slam down on your way out the door.

But this was in California, and it was 1959, and we were supposed to have come further than this, weren’t we?

During the turbulent 1960’s we all watched and praised and were amazed by the Freedom Riders, young people who risked their very lives, as it turned out, because they believed that black folks were entitled to sit down at a lunch counter, to be treated as equals, and especially to vote. And they went down South to try to help make it happen.

James Cheney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman – all in their early twenties -- went to Mississippi to register black citizens to vote. Not long after their arrival they were arrested, jailed, released, followed and rearrested by the police and turned over to the Klan. They were shot to death. We learned all this only after a six-week search, when they were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, MS.

I was devastated, as were so many Americans. The front-page photograph of their bodies being returned to their grieving parents is seared in my memory and tugs at me still.

There have been so many trials for the country, so many injustices, and also some sweet but hard-won triumphs – but you know these things. I’m just offering some personal recollections that inform my own attitudes and state of mind on race in America.

So when I watched and listened to Barack Obama’s acceptance speech the other night, before that audience of 84,000, I was personally affected, and thrilled to be witnessing what may be the end of the beginning of America’s quest for a perfect union.

And I said to myself, “James, Andrew and Michael, this one’s for you!”

Originally published September 1, 2008