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Turning a blind eye to segregation
Once again this year as Martin Luther King’s birthday was observed I couldn’t help but feel a bit guilty. Each year it’s a reminder that I could have done more.
In 1963 when he gave what was one of the most inspirational speeches in the history of the English speaking language – a speech that for its sheer eloquence rivaled anything written by Shakespeare or Winston Churchill – I was 41 years old, not only old enough to understand the message but old enough to have seen the injustice and degradation of segregation for myself. Yet, except for paying lip service to the then pending civil legislation, I did nothing. I didn’t join any marches or demonstrations. I was, like most Americans, too busy getting on with my own life.
Having been born in New York City and raised in Bergen County, far from the cross burnings and lynchings of the south, it might seem as if I could plead ignorance on the grounds that I had never seen any of the injustice for myself, but that, of course, would have been untrue. Even in the north the evidence of prejudice was prevalent.
One of my earliest childhood memories, in fact, is of a beach that once existed between Asbury Park and Ocean Grove in New Jersey. That was in the 1930s, and in those days Asbury Park was a bustling resort with a crowded beach and a busy Boardwalk and even an amusement pier with bumper cars and a merry-go-round. Between that amusement pier, which still stands but is now practically deserted, and a smaller pier that marked the beginning of Ocean Grove there was a slender strip of sand, and that was the beach for the blacks. And I recall how sometimes my mother would take me by the hand and we would stand on that stretch of Boardwalk and look down on that beach, and my mother, who didn’t have a prejudiced bone in her body, would point out some little boy or girl in their bathing suit and say, “Look at the cute Picaninny, Edward.” Of course, you wouldn’t dare use a word like that today, but that was the way things were in New Jersey in the 1930s.
And only a decade later when I was aboard ship in the Pacific it never registered that my black shipmates were all either working in the galley assisting the cooks or serving as Steward’s Mates and waiting on the whims of the officers.
Again, that’s just the way it was. I took it for granted.
Then when I started to work in New York City in the late 1940s, while there was no official segregation, the black population pretty much lived and worked and stayed in Harlem. If they ventured into Midtown to shop or eat at a restaurant they wouldn’t be refused service; they’d just be ignored. And, when I reflect on it, I can’t recall a single black employed at McGraw-Hill where I worked in those years except, perhaps, as a janitor. But I didn’t give it a thought at the time. That’s just the way things were.
In the 1950s when I was sent into our South to cover stories – visiting towns like Yazoo City and Jackson, Hattiesburg and Greenville – it finally began to dawn on me that there was something going on in America that just wasn’t right. There was nothing subtle about discrimination down there. It wasn’t just schools that were segregated. It was the de facto law of the land, publicly proclaimed by signs making it clear that the establishment would only serves whites. Even public rest rooms and waiting rooms at bus stations and railroad terminals were designated as “White Only” and “Colored,” and when it came to voting blacks were effectively barred by unfair poll taxes, literary tests and intimidation.
But when I got back to New York City I didn’t write about things like that. That wasn’t my assignment. In fact, it didn’t seem to be anybody’s assignment until 1955 when a young black woman named Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a bus and set off the Civil Rights movement, which culminated with Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, his assassination, and eventually passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That Act, incidentally, not only outlawed segregation but included a clause on equality for women.
Now, in a year when a black man and a woman are the leading contenders for their party’s presidential nomination, it is difficult to recall how different things were only 44 years ago. The story of discrimination in America is not yet ancient history. The last chapter still has to be written and I’ll always regret that, when I had the chance, I didn’t add my own personal footnote to the story.
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