Feb 10 column

A DREAM FOR ALL

 

"How many of you remember the first time you saw a black person?" asked my sociology professor in my freshman class at Baylor University.

 

Several students answered with stories about the first time they saw a black person walking beside the road or working in their backyard.

 

I was shocked. But I really shouldn't have been. It was 1975 and my southern friends had enjoyed school holidays for "confederated heroes," yet not for Abraham Lincoln.

 

As a Californian, I was out of my element, but I counted myself lucky to be free of their racist upbringing.

 

Or was I?

 

With the beginning of Black History Month we might find how confessing our own history can provide insight into understanding racial issues.

 

As a boy growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, my skin was as white as the fog that shrouded my hometown hills. But it was mostly the fog of my family's southern roots that made me "color blind" to other races and cultures.

 

It was from the distant listening post of my Richmond, Calif., home where I began hearing the cries of social change, muffled and off-key.

 

In 1967, I started fifth grade with the announcement that our school, Balboa Elementary, would soon receive our first black students.

 

Few of my classmates said anything, holding our comments for the playground, where we assembled around Keith, our class troublemaker.  

 

Keith seemed to always be fighting someone on the schoolyard. It was even rumored that he was once suspended for hitting a teacher.

 

He persuaded us that we needn't fear these black children – as long as "us white kids stick together."

 

"Don't anyone talk to them," he commanded. We agreed. We'd follow our appointed leader and stick together.

 

"If they cause any trouble," Keith said, slamming his fist into his palm, "we'll show them who really runs this playground." 

 

We weren't just counting on Keith; we were counting on our geography too.

 

For you see, while many U.S. towns were segregated by railroad tracks, Richmond was segregated by a freeway. And with the district out of money they weren't going to bus kids across the formidable freeway barrier. My friends and I would be safe from the integration controversy.

 

And we would have been – except for one thing.

 

Our district took advantage of something our white neighborhood called "The tunnel." It was a darkened pedestrian walkway under the divisive freeway that reeked of urine and was paved with broken soda bottles.

 

Located only a few hundred yards from our playground, the tunnel was no man's land between the black community and the white one.

 

Yet, one September morning in 1967, our school district deployed a dozen 10-year-old black students through the tunnel. They walked like a scraggly group of Pop Warner football players returning to a halftime deficit, overwhelmed both by the size of the field and the stakes of the game.

 

Among those kids were Deborah, Agnes, Geoffrey and Gregory. I still remember their names because that was the first time I truly "saw" a black person as a person that shared this world with me.

 

Usually my columns work toward a dramatic climax, but the most dramatic thing in today's story is that nothing happened. No drama. Nothing.

 

Keith didn't beat anyone up. Nobody rioted or protested. Life just happened amongst us. Deborah stole my heart while Agnes stole my pencils. Gregory outscored me on the history quizzes. And both he and Agnes easily whizzed past me in the 50-yard dash.

 

No drama until that first Thursday in April 1968. Sometime after the evening fog returned to the Richmond hills, a friend came over to tell me he'd just heard that Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis.

 

Now, fifty-six years later, it seems to me that in the end, our little school became part of King's dream as it was "…transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers."

 

The next year, the district would send a black teacher which I still count as my best of two teachers in a lifetime. But she is a story for another day.

 

That's my history. What's yours?

 

------------------------

 

Please email me so I can add you to my weekly column email. My books can be purchased on my website www.thechaplain.net. Comments are received at 10556 Combie Rd Suite 6643 Auburn, CA 95602 or by email comment@thechaplain.net or at (843) 608-9715.