"This mother wouldn't let us ignore grisly ugliness of racism" from January 2003.
Posted on 06/06/2005 10:37:41 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
Growing up in Chicago, I never heard of Emmett Till.
This is what I tell my son when he comes home from a high school dance in a less-diverse suburb. He had a good time, he says, but it was weird. "Everybody was white," he says.
How weird, I think, that he finds this weird. Growing up in Chicago, I would have found the opposite weird.
Growing up in Chicago, I never heard of a black kid named Emmett Till who was murdered in Mississippi. I grew up on the South Side less than four miles from the funeral home where, in 1955, thousands of people filed past Emmett's glass-topped casket -- the same casket exhumed just last week as part of a reopened investigation. But I never knew. I was white, not black.
Growing up in Chicago, I never saw a black mailman. Our mailman for the longest time was Emil -- Emil the Mailman -- and he was great.
Emil paid me a quarter one day to walk a few blocks of his route with him and carry the mail from the sidewalk to the front doors, sparing him the steps. When we got to the end of Campbell Avenue, we turned into McKeever's tavern, dark and cool on a sunny day, and climbed up on stools. Emil ordered a Coke for me and a beer for himself.
But Emil wasn't black. That's the thing. And nobody else in McKeever's was black. And nobody we delivered the mail to was black.
Like teenage bodyguards
Growing up in Chicago, I'm not sure I ever talked to an actual black person until my folks hired a cleaning lady, Mrs. Johnson, who lived on the other side of the Dan Ryan Expy. from Comiskey Park and rode the bus to our house every week or two.
Sometimes Mrs. Johnson brought her daughter along, and the little girl would play with my sisters in the backyard. You'd think Malcolm X had arrived. Moms up and down the block would call their own children indoors until the danger had passed -- the little black girl had gone home.
At the end of the day, one of my older brothers or sisters would walk with Mrs. Johnson to 79th Street, like teenage bodyguards, and wait with her until a bus came along.
Growing up in Chicago, I never sat in a classroom with a black boy or girl. The first black student to attend Bogan High School -- the last all-white public high school in Chicago -- showed up in 1979, seven years after I had graduated.
She wasn't a Jackie Robinson type. No great talents or charms. No special ability to shake off the slights that come with breaking the color barrier. She was an average 13-year-old girl who stepped out of her mom's car on the first day of school and instantly found herself reviled. She made friends, but not many, and when provoked, she fought back. She ate lunch that first year in an assistant principal's office, all alone.
Growing up in Chicago, I never saw a black person west of Halsted. And then I did, but not west of Racine. And then I did, but not west of Western. And then I did, and the whole neighborhood broke up, like somebody flicked the lights a couple of times and said, "Closing time."
Growing up in Chicago, I never saw a black person at Rainbow Beach. That was our beach. I spent a good part of the summer of 1969 there, sitting on the rocks off 77th Street, a six-pack of Schlitz dangling in the water from my foot. I never saw a black person on the rocks. Those were our rocks.
And then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, a bunch of black guys were hanging out at Rainbow, sitting on the benches near the snacks shed and playing all kinds of drums. They were good. I would have sat down to watch, but you didn't do that. And before long, Rainbow Beach wasn't ours. It was theirs.
A state of mind away
Growing up in Chicago, black people for me were a bus ride away, a school district away, a state of mind away. The only black people I knew by name were the ones on TV and in newspapers and books.
Black people were Jim in Huckleberry Finn and Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird and Bigger Thomas in Native Son and John Grimes in Go Tell It on the Mountain and Claude Brown in Manchild in the Promised Land.
Black people were the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. marching on the news. They were Billy Williams, a lefty like me, hitting home runs for the Cubs.
They were not friends or neighbors or classmates.
This is what I tell my son now: What's weird to him was normal to me, and I just thank God it's weird to him.
Which isn't saying a whole lot. When it comes to race, this is still a screwed-up city in a screwed-up world.
But I guess it's something.
You could almost call it progress.
Tom McNamee's "The Chicago Way" column runs on Mondays in the Sun-Times.
CHICAGOLAND PING
Is this guy on target or is he really stretching it?
I lived in Chicago Heights with my parents from '63 to '78 and we were always "integrated." Everybody pretty much got along until Dr. King got capped in '68. Then all hell broke loose.
"This mother wouldn't let us ignore grisly ugliness of racism" from January 2003.
I wouldn't say this was an "odd lament." This basically describes the Long Island I grew up on in the 1980s. Blacks may have lived a mile or two away, but they went to separate schools (no bussing in Nassau County when I was a kid) and in many cases, made the same amount of money as their white neighbors in the blue collar suburbs, but lived in a separate world.
Metro NYC and Chicago are among the most segregated places in the U.S., although it has changed to a certain extent.
Chicago Heights, Harvey, and Bellwood were exceptions to the rule back in the day.
I don't care one little bit about my neighbor's race - but I find myself caring very much about his "culture".
I grew up in small town Missouri and graduated from high school in 1963. I never met a black person or even saw one up close until I went into the service.
Interesting. A black kid gets killed in 1955 and we still talk about it.
How many black kids will die this week?
Growing up in Alabama, my best friend in grade school was a black guy. Go figure.....
I think the difference was that in 1955 they couldn't get a white jury to convict the murderers. Sort of a reverse O.J. jury.
What time period?
Too many. But since Till's name was mentioned, we have a history here of where it will end up. I see where you were going and your point is sound.
Oh, Till wasn't "killed." He was murdered in the first-degree.
You must have lived in the Republican district. The author, obviously, grew up on the Democrat side of town.
In 1955 there was separation of such groups. It was, if anything, even more pronounced in the North than in the South. There probably still is, but it is gradually dying out and no longer has the law to back it up. The Society is being made to conform to the word of the Declaration of Independence.
How many murders are solved today?
Is this just bread and circuses? Dying because you flirted with a white woman is worse than dying because you accidentally bumped into someone? Or dying because someone needed to kill someone to make it into a gang?
Maybe things haven't changed. The only way to get attention to a black kid getting killed is to somehow involve a white person in it.
I got a feeling that this is a lot of exaggeration. I admit, I don't know the City of Chicago all that well, but I grew up at the same time in a similar, albeit smaller, City of Pittsburgh, and playing with, going to school with, or generally knowing and being familiar with black people was far more common than not, at least for people from blue collar neighborhoods. (Maybe this guy was far too sheltered.) And even though I was young at the time, I do remember the murder of Emmit Till. It was NATIONAL news.
Mid 70s...
I wonder if this author would consider Cabrini Green as a "less diverse" suburb.
Interestingly, if I go back to my father's graduation class picture from Cleveland's East Tech High in the mid-30, they were "integrated" although they probably didn't know it. And Jesse Owens was in the class following his if I recall correctly.
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