<p>I just started this book by Todd Purdum and it made me think to call my mom and dad who were born in 1933 and are both as fair minded people that I know and ask them if they recalled their feelings during the years prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act.</p>
<p>I was born in 1958 and I still have trouble wrapping my heads around the conditions faced by African Americans. My initial reaction to the book is how frustrating the incremental steps that politicians favored must have been for the Civil Rights leaders.</p>
<p>For those who can recall those years can you discuss what you recall from that time.</p>
<p>My DH is reading that book. He’s something of an expert in black history (it was his minor and he has continued to self-educate). I was also born in 1958, and I remember seeing things on TV in my whitest of white state that I had no frame of reference for. Certainly we didn’t discuss any of it in school. My parents had gone to college in NYC and taught us that we had very different lives from that of the African Americans we were seeing on the news. But I never wrapped my brain around it fully until I met my husband.</p>
<p>He has living relatives that attended segregated schools. His much older sister was asked to leave a store when visiting down south. His parents left Louisiana the minute they were legal to seek better circumstances in the PNW. An uncle had to leave in the dead of night because some white guy thought he’d paid too much attention to a white woman. I get it now, though I can never be as impacted as those who lived through it. As my D once told me, “No offense, Mom, but you’re white.” </p>
<p>Tom, you might also be interested in The Warmth of Other Suns. It follows several people’s lives through different paths on the Great Migration. One of the men in the book is from H’s parents’ hometown, and he left for similar reasons as they did.</p>
<p>I remember a family vacation in South Carolina around 1960. We stopped into a laundromat and I saw washing machines labeled for Whites and for Negroes. I couldn’t understand why clothes had to be kept separate. </p>
<p>I remember my parents’ talking in low tones (why do they think children don’t listen?) about their concern for my cousins and how the police had to accompany them to school because the KKK burned a cross on their property and threatened to kill them. </p>
<p>I remember visiting a rich woman’s house for tea (doilies on the chairs! A button on the floor under the dining room table that she could press with her foot and the black maid would appear!). The woman started talking about her husband keeping a shotgun in their car so he could shoot “Nigras”. My mom got real quiet, excused us and we left. I wanted to stay and see all her cool stuff, but my mother told me my family doesn’t associate with people like that, but she couldn’t say anything because it was bad to have words with someone as a guest in their house. One of my many lessons in being a southern lady. </p>
<p>As an adult I admire and respect the leaders of the Civil Rights movement. I also respect the average person who listened, and in small everyday ways turned against Jim Crow, who just began to say No more. </p>
<p>My mom told me a story about when she was 16- so 1949 the grand daughter of her neighbor came up to Elizabeth NJ for the summer and they went over to the park. While they were in the park the girl shouted at the African Americans in the park. Calling them the n get off the sidewalk.
Mom said she was both in fear and upset. She says she will never forget it. She wishes she stood up to the girl at the time but she just ran home as fast as she could.</p>
<p>That’s wild…my mother’s grandparents lived in Elizabeth. My mom told me story of visiting her grandmother in early 60s and going to city park and seeing ‘colored’ kids in park…couldn’t understand what they were doing in the park with whites. Mom lived in segregated Florida…blacks didn’t mix with whites back then.</p>
<p>My father did his residency at Charity Hospital in New Orleans in the early 1940’s. The hospital had segregated wards, operating rooms, etc. Even the blood was supposed to be kept seperately. Whites were supposed to be given only “white” blood, but in reality the residents did not follow that rule. </p>
<p>Segregation wasn’t just black and white but brown, too. I’ve seen photos of signs saying “No Filipinos” posted in central CA during that time. There was even a law there that Filipino men couldn’t date or marry white women.</p>
<p>eastcoast- Do you know the story of Dr. Charles Drew? It’s pretty fascinating. He is considered the father of the blood bank, yet he died after an accident and was prevented from being admitted to the nearest hospital because it was “whites only”. </p>
<p>We moved from a very-white community in CA to PA in 1964 when I was 8. I had never seen a black person except on TV before we moved there. While our new school had been integrated for quite some time (I don’t know exactly when), I do remember that the black kids still sat on one side of the room and the whites on the other. Shortly after we moved, my sister invited a pair of black twins from her class to our house after school to play. When my Mom went to their house in an all-black neighborhood to pick them up, I remember many of the neighbors coming outside to watch us, and I couldn’t figure out why. A day after the girls were over, a “committee” of neighborhood women came to our door to “welcome” us to the neighborhood, and to quietly inform my Mom that as concerned “friends” they just wanted her to know that having “coloreds” over to visit was just not done. I remember my Mom being very non-confrontational, smiling and saying something like " she was so happy to be able to bring new ways of doing things with us when we moved in." I don’t really remember the reaction, but do know there were other neighbors who did not seem to have an issue with it. </p>
<p>We (whites) moved from Northern California to Dearborn, Michigan in the early 70s. African Americans couldn’t buy in town. A real estate agent told my parents flat out that they wouldn’t want to live in next-door Dearborn Heights “because blacks live there.” At school, a kid calmly told me, “we call ‘em n----s’ here.” I watched a group of high school kids walk across a big street to taunt a black motorist who’d pulled over to change a flat tire. Having come from peace-and-love-politically correct Northern California, Dearborn was a shocking, jarring jolt. The more I read about the experience of black Americans the more I’m astounded that we never had a full-blown revolution. I credit MLK Jr and other civil rights leaders for that. They saved a lot of bloodshed while peacefully pushing reluctant whites for inch-by-inch change. </p>
<p>I envy those of you who had open-minded parents. My mother had, and still has, attitudes toward race that I can’t approve. Even though I want not to have subconscious racist attitudes, I have them, as revealed by the Implicit Association Test: <a href=“Project Implicit”>https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/</a></p>
<p>You too can see if you absorbed unwanted associations from your parents or others when you were growing up. Take the test. You might find out something you don’t want to know about yourself, but it’s better to know than not to know.</p>
<p>Took the test back in high school. Didn’t have a preference.
Took the test a couple weeks ago. Still don’t have a preference. </p>
<p>And there are more out there like me, which I consider a plus. Much appreciation for those who worked hard to push the boundaries and fight the mindset in the past. </p>
<p>katliamom- your post reminded me of growing up in a solid middle class town in central NJ with a solid middle class African American population. One day a real estate agent was showing a home to someone and drove by me and my brother rolled down the window and said- tell him no “n’s” live around here. We just walked away from him. We were 13 and 14 years old.
When I tell my daughter these stories she can not imagine what went on.</p>
<p>Recently my mom and dad took their grandchildren to an all inclusive resort and their was an African American family there. Some woman said to my mom- I did not expect to see that here. My mom turned to her and said- I don’t think like you do. Her grandchildren said the woman shrunk away.</p>
<p>One thing I have noticed is because I am a middle aged white straight male people think it is acceptable to make these types of comments. I use the I do not think like you line quite often.</p>
<p>DH lived in a apartment complex in Georgia in the 1960’s. He remembers one time when a AA little boy jumped in the swimming pool. The apartment complex drained and sanitized the pool. </p>
<p>The first thing: (My mother recounted this story to me) I was about 18 months old and extremely verbal. We were in the subway and an African American mother and her little girl were a few seats away. I looked at the little girl and said to my mother, “Look mommy there is a little girl who looks like me…but shes black.” My mother said that she didn’t know what to say except sush.</p>
<p>My father was in Richmond Virginia on business. He was thirsty and saw a fountain and drank. A police officer saw him and stopped him. It said, “Colored”. The officer pointed to the white fountain.</p>