Memories of racism
By Fred Malo, Jr.
Carbondale
Like most people my age, my short-term memory really sucks. I can’t remember what I did five minutes ago. On the other hand, my long-term memory is spooky good. I remember details of a trip my family made to the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee in 1953, when I was 4 years old.
It was my first experience in the segregated South, the first exposure to white and colored water fountains and bathrooms. A curious lad, I wandered into the colored bathroom in Chattanooga to see what it was like.
It wasn’t well kept. A tall Black man with a voice like God said, “You don’t belong here, boy.” I stood transfixed, wondering if he was going to eat me. Charging to the rescue was my father, yanking me by the arm, nearly pulling my shoulder out of socket. The tall Black man laughed.
Boogying down the road to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, we saw a Black family burying their dead by the roadside. “Why are they doing that?” I asked. “Why don’t they do it in a cemetery?”
“Because white people won’t allow them to be buried in one of their cemeteries,” my father answered.
“You mean they don’t even want them around when they’re dead?” I inquired. “What kinda people are these?”
My mother, who grew up in Idaho and never met a Black person until she joined the Army, responded, “They’re the kinda people who go to church on Sunday and worship the God of love, then, as soon as they leave, hate their brothers because of the color of their skin.”
Chattanooga is the site of a pivotal Civil War battle won by General Ulysses Grant’s Union troops. It opened up the South for General William Sherman’s famous March to the Sea.
I was 4-F during the Vietnam War and I’m glad I was. No way was I going to go over there and kill people who were obviously on the right side of history. But I think I may have picked up a musket and fought the Rebel traitors in the 1860s.
I’m sure most of the Confederates called themselves Christians and I don’t understand how anyone of that faith could fight for the cause of slavery. As it says in the Battle Hymn of the Republic, “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”
My paternal grandfather was a horrible racist. He couldn’t refer to Blacks without using the N-word and he definitely thought they were a lower form of human. My father was more of a separate-but-equal racist. He granted Blacks full humanity and enjoyed working with them as a lawyer representing the United Steelworkers. However, he preferred Blacks stay in Hammond, East Chicago and Gary while he raised his family in lily white Munster, Indiana.
Then came me. In 1972, I was recruited by the Congress of Racial Equality to do voters’ rights work in Greenville, Mississippi. I faced the business end of a shotgun more than once.
A Black colleague confronted me. “What are you doing down here? You don’t know what you’re talking about. Nobody’s ever told you you can’t vote.”
“No,” I replied, “I’m outta my element here and I’m not Black, but Dr. King said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’’’
Not that the South has a patent on racism. While working at a steel mill in East Chicago, management got the notion there were racial tensions among the workers. They sent us to what would be called today diversity, equity and inclusion classes.
The teacher traveled around the country trying to convince people of different races to get along. He said the hardest cases he’d encountered weren’t big-bellied southern sheriffs, but Irish-American Chicago cops.
I didn’t vote for Barack Obama either time he ran for president, but when I saw him come on the stage with his family at Grant Park in Chicago after his first victory, I cried tears of joy. I couldn’t believe the most racist nation in the world had just elected a Black president.
So, the Malo men have made a lot of progress.
Until recently, Woodrow Wilson was considered our most racist president because his favorite film was D.W. Griffith’s classic “The Birth of a Nation,” a favorable account of the foundations of the Ku Klux Klan.
But Wilson is far surpassed by our current president. Donald Trump’s political career began with the blatantly racist Birther Movement where it was claimed Obama was born in Kenya.
After his 2016 win, Trump thanked Black voters for not showing up to the polls, which is not only racist, but incredibly un-American. Now, in his second term, Trump is deporting thousands of Latin American people of color, the vast majority of which haven’t even been charged with a crime and none of whom has been accorded due process.
At the same time, Trump has brought in 59 white Afrikaners from South Africa claiming, without evidence as usual, they were being abused by the Black government with genocide and land seizures. This is what Mother Jones calls “remigration,” where “non-ethnically Europeans” are sent back to where they came from and pure whites are imported.
This isn’t progress.
When I was a young man, if I saw an attractive, white woman with a Black man, a shiver would move up my spine. I didn’t really care. It was like an instinctive, impulsive response. In later years, after I learned that all white women weren’t like my mother, I took a “you can have ‘em” attitude.
Seriously, I now see intermarriage as a possible solution to racism. If we’re all the same shade of light tan, who’re the haters going to hate?