Whew!  I have been sick lately and am just this week catching up on a lot of projects.  I haven’t posted much this month at all.

I finished reading Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin this week.  I had never read it in school and got interested in it after watching a TV show, Black. White., on FX last year.  The story details the real experiences of the author who used medication, sun lamps, and dye to experience life as a black American.  In the South.  In 1959.  Before the Civil Rights Act.  Before desegregation.  It’s the rare kind of book that not only examines history carefully, but actually made history while it was being written and again after it was published.  It’s fortunate that Griffin is so capable of articulating his thoughts and feelings as both spectator and participant during the month he spent on his project and the months and years later during his subsequent role in the civil rights scene.

It’s awful to think of how recent segregation was and how far we’ve come along, yet how far we still have to go.  Although I’ve certainly thought about race relations and civil rights as we know them today, I had never really given significant time to study them in the past outside of the classroom.  And even in the classroom, I was too young to comprehend how recent and painful some of the things that occurred as recently as the 1960’s.  To me as a young man, even the disco era was deep past.  Now that I’m older and my circle of friends has expanded to include some guys who had graduated high school years before this book was even written, I have a greater appreciation for how recent these times were.  And Griffin helps to explain how tragic the problem is.  I won’t go into some of my thoughts on the issues Griffin raises because I think his book does it best; however, there was one particular section that caught my attention and I wanted to share:

"I thought of Maritain’s conclusion that the only solution to the problems of man is the return of charity (in the old embracing sense of caritas, not in the stingy literal sense it has assumed in our language and in our days) and metaphysics.  Or, more simply, the maxim of St. Augustine: ‘Love, and then do what you will.’ To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue.”
John Howard Griffin from Black Like Me

Some of the things I would like to talk about and what I do have an opinion on, was how this book made me feel.  First off, I felt ashamed and embarassed that I never really thought too deeply about how things were.  I mean, I knew there were bathrooms and water fountains for “Whites Only,” but I never gave much thought to what that really meant.  I guess I just figured everywhere there were two bathrooms and two water fountains, one for whites and one for blacks.  Maybe if it was a busy place, they’d have four bathrooms: men and women of both races.  Kind of like how I figured it was when they the forced blacks in the South to sit on the back of the bus; they just divided the bus in two and everyone got a ride.  What could I have been thinking if anything at all?

Griffin details what it was like when the only bathrooms available were for whites only.  Whenever black folks went out they would have to always know where all the closest bathrooms were and even then they’d have to walk miles to get to one.  Even stores where blacks were welcome to patronize would turn people away.  A family could spend all their money in a store but still not be able to get a a drink or sandwich at its lunch counter.  How hard it must have been for mothers to take their children out and not have a place for them to go.  How humiliating and demeaning it must have been for a grown man to be always told when and where he can use the toilet, a right Griffin accurately identifies as something people readily gave their livestock or pets.  Griffin even details a stop-over on a long distance bus ride where the driver won’t let the black passengers off the bus at all.  It’s a despicable act by a cruel man, but more despicable is that it was considered acceptable by-and-large.  It’s embarrassing to think how petty and small people could have been.  Racism doesn’t just demean the intended target, but it demans the offender.

I’m glad some things have improved.  I hope they continue to do so.  Hopefully some day, along with chapters like this civil rights era, all of racism is considered history.

"The players in this drama of frustration and indignity are not commas or semicolons in a legislative thesis; they are people, human beings, citizens of the United States of America.”
Roy Wilkins