I Was a Bystander, But I'm Not Innocent

On Martin Luther King Day I revisit memories that I revisit on every other day.

The first memory is of being four or five years old and going to get a drink of water at Memorial Stadium in Baton Rouge. My mother said “Not that one. Go over here.” I don’t know if I understood why. I don’t know if I was even old enough to read the signs “Colored” and “White.” I do know it’s the earliest memory I have of segregation.

It didn’t bother me. At that age you’re only aware of injustice if it happens to you. I never wondered why all the kids in my school were white. When civil rights protests hit the news I didn’t see the point. I assumed that everybody’s life was pretty much like mine. I didn't think people should be gunned down in Mississippi because they were registering voters, but then a whole lot of people got gunned down for unsatisfactory reasons.

My school was integrated by introducing 12 blacks to my senior class of 510. The next year some seniors and some juniors were moved in, and on down one year at a time until 12 years later integration had been achieved. ("Mission Accomplished!") There was no violence, although I heard a rumor that some white kid had dumped a plate of spaghetti on one of the black kids at lunch. I recall that wherever one of "them" sat in class there were eight empty seats around them. One fore and aft and three on each adjacent row. I went to class and did my homework and left the barrier seats clear. I didn't speak a word to any of those 12 kids all year long.

I came back from college into the middle of work place integration. The government had decided to make Corporate America solve this problem, as they did with so many others. We had racial hiring quotas, and they got filled. We had training in the three R’s for the people who came out of the rancid “separate but equal” schools for blacks.

A black engineer I worked with thanked an older white guy for getting him some information. The white guy said. “Don’t thank me. I gave you that because it’s a job requirement. I don’t think you or anybody else your color should be here.” I told the black engineer I thought that was despicable. “Maybe so,” he said, “But that’s the only guy out here that I know exactly how he feels. You act nice, but I don’t know what you think. It’s not very nice, but at least with him I don’t have to wonder.”

Twenty years later the company held “diversity” sessions where mixed race groups talked about their experiences. I sat next to a black woman who had come to my high school as a senior the year after I left. From her I found out what it was like to pick any seat you wanted and know that nobody would sit next to you. She had been on the Homecoming Court the year before and would probably have been Queen. She would have had a role in the Senior Play. Instead she spent her senior year as a nobody that nobody wanted.

This lady was an acting supervisor – not bad when you consider that when she came to work nobody of her race held anything above a common labor job. “I know that if I had come to work ten years later I would have been promoted farther and faster. But I was one of the first ones. I had to face all the resistance and make a path for others. I’m proud of that, but I paid a price.” A white guy at the table said “I was there, and I believe what you’re saying but I’ve got a story too. I never made supervisor. I saw blacks promoted over me that everybody knew weren’t as good as me. I knew it and they knew it. So you got held back, but so did I.” It wasn’t a heated exchange, it was a simple recognition of fact that both of them acknowledged.

I go to restaurants today and see black people eating. I see them checking into hotels. I hear them called “sir” instead of “boy.” The mayor of my town is black. When I was a kid those black people would have been beat up thoroughly for trying to get into those restaurants. The mayor would have been sweeping city hall. As an integrated society we’re not what we should be, or want to be, or what we will become. But we sure as hell are not what we used to be. I was privileged to live through the change and see it happen.

And living through it was all that I did. I was nice to the blacks I knew, and treated the ones who worked for me fairly. But the waters of history rushed by me, and I never so much as put out a hand to affect their flow. Some of the worst injustices in the history of mankind were set right during my lifetime, and I played no part at all.

That's what I remember on Martin Luther King day, and on every other day.