Although it’s the last day of the shortest month, it’s not too late to note that the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom are celebrating Black History Month.
My St. Michael’s High School peers and I were never taught black history; it was left for us to seek it out. Wiser now, I agree with actor Morgan Freeman that black history is American history. The fact that many of our founding fathers were slaveholders makes the case.
I had not read “The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin back when it might have opened my eyes. Recently, I was pointed toward a YouTube conscience-raising 1965 Cambridge University Union Hall debate between Baldwin and conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. Its premise: “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”
In his opening, Baldwin told how at the age of 5, 6 or 7 it was a shock to realize that his pledge of allegiance to the flag was not returned. Baldwin was a citizen, but black.
Occasionally, I push myself to read a difficult book. At my age most of my educational gaps should be covered. When that’s not the case, I test my brain by reading writers whose lives are or were far different than my own.
A new book, “We Were Eight Years in Power,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is a collection of essays on the recent black experience in America, a time when Barack Obama was in the White House. Coates recalls the trouble that America faced when Obama was elected in 2008: “The economy was on the brink. The blood of untold numbers of Iraqis was on our hands. Katrina had shamed the society.” Coates continued: ” ‘Son,’ my father said of Obama, ‘you know the country got to be messed up for them folks to give him the job.’ ”
Coates’ dad’s insight echoes the election headline from the satirical website The Onion: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”
To be born in 1930s Northampton, Massachusetts, was to be as ignorant as possible about the black experience. What my classmates and I knew of the world was limited. We attended white schools. We played sports against guys who looked like us, and never questioned why that was so. It just was.
At age 18, during the Korean War, I expanded my world view by joining the Air Force and shipping down to 1950s Texas for basic training. Texas was then as unlike western Massachusetts as it could get, with separate water fountains and restrooms designated “White” and “Colored” just the beginning.
To watch films about Jackie Robinson and the Jim Crow world he and his contemporaries confronted teaches each new generation about America the not so beautiful. To see Jackie Robinson, a college-educated World War II Army officer, and a busload of baseball players refused use of toilets at a gas station or food in a restaurant blows our 21st-century minds. Revealing films like “Hidden Figures” about math-whiz, African-American women working for NASA’s space program being humiliated daily in the 1960s shocks us, and it should.
I hear younger voices saying, “But that’s so stupid.” Only when they experience the horrible hatred of Jim Crow up close and naked does their inborn sense of fairness kick in as skin color fades.
Books are still the best way to get one’s mind around bigotry and to finally admit, yep, me too. At Holyoke Community College, I read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” following up with a book report. I so over-identified with Alex Haley’s groundbreaking book that I closed my paper with, “I am black.” My white instructor was unimpressed. His comment was along the lines of, “I think not.”
My point was that whites know nothing of their world until seen through a black person’s eyes. One cure is reading books or seeing films that confront racism before our mind is imprisoned.
Hollywood has an obligation to right their racist ship because movies reflected America’s times and prejudices. They’ve removed a Bing Crosby in blackface minstrel number “Abraham,” from 1942’s “Holiday Inn.”
A University of Massachusetts course in American culture noted that Irish immigrants liked old-fashioned minstrelsy because someone else was presented as lower down America’s social flagpole. That’s ironic because Irish immigrants were also pictured as subhuman in 19th-century political cartoons.
In short, your culture deserves respect. People of every persuasion honor fellow citizens by respecting their unique heritages. Sadly, it’s not always the case. I take comfort in reading that 2,000 Valley people showed up to hear a brave Ruby Bridges speak at Smith College’s John M. Greene Hall earlier this month.
The dirty laundry list of Hollywood and television’s early days reveal complete capitulation to current mores for fear of losing white audiences in theaters or advertisers on TV. The great Nat King Cole had a 15-minute show taken off the air for a lack of sponsors. I recall 1968 newspaper stories about the nasty uproar when Harry Belafonte was briefly touched on the arm by British singer Petula Clark as they sang an anti-war song. Belafonte was a friend of Martin Luther King Jr., and a civil rights activist. Following the sponsor’s complaint, and to her credit, Clark refused to retape the segment. In a stroke of black humor, the racist Chrysler advertising exec was fired.
Petula Clark’s special won broad acclaim. One reviewer wrote that America’s first televised interracial touch “could only disturb the spiritually sick.”
This column was updated on March 1 to correct the film in which Bing Crosby performed the blackface minstrel number, “Abraham.”
Jim Cahillane, of Williamsburg, writes a monthly column. He can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.