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.