The first black person I ever knew who was not my mother’s maid was a boy my own age whose father was the janitor at my father’s television station.
It was 50 years ago, but I remember a company Christmas party in which I and every other white kid there received handsome presents like flyable model airplanes, while the janitor’s son received a cheap little plastic football.
That same year there were terrible riots because a black family had moved into a white, working-class suburb in the area, but what I remember is the look on that boy’s face when he received his present.
I remember growing up among some of the wealthiest and best-educated people in the country and hearing from classmates such words as “nigger” and “jigaboo” so routinely we might as well have been living in backwoods Alabama.
I remember that, when I was going to college in New York City in the late 1950s, my art-student girlfriend and I would regularly double date with a black student and her black boyfriend. We would almost always go either to Greenwich Village or Harlem because we didn’t dare go into many Midtown places together without experiencing serious trouble.
As a soldier stationed at Ft. Bragg, N.C., in the ’60s, I remember that there were a half dozen of us who were friends, and that one of us was black. I remember that, while we were out in the Carolina boonies on maneuvers and stopped in a small town for lunch, this friend and another black soldier with us went without eating because they were afraid to go into the only restaurant there.
I remember as a young reporter in Chicago covering a really terrible homicide and being told to “cheap it out” because it was “blue,” meaning it involved black people, not white people. I remember that newspapers then required the word “Negro” after the name of any black person involved in a crime, whether as victim or perpetrator. I remember being lectured about the importance of the capital “N,” being told, “they’re very sensitive about that.”
I remember white northern professional men laughing in a bar when the news came that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. When I flew down to Memphis the night of the murder, I remember finding National Guard armored personnel carriers in the streets and white deputies with shotguns in every window and doorway of the Shelby County Courthouse.
The next morning, when they were loading King’s body onto an airplane to fly to Atlanta, I remember a line of state troopers at the airport, standing shoulder to shoulder and holding 3-foot-long riot clubs, confronting a group of keening black women who were just standing there singing. I remember that I never before saw such a look of mingled devotion and sadness as I saw on their faces.
And a few days later, in Atlanta, on the eve of King’s funeral, I remember walking through a black neighborhood where there was so much broken glass underfoot it seemed like it was the pavement, and being stared at by hostile faces. I remember that I had never before seen such hatred.
I bring all this up because I had completely forgotten about it. I’d put it all out of my mind, thinking nowadays of race and civil rights only in terms of debate on affirmative action and welfare reform and trivial Bill Clinton’s trivial “national conversation on race.”
But recently I was reminded–vividly and stunningly reminded. I saw a film called “4 Little Girls.” Directed by Spike Lee, it tells in a methodical, riveting and appalling way of the now-forgotten but then infamous white supremacist bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., black church that horribly killed four young girls, including one who had a jagged piece of concrete thrust into her skull like some medieval weapon.
But just as horrifying is the film’s retelling of what used to happen only a few years ago to black people who wanted to do things like eat in restaurants and drink from fountains and vote.
The film was shown in only a handful of theaters here in New York and nine other cities, but it’s being telecast over the HBO cable network at 8 p.m. Monday, and will be shown again Feb. 26, March 1 and March 26.
It’s been nominated for an Academy Award in the documentary category, and many feel it will win director Lee the Oscar he was denied in 1990 for his cutting-edge race relations movie “Do the Right Thing.”
I talked to Lee about that and he doesn’t much care.
“I haven’t changed my mind about the Academy,” said Lee, a longtime critic of Hollywood’s treatment of blacks.
He said he made “4 Little Girls” for the history, so people would be reminded. So they wouldn’t forget the way I did.
“People need to know there was such an animal as a colored water fountain, and a white water fountain,” he said. “People need to know history, period. If you look at the history of the world, 30 years is a spit in the ocean.
“. . . (I)f you don’t know history and the past, you won’t know what’s going to happen to you in the future–wherever in the hell it goes. That’s a basic truth. It will not change.”
If you somehow can’t find the time to see Lee’s film, there are other ways to remind yourself of previous national conversations on race.
Next time you’re really thirsty, just go to a water fountain.
And tell yourself “no.”
