America Behind the Color Line (25 page)

And if any of these guys think I’m a racist, if they think I’m a black man who hates white people—since most of these guys are white—there is a procedure they can call me on. All they’ve got to do is make a complaint. That complaint goes straight to EO, the Equal Opportunity officer, at the post, and somebody must act upon it. That person will come down and conduct interviews. He’ll do a racial profile of the battalion. And then he’ll let the commander know whether or not there’s validity to the allegations. Whenever a complaint goes up, everybody’s ears come up; everybody’s antennae go up. It’s not something that’s taken lightly.

I was up to get another higher position, a brigade position. Lately, the brigade position has been given to other higher, enlisted soldiers, and all of them have been white except for one. And my subconscious says it’s a racial issue. But on a professional level, I’m saying it can’t be, because we live in a society in the army where you can’t do that. There have got to be other issues involved, and I wouldn’t allow myself to think that it was a racial thing. I still believe that to be the case.

Every soldier has the ability to get the attention if they want. Every person in a leadership position in the army, every person in a junior leadership position and a senior leadership position, knows that when somebody makes a racial complaint, everybody has to act. If you don’t respond to the allegation, you find out later on that you should have acted. Sometimes a guy says it’s a race issue when it’s not. And when a complaint is made that shouldn’t have been, everybody gets in an uproar. But every one of those guys can make a statement and say, hey, this guy is racist and getting on me and I can prove it and everybody heard him say racial swear words at me. Everybody’s going to start acting on the allegation, and that guy who was accused is probably going to get moved. We have several senior guys on this post alone that have been moved because of racial issues. They don’t stay long. There’ll be some repercussions if you’re found to be the one that perpetrated that kind of stuff.

Take the issue of homosexuality. It’s not an issue until it is brought to you face-to-face. I cannot act prejudiced toward a person just because I think he’s homosexual or I think he’s this or that. Everything’s got to be factual, and that forces you to act professionally toward that person regardless. The army as a whole has made that transition over the years.

The army has come a long way from the days when it was a racist organization. Education has a lot to do with it. I came in right at the end of the Vietnam era. You had no reason for not being educated. Today the black person, the white person, or the Hispanic person in the army has no excuse for not being educated, because the army has laid out the carpet. When I went to school, they paid 75 percent of my tuition and I paid 25 percent. But now they’re paying 100 percent. Education has given people the ability and skills to move to a higher position in the army. In an infantry battalion, for instance, we may get three or four blacks out of about sixty people in the platoon. But when I came in, it was just the opposite: the majority of them were black. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think most of the black people are going to technical schools. They want technical skills, and they want to go where the money is and where people move up. So they’re getting away from the infantry, and I predict that in about twenty years, the infantry is going to be mostly white at the high echelons. Artillery is probably heading the same way. Artillery has a lot of whites and maybe some Hispanics but not many blacks, because all your blacks are gravitating toward learning computer skills. Remember, the stigma is that a black man can’t learn; a black man is not intelligent.

The youth coming into the military today like discipline. Most of the black kids, especially male, don’t have a father in the house. They don’t have the strict discipline of someone saying, you’ve got to do it because this is what you’ve been chosen to do and it’s what I told you to do. And this is where they can get it. They can get a good fit on society and life right here. They’re going to learn what it means to be part of a team; they’re going to learn what it means to accomplish something that’s more difficult than you can ever imagine you could accomplish. They will get to understand that the world is bigger than all the neighborhoods or towns they came out of. And they’re going to feel like I feel, the sense of, hey, I can do whatever I want to do in the world. I came from tobacco fields and cotton fields. I used to look up in the air and see the airplanes go by and say to myself, you’re going nowhere.

I know racism when I see it, and I feel racism when I go home now to South Georgia. When I go home, people can’t comprehend that I’m a command sergeant major and I’ve got fourteen hundred men at my beck and command who do what I tell them to do. They still want to treat me like I’m from South Georgia. And I want to say, guy, you’re not a sergeant major, and right now I’ve got more people in my control than you ever thought of. But I don’t go there because that becomes boastful, and that’s not me. The environment down there is still the same, and they see me the same way they saw me when I left there.

Race relations back in South Georgia need help. I can tell you, they are backwards. Everybody still lives in a box. I try to tell my siblings, you’ve got to get out of this box. You’ve got to experience the world, because the world is a bigger place than where you’re at now. And you don’t have to settle for minimum wage; you don’t have to settle for bad compensation on your job. There are other places you can go. Don’t think you’ve got to stay here. The army is a good place to be. Come and see me, and I’ll take care of you.

WILLIE W. HERENTON
Keys to the City

I was born in Memphis in 1940. I’m sixty-two years old, and I’ve been mayor of Memphis for twelve years. Obviously, in the 1940s and the 1950s, racial segregation was flourishing, especially in the South. We had jury segregation by law. In the North, there was the fact of segregation, but it was black and white. Where you lived was determined by race. In the South, we were forced to ride at the back of the bus. People drank from separate water fountains marked colored and white. We were relegated to menial jobs and low pay. Police brutality was rampant. It was open season on blacks for no justifiable reason.

This was the order of the day. I well remember in the old days black people got life insurance policies—they called them burial policies. So the insurance guy would come to collect from my grandmother. My grandmother was old enough to be this guy’s mother, and my grandmother would say, yes, sir. And I said, Grandma, why you call him “sir”? You’re old enough to be his mother. That was the order of the day. Growing up in a segregated society, it was a way of life. You just accepted it.

Of course, I experienced racism myself growing up here in Memphis. I remember vividly being forced to ride at the back of the bus. I remember one evening a white man got on a bus and forced my mother and me to get up. We were at the middle of the bus and he said, hey girl, he said, you know you’re not supposed to be sitting here. And my mother and I, we got up and we sat farther in the back of the bus. I remember the separate water fountains. I remember going in the back of restaurants. You couldn’t go in the front. You had to go in the side doors of theaters. You had to go upstairs; you couldn’t go in the front of theaters. If you wanted to try on garments for size, you could not do that if you were black. Well, then we weren’t “black,” we were “colored.”

There were certain jobs that were menial, that were allocated to people of color. Schools were segregated. I remember getting the hand-me-down textbooks from the white high schools. Three years out of date, four years out of date. Or longer. This was a whole way of life. And if you saw an attractive white female, you were afraid to look at her. In those days, they were lynching people. If you saw an attractive white woman, you wouldn’t want to be caught taking a glimpse, even accidentally, during those days. It was just crazy. It was hard.

Dr. King came to Memphis for two marches during the Civil Rights Movement. I marched with Dr. King on behalf of the sanitation workers. I was out in front of City Hall protesting against the mayor, who was then Henry Loeb. We wore a sign saying i am a man. I was twenty-eight years old and I had this sign on me. The reason we had to say we were men was because of the way we were treated. We were treated like less than men. So i am a man was a sign that you wore to demonstrate to America that we were not subhuman, but we were men. Obviously, I never thought I’d be on the inside of this building as mayor when I was in the Civil Rights Movement. I was outside protesting against a mayor because Memphis was a mean-spirited city.

Memphis was similar to many other Southern cities at the time. The sanitation workers were not afforded decent wages or working conditions. They were treated like subhumans, and I felt the need to protest against those kinds of injustices. So I marched. I couldn’t imagine then a day when any black person would be mayor of Memphis. I didn’t think in my wildest dreams when I was growing up that I would be the man at City Hall.

I will always remember where I was when the tragic murders of Dr. King and President John F. Kennedy occurred. The night that Dr. King was killed I was in a leadership training program to become principal of a school. We were having in-service the night of April 4, 1968. And we got word that Dr. King had been shot. It was unbelievable. Couldn’t believe it. A silence went over the room, over an audience of about fifty whites and maybe two blacks. I remember we terminated the meeting, out of shock; sent everybody home.

I was driving back to the inner city of Memphis. I had my radio tuned to a black radio station, and then it came on. They said, we have bad news: Dr. King was not only shot but he has died. And I was just overwhelmed with emotion. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been at Mason Temple the night before when he gave his speech “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” That church was so crowded. It rained that night. There was a storm. It was hot inside; I could see the sweat on Dr. King’s face. The place was packed. I didn’t know it would be the last time that I’d hear him speak.

There is something else I will never forget besides Dr. King’s words that night. I watched his face when he spoke. It’s hard to describe, but there was something about this man. He glowed when he gave that speech. There was something about him that looked totally different. In the Bible, it’s called transfiguration.

The death of Dr. King was a tragedy of enormous proportions to the Civil Rights Movement, to justice and equality. He was a man who probably did more for world peace, and certainly did more to ensure equality of opportunities and to deal with inhuman treatment in America, than anyone else in the country. There was no other figure like Dr. Martin Luther King. He moved the conscience of America. And all of a sudden he’s assassinated in our city, in Memphis. This is the city where I was born. This was an event that could have occurred in any American city, but it occurred in Memphis. So I felt a great loss in the death of Dr. King, but also a tremendous embarrassment and a blemish on my city, on Memphis. One that we could never live down.

So I’ve often said that if there’s any city in America that should accentuate the values and the principles that Dr. King stood for, it’s Memphis. Memphis ought to be that example of a city where you have a mosaic of God’s people who are treated with equality, with justice, and in accordance with just, noble principles of how people ought to live and work and be together.

Dr. King’s death sent a shock wave across America, really the world. All kinds of emotions were rampant throughout Memphis, in the white psyche, the black psyche. I think black people immediately commenced to have a deep hatred for whites. I think this was true all over the world. And I think the whites of goodwill were profoundly saddened and hurt. Those who were racists probably were happy. That’s sad to say. The racists were not remorseful. But people of goodwill, I think, were remorseful and felt a deep loss and embarrassment for our country and for Memphis.

If Dr. King were here today in Memphis, he would see a different city. He would see a city in which blacks are empowered politically. The per capita income for blacks in this city is equal to the per capita income of whites and blacks across America. He would see a school system that is no longer segregated by racists. He would see a city where the sanitation workers are treated with dignity and respect, where their wages have increased greatly, where working conditions have improved. He would see a city where blacks and whites have a greater mutual respect. Institutions are more accessible to blacks, whether it’s in the private sector, government, or nonprofits. So we are faring much better than we fared in the early days of segregation.

Everything has opened up to blacks. The president and CEO of Memphis Light, Gas and Water—MLGW—is African American. MLGW is one of the largest three-service municipal utilities in the country. The director of our Housing and Community Development and the president of the Memphis Area Transit Authority are both African American. Will Hudson began in MATA as a bus operator in the mid-1960s and advanced through the ranks to become president and manager. We have African Americans on the airport authority, on the boards of all major governmental institutions.

Memphis is a place that black people are coming back to. They’re coming back home. We had the Great Migration from the South to the North in the 1920s and 1930s. At that time blacks considered the North to be earthly heaven. They thought, you leave the South, you go to the North, there’s no discrimination. Now they’re coming back in large numbers. Why? We have big corporations here. Our tourism, health care and biomedical research, high tech, are all major industries. We’re known as America’s distribution center. The national headquarters for Federal Express are here. We have America’s third largest UPS facility. We’re the largest air cargo destination center in the world.

We have blacks who are in positions of great political power. We have blacks who are entrepreneurs, who are doing well with their own businesses. Memphis is destined to be the next Atlanta for African-American colleges. We have a great location, right in the middle of the United States. That’s our major strength. We’re a hub between the North and South. We have one of America’s largest inland ports, on the great, mighty Mississippi River.

When you look demographically, we’re about 55 percent African American. In a matter of five years, Shelby County will be majority African American. Today in Memphis you could come here as an interracial couple and some people might glance at you but they wouldn’t stare. The South represented the battleground for the Civil Rights Movement, and look where we are today. The first time I ran for mayor, the campaign was divided on the issue of race. I’m the first black mayor of Memphis, and I’ve been reelected twice and we plan to run a fourth time, God’s will. In the last race, we had a plurality of votes. I think we’ve proven to all of Memphis that excellence in leadership is not based on the race of the individual who holds the leadership role, but that it’s about the quality of a person’s leadership and work.

Now, I would be less than honest if I were to say that every vestige of racism in Memphis has been removed. Racism manifests differently now. I think the battleground in this new century will be set along economic lines. Black people are no longer impoverished politically and economically, but we are still disenfranchised economically. We represent labor but very little wealth. There is very little wealth creation in the African-American community. We have great purchasing power, but we have not converted our purchasing power to creating wealth within our race. So the economic gap is where I think we have a great challenge. It’s about economics and where people choose to live and the choices they have available.

There are also huge educational disparities in terms of achievement, despite integration of the schools. Black kids have got to do better in school. Somehow or other, a lot of our kids today are forgetting the power of education. We knew it years ago. My grandmother and mama would always say to me, Willy, get a good education; that is something no one can take away from you. I didn’t understand it then, but what they were really saying to me was, the segregated society and the white man will have his foot on you, boy, but if you get an education, you can make it. The power of education. Your folks told you, boy, you’re going to school. And you’ve got to be better than the white boy. You’ve got to be better.

In the flat where I grew up in Memphis, we did not have indoor bathroom facilities. I could not go to the parks to learn to play ball; we played ball in a little alley. When I became superintendent of the Memphis City Schools, they wanted to go out to my home to interview me in suburbia. I said, no, I want you to go where I was born. I keep a picture in my office of where I was born to remind me of where I came from, because if you don’t remember where you came from, you can come in here and with all of this power and responsibility and prestige, you could get disconnected from who you really are.

I worry that our people are disconnected. We’ve lost a resilient faith and the belief in God that helped us endure the harsher treatments we received. We’ve lost the work ethic we once had. We provided this country with labor; that’s what we did. Now there are a lot of other groups coming to America that are outworking black people. And young people today don’t want to work for six and seven dollars an hour. I grew up chopping cotton, picking cotton, working for three dollars a day. But there was a work ethic, and our people believed that despite harsh conditions, if we got a good education and we worked, we were going to achieve. I chopped cotton for three dollars for twelve hours, in a hot sun. Today everybody wants it instantly. They don’t know that you’ve got to burn the midnight oil. We struggled. Every achievement we made in America didn’t come easy. We struggled to achieve and they want it easy, and they don’t give it to you that way.

I get guys now, they’re crying, and I say, look, man, I don’t cry, I don’t expect people to be fair to me. I don’t care how they bring it to me, I’m going to handle this. I don’t care how hard it gets, how tough it is, I’m going to handle it. But these guys go, man, they’re not fair to me, not treating me right. What’s new about that? You succeed anyway. But they don’t have that perspective, and this deeply troubles me. It’s tough out there, and it’s more competitive today, because blacks have access to the opportunities that were denied us for so many decades. But we’re not taking advantage of those opportunities.

So in terms of the quality of life and how people relate to each other, as blacks and whites, the difference between the 1960s and now is as vast as between day and night. But we’ve lost a lot in terms of core values. We lost a lot of resiliency when we were oppressed by segregation. Far too many of our children have been removed from those values that sustained us while we were being beaten up by dogs and water hoses and we were being relegated to the back of the bus. We’re not the same people, so that’s good and bad. It’s both good and bad.

In retrospect, it seems almost peculiar that we believed the system could work for us if we worked really hard, much as white people believed. We believed in the system despite the enormous odds of racism. And now the kids have more opportunity and they’re taking less advantage of it. This disturbs me. In America today, you can make it. You can literally make it. Doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy, but you can make it. You’ve got to work hard, and you can’t expect everything to be fair, but you’ve got to achieve. I always say to these kids, look, in America you’ve got opportunity. Doesn’t mean everybody’s going to treat you equal even today, but you can make it in this country. You can make it.