RonKiley wrote:I hesitated to write anything but I don't see anyone who remembers first hand the way it was.
Well, I've written some of this before, but here goes again.
When I was a kid, we ate flange toes (Brazil nuts), played with flange shooters (slingshots, catapults) and flange chasers (devil chasers--a kind of fireworks), chanted "eeny meeny miney moe, catch a flange by the toe" and sang:
Police, police, don't catch me
Catch that flange behind that tree
He stole one and I stole none
Police, police, ain't this fun
One of my main memories is that in many Texas movie theaters, Blacks had to sit in the balcony. In most cases, there would be stairs going up the side of the theater, so the White patrons never had to see them. But in the large first-run theaters, like the Majestic, the Metropolitan, and Loew's State in downtown Houston, Blacks weren't admitted at all, and you had to pay extra to sit in the balcony. In Rosenberg, where my grandparents lived, Blacks weren't permitted to attend the Saturday morning cartoon-and-Western shows, so we White kids got to go up there where we could throw popcorn on our friends below.
Bus stations had separate waiting rooms--or none--for Blacks.
When some friends and I drove home from the Defense Language Institute in the summer of '63, I noticed that after we hit El Paso, all the "Whites Only" signs in restaurants had been replaced with "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone." I guess that made it legal. We decided we wouldn't stop at any place that had such a sign.
But one of my most vivid memories is earlier than that. It's the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. (I was 13 at the time.) I found
this Look Magazine article about it, but I recall an earlier article about it, also in
Look, which must have been published right after it happened. There's
another, describing what his mother saw when she identified the body.
I just missed integration, having graduated in 1959. There were no Blacks at Southwestern University, either, though we had Chinese, Japanese, Laotians, Mexicans, Columbians, Palestinians, Israelis, Greeks, and even a Canadian. However, we did have a visiting Black preacher for Chapel one week. He told about preaching at some town in Utah. After his sermon, someone came up to him and complimented him on the game the night before. It turned out that he had been preceded by the Harlem Globetrotters, and since there were no Blacks in the town, the folks there couldn't tell one Black man from another.
My first personal contact with Blacks who were not maids was in Basic Training in 1962.
Some of my college classmates went to a friend's house for Easter one year. On Easter Sunday, they got into the friend's father's pickup truck with a bunch of rotten vegetables, drove off to "flange Town", and drove past a church that was just letting out. They pelted all the Blacks in their Easter best with the vegetables, and drove on through. What they didn't know was that they were on a deadend street. They had to turn around and come out the way they'd come in. Of course, the locals knew that, so when they came back through, there were people up in trees and or roofs with rocks, bricks, and empty soda bottles. When my friends got back to school, they were bruised all over. I think the friend got into trouble because of damage to his father's truck, too.
I often heard descriptions of "flange knocking". This involved driving along a country road looking for a Black on foot, then shoving a long 2x4 out the window to smack them in the head while driving by. Blacks weren't the only beneficiaries of Texas racism, as there was also "Bracero hunting", which involved shooting (legal) Mexican field workers with .22 rifles--just to wound them, of course.
In Taiwan, in about 1965, a bunch of White soldiers chased down an Black soldier and beat him up. Why? Because he ran. The White soldier who led the group once told me that he planned to go back home to Tennessee and run for Sherrif.
I have a fair number of relatives who are no less racist today than they were back in those days. Given
the dragging death of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, TX in 1998, it's hard to imagine that everything is all fine and dandy now.
