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Stumbling at the color line
The American struggle with race is filled with rich paradoxes: painful yet redemptive, ageless yet newly exotic, hopeful yet filled with years of hopelessness.
By Wil Haygood
(Globe Staff Photo /
Bill Greene)
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On the first day of my sophomore year at a college tucked in the southwestern corner of Ohio, I introduced myself to my roommate. There was a spray of autumn sunlight in the dorm room; I felt giddy and light on my feet. It was the joy of being back at school, of having survived my freshman year of 1972.
My roommate and I passed those first couple of days uneventfully - talking about classes, wondering what we'd major in. By week's end, however, my roommate had vanished. The dorm adviser told me the roommate - white - did not wish to room with me - a black. I didn't whine then and don't mean to whine now, but I look back and wonder how two people had managed to drag race onto that campus, down that hallway, into that dormitory room, into my memory today.
But that is America, and race won't let any of us Americans go. It's like a wicked moonlight that lays on us. If it did not follow us daily, haunting us so somberly, race just might ease its maniacal force upon us and our imagination. But it won't.
Part of the fascination surely lies with the rich paradoxes of race: painful yet redemptive, it is ageless yet newly exotic. It is hopeful and yet, there are moments - decades in fact - when closing the racial gulf can and has seemed hopeless.
In 1903, our century still new and not so distant from the Civil War, a rising social thinker with a Vandyke beard by the name of W.E.B. Du Bois said the problem of the 20th century would be ''the problem of the color line.'' As the century unfolded, Du Bois's prediction was apt: it saw race riots and lynchings and laws against Negroes and Coloreds. True enough, America soared with its inventions, its commerce, and brilliance. It became the envy of other nations. But not for its record on race. The malaise spread. The color line became the line drawn in the sand.
There have been heroes and martyrs in the struggle, writers aplenty. Frederick Douglass and Charles Sumner and Booker T. Washington. Mary McCleod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt. Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. And how we miss James Baldwin, that sweet and angry man who had eyes deep as the ocean. They all died with the problems of race disrupting their sleep, worrying their souls. Now, at century's end, we ask, we wonder: Will the racial gulf trail us into the next century?
It seems painfully easy to answer.
There are woes coast to coast. A racial murder trial over here; yet another state legislature chipping away at affirmative action over there; the ravages of housing discrimination nearly everywhere. Not to mention those alarming statistics about black men locked away in prisons. According to Justice Department numbers, there'll be a million blacks behind bars by next year. It is estimated that 1 in 7 black males have felony records, keeping them away from the ballot box in many states. Baldwin's prose would have erupted at such revelations.
Blacks say they are weary of talking about race. Fannie Lou Hamer used to say she was ''sick and tired of being sick and tired.'' Her words weren't poetry, but they are remembered. Hamer was a buck-an-hour wage earner. She was a Mississippi Freedom Rider. She was somebody.
Whites are asked to step into the breach. According to a lot of experts, whites do not come to the table easily.
Not long ago, on a reporting assignment, I sat in the basement of a church in Louisville, Ky. It was a winter's evening and a group of folk - bless their hearts - had gathered, had been gathering on a volunteer basis, to talk about race, about that gulf. A white woman, in a voice soft as churchtime, asked a black man - actually she had asked the entire group but the black man bolted to his feet to answer - if he thought blacks who had been lopped off welfare would riot. A black woman wondered if whites were aware how disrespectful it was to her and other blacks when, she said, white store clerks laid their change from a purchase on the counter instead of in their hands. A black woman said blacks shouldn't always cry racism when they've suffered or been fired from jobs. Someone wondered why yet another white male had dropped out of the group. A black man wondered if he hadn't gotten a contracting job in that very church because he was black.
An evening's worth of history. Some anger floated about, but no one bolted for the door. Maybe that was victory enough.
Afterward, everyone grabbed their coats, shared some chitchat, vowed to return the following week, and headed for the parking lot. I watched everyone lope through the darkness. For some reason I felt sorry, and so very hopeful, for the white woman who had asked the question about welfare. She seemed so sincere - and yet frightfully unaware of the pain the question had caused. But she had shown up. She had opened the door to her house and turned the key in her car and headed off to that church. I felt if she could show up - a Louisville city official - and share her fears, maybe others would follow her. Maybe she could enlighten.
It is not, of course, always black and white. The gulf in America touches other cultures: Hispanics, Asian-Americans, Indians.
''There's no question the original sin began with trying to put blacks in one box,'' says Eric Liu, an Asian-American and former speechwriter for President Clinton. Liu is also a fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based, non-partisan public-policy organization devoted to trying to solve social problems with new ideas. Liu just argues for a seat at the table in the discourse. ''The most important thing is not what I say - but that I speak.''
So the black and white blood roils the loudest.
So Thomas Jefferson, deep in his grave, has his sleep disrupted over the question of whether he had sex with his female slaves? From here to Charlottesville, the somber moonlight keeps moving among us.
For all of its currency, its ability to sway groups of people, racism and the old color line defies common sense. How else to explain a restaurant chain denying service to a group of black Secret Service agents and being shamed before a nation? How else to explain large corporations backed up against the wall, losing multimillion-dollar discrimination lawsuits?
Once I found myself rolling across the bayous of Louisiana with David Duke, a perennial candidate in that state. The black man and the white man with the Nazi and Klan leanings. We had attended one Duke rally and were on our way to another. He was smiling, joking - normal. But at the rally later that evening, the bigot surfaced, the code words about welfare started flying: them people, our America. Not a black face, other than mine, was in sight. The sweat from brows started flying like sideways raindrops. The teeth flashed in something between a smile and a bite. David Duke had created his own prison, his jailers everyone around him, defying common sense. So he lost. Now he's running for another office. A Huey Long Kingfish in reverse. But the color line does that: sends warriors and their followers in full flight away from the right direction.
In 1992 David Shipler took off on a cross-country odyssey into black and white America. He wrote a book, ''A Country of Strangers: Black and White America.'' A lot of what he saw and heard out there in America nearly broke his heart.
Shipler, who is white, places much of the blame upon many whites who have what he calls a skewed view of history. ''This history - or perception of history - is one of the big divides between whites and blacks,'' he says. ''I found that many whites felt that history was not important to what shapes the present. African-Americans felt just the opposite. Many whites get upset when blacks talk about the past. I think the legacy of master to slave still haunts us.''
Now and then - many say not often enough - our racial agonies find their way to the White House. Race has long befuddled American presidents. Lincoln grappled with race in word and deed, then paid a heavy price with a bullet lodged in his skull. Woodrow Wilson ignored race - although he once jauntily proclaimed the racist ''Birth of a Nation'' a joyous movie to watch.
Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, the former slave, to the White House. Blunt and cocky, Roosevelt couldn't imagine why the public was so aghast. Truman was brave, but dangerously ahead of public sentiment on the question of integration. Kennedy appeared genuinely moved by the racial unrest of 1961 and 1962, but he had made too many handshakes with southern politicians to move a civil rights agenda forward. It was Kennedy, however - galled at the beating of black women and children in Alabama - who asked a national audience one evening who among them would be willing to trade places with the black man.
Nixon reacted awkwardly to race; Reagan chose to ignore it. Bush provided noblisse oblige, and then one afternoon found himself striding through the rubble of Los Angeles in the aftermath of rioting over the acquittal of white police officers who had beaten a black man. Lyndon Johnson achieved huge accomplishments on the racial front through threats, blackmail, shrewdness, and ingenuity. Johnson was born poor, had tasted poverty in the pit of his stomach. Not always, but poverty can often push a soul to understand racism with a peculiar kind of clarity.
In 1993 southern-born Bill Clinton entered the White House. Clinton might have been the first president who felt at ease around blacks, who had black friends over for dinner, who depended on the brainpower of political associates who just happened to be black. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison called him ''our first black president.'' She meant this: Bill Clinton knows the work of Walter Moseley and the horn of Coleman Hawkins and the voice of CeCe Winans and the poetry of Maya Angelou. Bill Clinton has quoted Fannie Lou Hamer. He knows America.
In time the president would plead with the citizenry to talk about race. And the country talked, a year of pulling out chairs.
William Winter, a former Mississippi governor, served on Clinton's Race Initiative. In traveling around the country, Winter, now a private-practice lawyer in Jackson, Miss., said he was encouraged by all the groups that have been created, of all the doors to houses that have swung open and sent husbands, wives, and teenage sons and daughters down to the library, the recreation center, the church, to engage in conversations about race. In a small, small way, to seek a kind of redemption.
The advisory board recommended to Clinton in its final report that he create a permanent panel to keep racial dialogue going in the country. ''It would be a high-profile permanent council on racial relations that would emulate John Kennedy's Council on Physical Fitness,'' says Winter. ''That council really transformed how people thought about themselves as a result of the emphasis put on physcial fitness. I know I started jogging in 1962 because of that report.''
Somewhere, right now, in this land of ours, there are two children at play, one black and one white. They are too young to know about the color line. Their hearts are as happy as children's hearts should be. Their lungs are filled with fresh air. They are allies and comrades and cohorts. They know soft mattresses and ironed shirts and mother's and grandmother's kisses on their cheeks.
They are years away from walking down the clean hallway of a dorm room, to shake the hand of a never-before-seen roommate. They are not yet sick and tired of anything. What they know of this complicated word - love - could fill a teacup, which is how it should be. So they love each other, too. Time is real, of course. But let us freeze the frame and wish them well. It will be their century.
Wil Haygood is a member of the Globe staff.
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