America Behind the Color Line (22 page)

I believe the movement of blacks from the North back to the South is a way of getting back to who we are and what we built. I don’t think you can look at it differently; there is no other way to think of it. Why else go? We’re still an agrarian society in the South. Of course, we’ve got cities like Atlanta sprouting up, New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville; they’re coming along. But the cities aren’t Mississippi and Alabama and Arkansas, the places where all the real comfort is. The place where you walk down the street and people say, “How are you?” and “How do you do?” and mean it. So I think the reason for the migration south would be to get back to that sort of humanness, the gentility that just imbues.

Many black people moving back to the South want to live with other black people, willingly. Strangely enough, people group themselves. It’s like any other form of life. Oak trees need oak trees to cross-pollinate. Black people are always going to seek out black people because as long as we’ve been in this country, we’ve been the only comfort we have, the only surety. As time goes on, however, intermarriage becomes less of a bugaboo in the South. There are many interracial couples who move around the South just as freely as they do any place else, without any problems. People are going to group according to one criterion or another, be it race, class, income, what have you. That’s always going to be.

It’s a new day now for our people, and I think it’s a great thing that people are moving back south. They’re going to be happier. They’re going to bring talent; they’re going to bring something with them. And I’m for that. That was part of my reasoning in going home. I’ve received a lot. Now the question is, what am I going to do with it? If you’ve got all this money, where will you spend it? What will be your aim?

The answer, for me, begins with what I was most proud of growing up—my education. And I’ve learned the power of film to educate. With movies you can reach so many people. Without
Glory,
most Americans wouldn’t have known about the first infantry of black soldiers that fought for the Union in the Civil War—the Fifty-fourth Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. They wouldn’t have known about the bravery of the Fifty-fourth in waging a hellish assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina, when they were outnumbered and outgunned. I don’t know and I can’t tell you how many people have approached me and said, I’m so glad they made that movie; I had no idea.

Here’s another piece of history that most people don’t know about. In late 1944 in World War II, General Patton’s spearhead in his Third Army was a tank outfit, the 761st Tank Battalion. It was all black, except for the commanding officer and maybe three other white officers. This all-black battalion spearheaded Patton’s 1944 campaign across Europe. They battled the enemy for 183 consecutive days across six European countries, fought in four major Allied campaigns, and helped liberate prisoners from Nazi concentration camps.

Amid the segregation that still existed in the U.S. Army, Patton had asked for the best separate tank battalion still back at home. When the 761st arrived in Normandy on October 10, he said to them: “I would never have asked for you if you weren’t good. I have nothing but the best in my army. I don’t care what color you are so long as you go up there and kill the Kraut sonofabitches. Everyone has their eyes on you and is expecting great things from you. Most of all, your race is looking forward to you. Don’t let them down and damn you, don’t let me down.” They kicked tall arse, and I’m going to make a film about them.

Very few people know about the 761st Tank Battalion or the two other black tank battalions of World War II, just as people had no concept of blacks fighting in the Civil War. The question arises, who do we blame for these omissions? One answer is, it was one of the most pernicious forms of racism, to deny black people their place in the textbooks. It’s as if the message was, not only are you people not human beings, but you have no history and we’re just going to wipe out all your contributions. Well, we are human beings. And we can talk and we can write. So another answer to the matter of omission is, why don’t we talk and write and make films about our own history?

A country whose history is truncated—let’s put it that way—is only half formed. You can’t feel good about any group of people if you can isolate them by color, size, or some other characteristic—and in our case, it’s color. You can’t appreciate them if you have no idea of their contributions to your being, and to your well-being. Once we start redressing that, we change our entire national persona. That’s what I’m trying to do, and what others are trying to do. What academicians do in the academy to inform, to motivate, we in the popular media have got to do in the popular media. Simply put, that’s my aim in life.

MAYA ANGELOU
Choices

With liberation comes choices. One of America’s worst race riots occurred in Atlanta, in 1906, yet today it is home to many African Americans who choose to live there happily.

To understand the phenomenon, one could say if there is that much evil in the history, there is bound to be that much good.

The Civil War was fought all over the South, and alas it is still being fought in some people’s hearts. But the fight for Atlanta was particularly fierce and particularly ongoing. I do not know the impact
Gone with the Wind
had on the resistance to change, but I suspect that many people whose ancestors were white sharecroppers fell in love with the romance in the novel and imagined that if we returned to slavery days, they could be served mint juleps by grinning butlers and hotcakes by loving nannies. The people, black and white, who fought to liberate Atlanta from her prison of ignorance were equal to the task. The organization the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, Maynard Jackson, Septima Clark, Andrew Young, Joe Lowery, C. T. Vivian, and others white and black won victory for Atlanta and for all people.

Martin Luther King told a story that after the Montgomery bus boycott ended and the companies capitulated, a black woman got onto the bus and walked all the way back and sat in the backseat. A young man who had been so adamant about voter registration, so adamant, and about the boycotting, went back and he said, “Ma’am, excuse me, we have walked eighteen miles so that you don’t have to sit here.” And she said, “Son, I walked with you, but now that I can sit anywhere, I’m sitting in the back. It’s much more comfortable. I can relax, put my bags down, and stretch my legs out.” Then she smiled.

With choices comes a different kind of criticism. There is surprise that in some affluent neighborhoods in Atlanta, black people have chosen to live with other affluent black people. But if your neighbor likes the same kind of music you like, and pretty much the same food and maybe goes to the same church, it’s easier to go over and ask, excuse me, do you have some pinto beans, or have you got some Mahalia Jackson records, some Tabasco sauce? Most folks live in the same neighborhood with others like them and have very fine homes there where they choose to live. That should be unremarkable.

I can’t imagine having a city place that wouldn’t be Atlanta. After I moved from California, the first place I bought outside North Carolina was in Atlanta. I’m a country soul—not way rustic, but small town. I love my town, but 140,000 other people do so as well. But I need the city too; from time to time I need its vitality. There are city souls and country souls. I think a country soul could have been born in Times Square, but when he sees the country he says, this is where I’m supposed to live. And a city soul could have been born in the mountains of West Virginia, but when she sees the city she says, hm-mm, this is me. Wherever home is, the closer one gets to it, the more one relaxes. That’s even if you’re walking. If you’ve been on a trek, a few blocks or a few miles, you can almost spot your house. You start to breathe differently. I think this is true for all people.

The federal census for the year 2000 tells us that far more African Americans are now choosing to migrate south than the other way around. This reverse migration has its roots, I believe, in the first move north. Not the very first, because obviously slaves were escaping slavery going north. The move in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the place Robert Hayden called the “mythic northern city” was caused by people who hoped they could find a better place. People thought if they could get away north, get away from the cotton, the worn-out South, get away from all the hatred, from the mean sharecropping days, they would find milk and honey in the streets of Chicago and New York and even St. Louis, and certainly Los Angeles. However, if the North did promise that, it never lived up to its promise, although many black people remained there.

So when the people sent their children back to the South, to the grandmothers, to the grandfathers, to Sister and Bubba, they sent them to be looked after, I believe, because of the Northern disappointment. It was thanks to the Civil Rights Movement and the leveling of the playing field that we had the possibility of Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young as mayors of the great Southern city. Then the congressmen and -women began coming from the South to Washington, D.C., to plan a better world. I believe that those events freed people from the painful memories of Southern treatment. They began to look south again and see it as they want it to be.

Something basic and earth-shattering happened with the Civil Rights Movement. The fabric of old belief was shattered. The belief that in the South if you’re black get back, if you’re white you’re all right. That was structurally shaken, so that black people in Detroit and Philadelphia and Tucson began to look back at the South. They began to remember not only the South’s beauty, but that our people’s bodies and sweat and tears and blood have enriched this soil, and thought, wait a minute, maybe I belong there too.

I am saying our people have been in exile in the North for three-quarters of a century. In exile, and in many cases, not realizing it but terribly uncomfortable. There’s a wonderful cartoon by the great Ollie Harrington, who drew the character Bootsie for the
Chicago Defender
. In the 1950s, in a particularly relevant drawing, he showed Bootsie and his friend standing atop a mountain in Maine. They are outfitted in ski gear with the ski poles and this heavy, heavy, heavy clothing. Bootsie turns to his friend and asks, “Do you think Martin Luther King really wanted us to do this? Is this part of our liberation?”

Our people are coming home. The South is rich with memories of kindness and courage and cowardice and brutality. It is beautiful physically, and spiritually rich.

I live in the South because it’s the best place to live. It’s beautiful beyond the weight and even the ecstasy of my memories. If you come as far south as North Carolina, you see the lush, almost tropical growth and the fireflies and hear the birds in the morning and the cicadas in the evening.

Come south, walk along honeysuckled paths, and listen carefully to the sounds of good Southern music that will play so easily on your ears. You will be happy that you had the nerve and perspicacity to travel on a Southern train.

We can reclaim our home place.

We can stand for the good. That’s why we risk our lives.

I see the work, the art and the music, and the lyrics of the poets, and the sculpture and the paintings, and I see that the culture is healthy. I do not believe that drugs and criminalities and venialities have total power over our youth. There is a core of health in our culture. Still we rise, out of the huts of history’s shame, we rise. From a past rooted in pain, we rise. Bringing the gifts that our ancestors gave, we are the hope and the dream of the slave.

JAMES H. BOLDEN
Policing the South

I’m fifty-four years old. Now as most everyone in my generation knows, when I was growing up, black people did not look at the police force as a friendly presence in our neighborhoods. Friends have asked me what in the world possessed me to try to join the Memphis Police Department. Well, I was on my way home one night and I was a young man, maybe twelve, fourteen years old, and I had an encounter with two police officers from the Memphis Police Department, and it wasn’t a very pleasant encounter. We had always been taught that if we were walking the streets and if we saw the police before they saw us, then we should run, because there was a basic distrust of police officers at that time. As I said, the encounter wasn’t a real pleasant one. I was verbally abused by the officers. And instead of that driving me away from the police department, it made me want to become a part of it.

After talking with my parents concerning what had happened, they said a lot of times what you have to do to change things is to become a part of it and work from within. And from that day on I had decided that I wanted to be a police officer and wanted to join the Memphis Police Department. I knew some good police officers who patrolled my neighborhood; the police weren’t all bad. But that encounter certainly affected the way I felt about police work.

Where I grew up, in Somerville, Tennessee, we did not have a lot of contact with white people. Some whites would come into our communities to sell products or insurance, but blacks lived from day to day in a self-contained world. We didn’t go to school with whites. The integration of Memphis schools didn’t begin until 1961, and it took years for the schools to really integrate.

The interaction that we did have with whites was fights. I never personally experienced any problems with fights in Memphis. But in Somerville, I did experience some problems. That was a place where you sometimes had to get off the sidewalk in order to allow a white person to pass. We were told we had to do that. Relationships with whites were based upon certain things we had been told. They were prohibited and forbidden.

Being a child, I did not understand the full ramifications of what was happening, but I knew there was something not right about the equation. We accepted it as a way of life; this was the way it was in the South, and so consequently we did it. But we knew that something wasn’t right about it. We always wondered not only about getting off the sidewalk, but why there were certain places we couldn’t go or why we could not drink out of a certain water fountain. We always realized there was a difference in the way whites and blacks were treated, and we felt bad about it. I think my parents even felt bad. One day I saw my daddy as he wept because of something that had happened in our community in Somerville. So I’m sure it bothered him.

I joined the Memphis Police Department as a patrol officer in September of 1968, six months after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. I was twenty years old. At that time, there weren’t many black people in the Memphis Police Department. I think the number was probably somewhere around fifty. The force was male and white-dominated. When I came on the job, we didn’t have many aspirations of ever achieving any type of rank, because black commanding officers were practically nonexistent. There were very few black role models holding positions of rank in the Memphis Police Department. Blacks had certain areas of the city we could patrol and others we couldn’t, even as a police officer. The areas we were assigned to generally were occupied by the black community, and we didn’t police outside that community.

As a matter of fact, just prior to me joining the force, they had gotten away from having separate role calls. One role call was inside the building, and other officers who were black would assemble outside the building. That was something else. Even down to the kind of shirt we wore. It used to be that the white officers would wear white shirts and black officers would wear blue shirts. But that changed right around the mid-1960s here in Memphis.

If you look at the police force today, you see a lot more African Americans than when I joined. In the 1960s, the number of blacks in the force not only didn’t represent the size of the black community in Memphis; it didn’t represent the number of blacks or other minorities who might like to join the force. So to begin with, in 1973, we founded the Afro-American Police Association, which probably brought about some of the greatest changes that we’ve seen in the Memphis Police Department. Coupled with a federal consent decree that was handed down, it caused hiring practices within the Memphis Police Department to change dramatically. It simply stated that future hires had to represent that base of the population. Here in Memphis right now, we have a population of approximately 53 percent minority, and so, naturally, our hiring is commensurate with that.

As a result of the increase in the hiring of minorities, more opportunities began to open up. Never would I have dreamed in all my years that I could become chief of police in Memphis, after all we had gone through. But it tells you that there have been so many dramatic changes in the Southern region of the country. If you look at the South today, you see that things are quite different. We think that even though we had a lot of problems here in the South, we have made tremendous progress. We have mayors and we have police chiefs, we have county executives, we have chief administrative officers throughout government in Southern cities, and I think that’s a tribute to the price we had to pay for voting rights and other changes in the South.

In 1968 such opportunities were simply nonexistent for blacks. We had only achieved our voting rights three years prior, with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So to think that you could be a police chief or you could be the superintendent of the school system or mayor of this great city was virtually unheard-of. But here we are today.

When I was starting to make all these changes on the force, the white officers were openly defiant. Speaking for myself, I can say that leading an organization that was trying to bring about some change within the police department, I was not met with open arms. There were white officers who refused to ride in a squad car with me. There were black officers who would turn their backs on me, who wouldn’t speak to me because they were afraid I would bring trouble to them. So it was a very, very lonely time for me, personally, in dealing with the situation within the Memphis Police Department. My family suffered as a result of it, and there were just some very unhappy times, very lonely times for me.

And extremely dangerous times. Numerous threats were made on my life, on the lives of my family, but it was almost as if I had taken that step and I couldn’t retreat. There were times when I felt discouraged and wanted to go back. But Father James P. Lyke stood by my side. I have his picture on the bookshelf in my office. He was with me, and there were other white people who worked behind the scenes and were really sympathetic to the cause we were working for, and realized that it was a just cause. They were very helpful.

One time I had to meet with some top police officials. I got a call early one morning at home when I was in bed. It was the director of the police department saying he needed to speak with me. When I got to headquarters—and mind you, I was a patrol officer with five years on the job—I stepped in the room and they had fourteen commanding, high-ranking police officials lined up around a table, and then there was just me.

They said, well, we hear you say there’s trouble in the police department and that there’s discrimination. It was a bit intimidating for me, but I responded by saying, well, yes, sir, there is discrimination within the police department, and it’s obvious when I look at you seated around a table here. I see no one that looks like me. And I said, I look at commanding positions around the police department and there is one black officer. They had him sitting there in a corner, and they looked to him and they said, now you tell them whether you’ve ever seen discrimination in the Memphis Police Department. And the officer, he said, well, no, sir, I haven’t. But I realized that we had a problem; the officer was obviously intimidated by that, and I certainly understood. I could understand his position, but certainly I had to be true to my faith that discrimination did exist and that it had to change within the police department.

The priest, by now Archbishop Lyke, was always there with me. He would sit in a corner of the room while I would conduct an interview. When I would talk with police officials, he would be with me. He would pick me up in the morning, and he would ride with me during my daily chores or duties with the Police Association. We developed a friendship. At first the priest was a spiritual adviser to me, but then as we grew to know each other, he became a personal friend. He was my closest confidant. He never tried to change me. He was a source of strength for me. He gave me a great deal of encouragement. If I needed advice, he would advise me. I felt that having a priest at my side then somehow would make me a better person, because I’m not perfect by any means. I’ve had my transgressions; I’ve made mistakes. But I also feel that deep down inside I’ve always tried to do that which is just and that which is right.

I must have been the only policeman in America who had a priest traveling with him. As ironic as it was, the priest sought me out. I never knew him prior to entering this adviser-friend relationship, and come to find out that this very priest had been close to Dr. King. He had come into my life at that time. The fact that he was a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement only gave me more encouragement that this was somebody I certainly should pay attention to.

The fear that maybe an “accident” might befall me from some of my white colleagues was with me every day. I would go to work and sometimes I couldn’t imagine getting home at night, I was so terrified. I was always aware of what it might mean when the phone rang or what could happen while I was driving down the street. And these fears were not unrealistic. I was working in an environment where I wasn’t held in high esteem not only by the white officers but by black officers. My black officers were afraid to come near me. So I was like a man without a country. I was ostracized. I was told by officers who were around me that simply because of what I represented, I could not be trusted. I was one of the only officers in the city of Memphis who had to ride by himself, because no one would ride with me. Black or white. It was very disheartening. My response was often to be fearful, because who wouldn’t be when you had to face something like that and everyone working around you was wearing guns?

My wife and my children, naturally, were always concerned about my safety. But we’d go about our daily living, and you have to stand up for something. Sometimes you can be so gripped with fear until all the fear is scared out of you. I’ve been that way. I’ve been down that trail, where I have been fearful of things, but I just figure you’ve got to try to do the right thing. You’ve got to try to see that justice prevails, and sometimes that means putting fear behind you. I think that most courageous acts really come about as a result of paralyzing fear.

It was probably the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King that made me decide to fight back and change the system. I always admired Dr. King because he talked about what was just and right, and I felt so strongly about justice. I named my son Justice. Dr. King was always talking about doing the right thing and treating people in the way they should be treated, judging a person not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. That really made an impression on me, and I’ve always said that if I ever had an opportunity to make an impact on this earth, then I would want to do something along the lines that Dr. King had done.

I had the distinction of participating in the last march that Dr. King led in Memphis. The city sanitation workers were striking for better working conditions. There were thousands of us marching on March 28, 1968. We were proceeding from the Clayborne Ball Temple to City Hall and had turned right at Main and Beale, where the Orpheum Theater is, when the violence broke out. And I think Dr. King, being an advocate of nonviolence, was disturbed about that.

One of Dr. King’s staff members had tried to discourage him from returning to Memphis to plan another march, but Dr. King was determined. He wanted to have a peaceful march. On April 4, he was in his room at the Lorraine Motel discussing plans for another march with the Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and then he walked out onto the balcony of the motel.

At that time, I was a salesperson with a supply firm here in the city of Memphis. I left work that afternoon sometime around six o’clock. Dr. King was shot at one minute past six. I recall it was a cloudy day. It seems as though it’s always raining when bad things happen. We got the word that Dr. King had been shot and that they had rushed him to St. Joseph’s Hospital.

Everything just went up in flames throughout the downtown area. Shock gripped the community. Some whites in our community rejoiced over the fact that Dr. King had been assassinated and said that he deserved what happened, simply because he came into the community starting trouble. But the vast majority of the citizens of Memphis were appalled.

Dr. King’s death hurt us and it hurt the nation. It hurt the world to lose someone like Dr. King. When we lost Dr. King, we lost a great leader. Our hearts go out to the King family. But I can surely say that Dr. King’s death brought about many, many positive changes, not only in the city of Memphis but throughout the world. It created a sort of kinship among the people of Memphis that has improved race relations and brought people together. Much of the progress we have today came about as a direct result of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King here in Memphis.