WASHINGTON DC – INTEGRATION AND SEGREGATION 50 YEARS LATER

I cannot tell you where I was on that day late in August, fifty years ago, when the March on Washington occurred; when Dr. King gave his most famous speech.  I have heard it many times since, of course, always feeling the same thrill as the power of his cadence rings out.  Later that year I was in a math class on the first floor of Trenton High when word came of Kennedy’s assassination; that day I remember.  August 28^th, however, was probably just another in a dwindling string of days counting down to the end of summer and the start of school.

I didn’t think much about the issue.  My schools were pretty well mixed and I knew people of varying shades of brown.  One of my girlfriends at the time even had a skin that was the most lovely shade of chocolate.  Dark-skinned co-workers of my father occasionally came to dinner.  I imagine I knew that there were difficulties elsewhere in the country, but they didn’t seem to affect my life.

Once Cynthia came into my life I got many lessons on the kinds of difficulties people faced based solely on their dark skins.  Those who know me well have heard, from my perspective at least, about my parent’s reaction to our marriage, and I won’t go into that here, but this was by no means the last time problems arose.  Sometimes there were subtle snubs in banks and restaurants; other times she reported being followed around in a store to make sure she didn’t shoplift anything.  Some members of her family made it clear they were no happier than mine over our relationship.  Occasionally, but thankfully rarely, there were overt slurs and insults.  I can tell you that over the years things did improve a bit, but never to the point where we could ever completely relax.  It has gotten slightly better in the society as a whole as well, and there are some role models in the ranks of the powerful: Obama, of course, but also Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, the late Thurgood Marshall and even New Jersey’s own Corey Booker.  I also saw a recent Cheerios commercial featuring a mixed family (and the cutest little curly-haired actress since Shirley Temple) which was so matter-of-fact about the relationship that I really didn’t notice it at first.  But I have taken it as another sign that, oh so slowly and with very small steps, things are changing.  But there is such a long way to go.

In any event, I took the train to Washington for the closing ceremonies of the 50^th anniversary celebrations, where presidents Obama, Clinton, and Carter, to their credit, didn’t try to prove they could speak with the fire and power of Dr. King.  The actual event in front of the Lincoln Memorial was nearly impossible to get into, so I opted for visiting the King memorial, where you could hear the speeches nearly as well but the crowds were sparse.

I have always disliked this statue.  Dr. King had a higher forehead, was not that fat, and was rarely that stern.  I know that the King family approved the design, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling that the artist made a poor choice regarding how to portray Dr. King.

There were a few news organizations over here: NBC had a camera giving an all-network feed of the statue, and there were teams talking to the crowd from the local Fox affiliate and a new cable news channel called One America, which owner Charles Herring has described as a conservative alternative to FOX.  (You can make your own joke on that.  The bare fact is hilarious enough for me). 

 

Back to the reasons for the original march and this week’s commemorations.  There are strong anti-discrimination and voting rights laws on the books, despite conservative efforts to chip away at them, and affirmative action policies have made some headway against the forces of bigotry in the business world.  But some are now saying that the laws and policies are themselves discriminatory, being in favor of one group over another.  And it has been fifty years; why is bigotry still so prevalent?  Oddly enough, I think the core of the problem is as simple as what we call one another.

You’ll notice in the discussion above that I try not to refer to the word ‘race’ or ‘black and white’.  When I am asked my race, I respond ‘human’, because there is only one species of thinking primate on this planet: the human race.  We are not divided into different human species; that distinction was pushed in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries by bigots seeking to prove that dark skins somehow equated with lower intelligence.  But the bigots were subtle.  They knew if they referred to the Negro species, the scientific community would have come down on them, so they referred instead to the Negro ‘race’ and managed to create the notion of separateness by the use of this scientifically meaningless word.

Here’s another point on this subject.  I have never met a person whose skin was actually black, nor one truly white (not even a true albino – they’re pink), and neither have any of you.  And I have known some truly dark-skinned people.  The melanin pigment in our skins is all really different shades of brown.  Some of us are a light beige, others are coffee with cream, and some are that old Crayola color ‘burnt umber’, but our skins are always some shade of brown.  The labels ‘black’ and ‘white’ were pasted on us, this time from the other side of the bigotry fence, in yet another attempt to emphasize what is a non-existing difference.

So the problem is complex.  There is a deep-seated us/them dynamic at work, and bigots have gotten more subtle over the years, and these together have worked to create in our modern world places that are more segregated than they were 50 years ago.  Newark is an excellent example.  Go into churches and schools all over the country and you will see areas that are clearly segregated, and often this happens by people choosing to be with others they perceive of as ‘same’ and avoiding people who are ‘different’.  We will never get this problem under control until we drop the labels and start seeing one another as just people.

By the way, my understanding of the genetics of skin color is that there are as many as five different genes involved.  And they interact in such a way that, in general, children of parents of different tones will come out shaded somewhere in between the parents.  Over enough generations, the earth may eventually, finally, have only one color of human.

Here’s a joke on the subject.  There is a species of chimp with a somewhat human-looking face called the bonobo (‘old man’ in Bantu), and Africans tell a story as to why the bonobo does not speak.   They say if he did the Europeans would put him to work.

I have only been to three plays on Broadway, and oddly enough two of them were musicals about South African apartheid.  One was Sarafina, which in my entire life was the only time I have ever felt uncomfortable being nearly the only pale face in the crowd.  Emotions run very high at points during that play.  But where I'm going with this is that the other was more than forty years earlier and was called Wait a Minum, which tried unsuccessfully to shake the apartheid system by poking fun at it.  It contains one of my all-time favorite songs, to which I’ve provided both a link and the lyrics.

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=wait+a+minim&FORM=VIRE5#view=detail&mid=8EE70956C0ECBF59EF788EE70956C0ECBF59EF78

The other day reading Drum magazine
I’ll tell you some of the things I seen (repeat)
Advertisements for special cream in every section
Give you a soft and pale complexion
Make your black skin lighter, creamier and whiter
But when I look in the Star what do I find
But advertisements of a different kind
Because it seems that the white people have a notion
To make themselves black with the Sun Tan Lotion

CHORUS – Tell me, tell me, tell me why - I want to know the fact
Why all the black people want to go white and the white people want to go black.

Turning the pages of Zonk I see
A special tonic, which guarantee (repeat)
To make your curly hair straight
And bring you success on every date
Misfortune in love is attributed there
To having such coal black curly hair
But when I pass by the Rosebank Beauty Parlour
I see the women sitting there hour after hour
With a great big thing on their head trying to make their straight hair curly instead
Ain’t it ridiculous!

Tell me, tell me…CHORUS -

Now the other day the native girl she say to me
Au! Master, your madam she is very skinny
She say she also is much too thin
She must have some fattening vitamin
She say that it’s a fact that
All the men like her bottom to be fat
But in the northern suburbs the women are used
To living on lettuce and orange juice
To be slim is their preoccupation
My god, what a crazy nation – this is so

Tell me, tell me…CHORUS -

I have a simple remedy
For all this frustrated energy (repeat)
If you blacks have too much of this pigment stuff
And the white people say you’ve not got enough
Don’t waste your time buying creams and jellies
Trying to change the colour of your bellies
but follow the example of my brother
He married a black girl, they love each other
And she gives him a little bit of black in the night
And he gives her a little bit of white

That’s the solution!

Now I, now I, I know why I can tell you the fact
Why all the black people want to go white and the white people want to go black.

(Words & Music Jeremy Taylor © 1961 MPA)

Anyway, enough time on the soap box.

I had meals at two disparate DC landmarks.  Bens Chili Bowl is a bare ten years younger than me (their 55^th is on the 29^th, actually).  A favorite of Bill Cosby, this bare-bones short-order place is very famous for its chili (which you can buy by the gallon) and its sausage sandwiches.

http://benschilibowl.com/about/

After the ceremonies I had sushi and Sapporo at a place Washington’s Chinatown called Wok & Roll at 604 H St. NW and while the food was satisfactory, it is the location itself which makes the place famous.  The restaurant is in the building which was once the site of Mary Surratt’s boarding house, where it is said that John Wilkes Booth’s plot to assassinate President Lincoln was hatched.

Finally, let me give you a picture from the inside of one of the most fabulous train stations in the country - Union Station.

 

CHICAGO - GIORDANO'S

I forgot to mention that some of Pina's relatives have a pizza chain in Chicago.  They have a deep-dish variety they call the stuffed pizza.

They say their small stuffed normally serves two.  In fact, a couple of guys near me had one and didn't quite finish it.

Me, I had no trouble with mine, along with three pints of beer, a salad appetizer, and ice cream for dessert.  To someone experienced in real cheesesteak hoagies, it wasn't much of a stretch.  But very tasty.

BAY AREA

My stay in the Bay Area was primarily to spend a few days with my friend Deanna and her family, who Cynthia and I knew when we lived in California in the 70’s.  For those who don’t know the story, I met my wife when she walked into the Radio Shack I was managing in Oakland and bought a stereo (which I actually still own).  Deanna was actually her buddy.

We didn’t do much in the way of sightseeing, preferring to spend our time reminiscing or dancing at some of her favorite clubs.  She was constantly asking me if I remembered this or that, to which I could answer truthfully – no.  It’s been more than three decades, and I normally can’t remember last week.  One thing I was interested in was seeing if my first house still existed, which it did.  It really wasn’t much changed.  We paid $24.5 thousand for it in 1978, and sold it two years later for double that.  Our next door neighbors had always turned their noses up at us, being as prejudiced as my parents regarding interracial marriage, but we got the last laugh.  We sold it to a homosexual couple.

From 1979

 

And 2013

I did manage to get a parking ticket.  We had been out at a club and I was driving her to the airport at 4AM Thursday morning (she was going to a family reunion in Niagara Falls), so I crashed at her place for a couple of hours.  I didn’t see the sign that said no parking from 3AM to 6AM, so my rental car cost me an extra $66.  My only consolation was that there were a number of other cars with tickets, so maybe the meter maid had also been out clubbing and was getting a little work in before bedtime.

I did get over to San Francisco on one of the days of my trip.  I wanted to see the headquarters of M5, where Mythbusters is filmed.  When I got there I met a couple of very young fans who had actually met Adam Savage by chance, and were given signed pictures.  Nobody will ever mistake me for a little boy, so I only got this picture.  They don’t give tours, out of self-defense, otherwise they’d never get any filming done.  I actually had to fight my way through Giants traffic to reach their building, and there are many one-way streets which make getting around challenging for the novice.

I also went out to the Pacific to sort of put a coast-to-coast stamp on the journey.  At their rather prosaically named Ocean Beach, I got a few sunset shots of the bird rocks, but had an accident with my small digital camera.  I cracked the view-screen.  It can still take a picture, but you can’t see it.

And then I headed for the Zephyr to start the trip back home.

SEATTLE

What can I say about Seattle?  I was actually there only on the nights before and after the cruise, so I didn't really have too much time to do a lot of sightseeing.  I did go to the principal attraction.

 

but there was a line to get tickets in order to stand in line to go up in the tower, so I passed.  After all, having been on the top of the Willis tower I figured that the Needle would be a bit anticlimactic.  I did go with my niece on the Ferris Wheel they have on the waterfront, and there was a nice view.

That's Coors Field with Mt. Rainier in the background.

The place is apparently named after an American Indian chief, and here's his statue to prove it. 

This is my landmark to a good little bar and café named the 5 Points.  Stop by if you get there.

Of course the other reason I didn't get much sightseeing is that I did a bit of partying on one of the nights.  I was at an active little bar called the Rendezvous, where I was literally the only person without either a tat or piercing.

I was also undoubtedly the oldest patron.  But it was fun to close a place; it's been a very long time.

But the lasting impression I have taken from Seattle is the sheer number of homeless people on the streets.  I have never seen as many in any other city, not Chicago, NYC, Phila, Oakland or even Camden.  And they're aggressive, and literally in every public space I visited.  Maybe they're just concentrated because Seattle isn't that large.  I don't have an answer.

And finally, for my lawyer friends, I offer this real advertisement from the Seattle train system.

You can write your own punch-line.

ALASKA CRUISE - PORTS

The cruise ships visit three Alaskan towns, and one in Canada.  Ketchikan and Skagway are basically small fishing villages with very well developed tourist industries.  Juneau is bigger as befits a state capital, but what in thunder possessed Alaskans to make a little port town on the panhandle with no access by road their capital city?  Victoria, British Columbia's capital, has a similar problem, since it's located on Vancouver Island, but it's a much more impressive city.  In Ketchikan and Skagway I did a walkabout, and took the tram ride in Juneau.

In Ketchikan I shot a number of totems.  Most are basically one-sided, but there was a cute three-dimensional aspect to the last one.

 

The three Alaskan towns are much the same, small and relatively inaccessible. 

Juneau from the Mt. Roberts Tram

Ketchikan

Skagway from the docks

All share in the incredible scenery of the southern Alaskan coast.

Across the harbor from Ketchikan

View down Alaska St. in Skagway

 

View above Juneau

 

Even with the hoards of tourists from four or five tour ships nearly every day all summer, there would still be worse places to live.

The tram in Juneau and the lodge and visitor center on Mt. Roberts are all owned by one of the Tlingit tribes.  Unlike in the lower 48, the native Alaskans do not live on reservations and are not 'nations'.  They are rather formed into corporations owned by the tribe members, who live in the community.  And these are not dummy corporations.  The one that owns the Mt. Roberts operation had over $7 million in revenue last year, and has over $45 million in equity.  There was a presentation summarizing their history; they got a lot less interference from the Russians when they owned Alaska then when America took over.

Many towns had a red-light district during the Alaskan gold rush; Ketchikan has made theirs a central part of their tourist story.  Built on pilings along the creek and reached by a path called 'married man way', the houses are now mostly souvenir shops.

In Skagway, the tourist section is only a few square blocks, but it also contains a former brothel, which in this case has been turned into the Red Onion Saloon.  But the real attraction here is the wall décor.

For such a tiny place, Skagway seemed to give the best photo opportunities.  For example, there were at least two really dedicated car buffs.

And yes, that's a real Hudson Metro.

My sister took the excursion train, which went out into the gold exploration area, but she said the main attraction was the tour guide.

Oh and speaking of trains, how do you keep the tracks clear in the winter?  You use this monster, an industrial sized snow blower.

 

Going from big to small, my last Skagway shot is this tiny cabin sitting in an otherwise normal residential section.

 

 

And a final note.  This shot was taken in Juneau, but it could have been in any of the three Alaskan ports.

 

 

The rich do live better.

 

In Victoria I took the tour to the Butchart Gardens, which is named for the woman who designed them, when she built them in the former quarry dug by her husband's limestone business.  Here's a montage.

 

 

TRAINS

From Chicago I travelled west on an Amtrak train called the Empire Builder.  The return trip was on the California Zephyr from Oakland back to Chicago.  Long-haul trains are made up of double decker sleeper and coach cars, and Empire Builder had a pair of each going to Seattle and a pair of each going to Portland.  This train is split in Spokane.  There’s also a dining car and an observation/lounge car.  The ‘roomettes’ are tiny, basically two wide seats facing one another with a six-inch wide closet to hang clothes in.  The seats come together to make into a bed, and there’s another bed that can fold down from above.

These trains make more stops than you might expect, and a number of people use them as a short-haul commuter train.  There are also people who go overnight in a coach seat (like on a bus) and that’s cheap, but that seems to be a rough way to travel.  Also, since there are no showers available to coach passengers, I’ll wager that the air gets a little ‘stale’ in there.

If you fly over this country, you get no concept of how damn big it is, and how much of it is just flat!  Even on Empire Builder’s northerly route there are few hills to break up the landscape until you reach the Rockies.  On the Zephyr the flat part starts overnight on the second day and continues through the third.

 

 

One interesting feature of these trains is that they are ridden by volunteers from the national park service, who point out features as you go by, such as Fort Union outside of Williston, ND, which is where Sitting Bull signed a peace treaty.

The Empire Builder also had a Native American in costume who told some stories and played a native flute, then hawked his CD and website.

 

Being a train buff, I made sure I got out and got this shot in Havre, MT (they pronounce it so that it rhymes with cadaver [I couldn’t think of another word with the same sound – I’m open to suggestions])  I suspect the mispronunciation is intentional, like Bogota in NJ.

 

In the morning, the Empire Builder passed under the Cascades in the longest such tunnel in the US.

 

We didn’t see much of the Rockies on the Empire Builder as it was night when we passed most of them, but I did get a few shots near sunset.  On the California Zephyr, on the other hand, we came through the Sierra Nevada range in the afternoon, and woke up to the Rockies the next morning, having stopped at Salt Lake City at 3AM.  There were some spectacular twists and turns as we wound our way along river valleys and beneath nearly sheer rock walls.  I wouldn’t want to be in the train that was struck by one of these falling behemoths.  These are a sample of the landscape.    

 

 

The Zephyr also passes through the American River valley, which is the place where gold discovered in California, and there are remnants of the gold rush scattered around, like this water-transport flume and an old water wheel.

On the Empire's more northerly route, you pass through the lower end of Glacier National Park.  But there was little snow or ice to be seen.

 

There was a surprise on Empire Builder.  I’m used to houses near train tracks being rather run-down; places where people live ‘cause it’s cheaper when dealing with the noise.  On the way into Seattle I noticed a long string of well-maintained lawns on what where obviously upscale houses.  I realized that they all had wonderful views of Puget Sound, and figured they were built to take in the view, with the occasional train being a necessary nuisance.

 

After the cruise I took the Coast Starlight overnight from Seattle to Oakland.  This is a much more scenic trip as you get south of San Francisco, where the train really lives up to its name.  The portion I was on was more prosaic, but we did get glimpses of the Cascades and the ‘ghost fleet’ of mothballed naval vessels.

 

One thing I did notice was how neat the hay farmers were, with same-sized bales all neatly stacked up.  No haystacks for these folks, I guess.

 

I spotted this huge letter L on the side of a mountain somewhere soon after we came into Nevada.  I stumped the rangers riding the Zephyr with this, but they did say that it was somewhat common for towns to put up these markers.

The Starlight was hauling two private cars (shades of ‘Wild, Wild West’) and the California Zephyr left Emeryville with three.  This is a fabulously expensive way to travel.  Not only do you have to have the price of the cars, but the connection and cartage fee is thousands and thousands of dollars.

 

On the Zephyr I had the misfortune to share a car with a couple of rug rats under the ‘control’ of their grandparents.  And you thought sitting on a plane with a crying baby for a few hours is hard!  They got off in Grand Junction and were replaced by a 29-month old travelling with her mother.  Cute but also occasionally noisy.  But there was worse in another car.  There’s a woman who has two ‘service dogs’.  Really two tiny Chihuahuas which she carries around in a purse, a la Paris Hilton.  She got the service dog certificates because she uses them to ease interactions with the special needs kids she teaches, but of course the kids were not on the train.  There really should be better controls over these certificates.  Her neighbors told me at breakfast that they barked during the night and woke them up.

I’m glad I built overnight stays between each of my connections.  Besides my disinclination to rush, these are long trips, and there are ample opportunities for delay.  The Empire Builder arrived in Seattle only an hour late, but was more than two hours behind at other points.  The Coast Starlight had some difficulty in the train yard, and we boarded that three hours late.  They did manage to make up an hour by the time we arrived in Oakland.  On the Zephyr, we were actually early arriving in Denver where we had to drop the private cars and get a new engine, but they had some difficulty finding a working replacement engine and we left over an hour late with a freight engine in front.  Because of its somewhat slower speed we were three hours behind when we left Omaha.

But all in all, this is an excellent way to travel.  Even if you're shy, if travelling alone or as a couple you must sit with other people at least three times a day for your meals.  'Where are you going' and 'where are you from' are excellent conversation starters, and I found the experience remarkably enjoyable.  I may never get on another cruise ship, but there are a lot more trains to try.  I'm already thinking of taking the one to Montreal next year.