For Those Old Enough To Remember...

[Huey]

I attended an all Jewish elementary school,it wasn't all white.I was light enough to pass through,and I had the good hair so I was let in so were a lot of other Blacks.We sure fooled a lot of white people back then.

 

[NLT]

I attended an all Jewish elementary school,it wasn't all white.I was light enough to pass through,and I had the good hair so I was let in so were a lot of other Blacks.We sure fooled a lot of white people back then.

Whats good hair, isnt that racist?

 

[Katzndogz]

I remember the city pool in New Jersey that had a sign up saying "no Negroes". I asked why and the man told me that they caused too much trouble and started too many fights.

As a teenager in Oakland and in San Francisco there weren't any signs up at all. There was just sort of an understanding of where blacks could go and where whites could go. My best friend was black and we got a kick out of going into various restaurants together and watching the people sort of not know what to do with us.

For more serious bigotry I had to get into my thirties when a female friend and I went to an upscale restaurant in Manhattan Beach. We put our names in and waited for a table. For a very long time while male/female couples were seated after only a few minutes. I finally asked for the manager and complained that the reason there was this delay was because the restaurant had no intention of seating two women with no man. It would make the restaurant look bad, like it wasn't a date place. The manager was very apologetic and said we were free to wait. Yeah, wait forever.

Ten years after that, I went alone to my very favorite Indian restaurant. I was shown a table immediately, then sat for an hour waiting for the server to take my order. I'd have to trip one before he would pay attention to me. I finally hunted up the manager to complain and was told that it was the restaurant's policy to not serve women who were alone. I was more than angry, I was FURIOUS! I flat refused to leave, I was ready to camp out for the night. I'd get served or they didn't close. The manager compromised by calling in his wife to sit with me.

If blacks need the crutch of racisim it only means they can't walk.

 

[Flopper]

I was raised in the deep south during the 50's and 60's. What seems so strange to me was that black people seemed to be hated collectively but as individuals were often treated like members of the family.

I was raised by our black maid. I probably spent more time with her in my early years than I did with my mother. She was in every sense a member of the family. She brought her kids over to our house to play. When her father died we attended the funeral. I think my dad bailed her husband out of jail when he got in a bar fight.

But there were rules that you did not break. When she rode in our car with us, she never rode in the front seat, always in back. When I was very young, she took me downtown on the bus. We both sat together in back of the bus. Everyone seemed to realize that she was our maid taking care of me. But when I was older, I sat in the front of the bus and she sat in the rear. At least once a week in summer, she would take me swimming. She would of course stand outside the fenced area of the pool and wait for me. There was only one swimming pool in town and it was for whites only. I asked once why there was no swimming pool for black people. I was told black people are afraid of the water and building them a pool would be a waste of money. A lot of things were justified in those days by saying blacks wouldn't use it we gave it to them.

When I went off to college, I forgot about her but see did not forget about me. I got a card from her on my birthday for many years. All that was many years ago. Today as I look back, I can say she was one of the most powerful influences on my life.

I've been asked how could you just stand by and do nothing when such obvious injustices were so common. My only excuse is that's the way we were raised. We just assumed that's the way things were suppose to be.

In this post I use the term black people or blacks; In those days, the term was Negro or ******, depending on the context but some times people would use the word colored.

You know I watched that movie The Help and I always wanted to ask a white person from that era why there was so much hatred and animosity towards Blacks but blacks were trusted to cook their food and raise their children, which are big responsibilites that require alot of trust. I never understood that. Thats almost like Israelis hiring Palestinian cooks and maids to watch their kids.

The Palestinian were never slaves to the Israelis, they were competing with them. The strange relationship between whites and blacks in the South goes back to of the days of slavery. It was really all about economics. Black labor was much cheaper than white labor so black labor was used everywhere, in both the homes, businesses, and the fields. In order to keep that cheap labor, society taught blacks, by both word and deed, that they were inferior which kept self esteem low and prevented all kinds of problems for whites. And just to make sure blacks were kept in their place, all but the most exceptional students were educated just enough to perform only manual labor. Higher level government jobs were reserved for whites and God help the employer that promoted blacks to high level positions.

However, due to the high percentage of black people in the South, blacks and whites had to work together. Yet whites believe that blacks had to be kept in their place or the entire social order would fall apart. This was a prime motivator for most of the segregation laws and hundreds of unwritten laws that were just as important as the laws on the books.

IMHO, whites knew Blacks were being treated unfairly so they had to justify to themselves that all the injustices were necessarily. Blacks were dirty and spread disease so they weren't allowed to use the same rest rooms, drinking fountains, or swimming pools as whites. Blacks were less intelligent than whites and had no initiative, so there was no need for good schools. In other words, Blacks were inferior to Whites so that was used to justified the most sacred law of the old south. The races must be kept pure, so there would be no intermarriage. To support that end, schools had to be segregated.

I really think the hatred that Whites in the South had for the Black race grew out of fear, fear that blacks would rise up and destroy the white society.

However, when it came to the treatment of the maid, the cook, the gardener, or the janitor, then a different set of rules applied as long as they were subservient and kept their place. Whites would claim they had no hatred for Blacks; look how they helped old Tom the gardener or one legged Jim at the Mill. As my grandmother would say, they can't help it if they were born black.

It was a really strange time, that I hope is never repeated.

 

[Douger]

I saw that colored sign at the movie theater also.But the balcony was great for throwing water balloons at the peeps sitting below us.Sometimes we would put piss in them you should have heard the screams.Also you could sneak in without paying to see a movie.They took that sign down real fast.

Translation : Youz B aktin like *******.