Then and now
By Brandon Astor Jones
It was Lyndon B. Johnson who said, "Until justice is blind to colour, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the colour of men's [or women's] skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact".
The passage of time often reduces life to a series of paradoxical experiences. Alas, there are those who think of me as a racial antagonist, as if I take pleasure in the things that divide us. I am not. I do however, believe that societal examination past and present will help to unite us — if, indeed, unification is possible.
Recently, in the September 1993 issue of Ebony magazine, I came upon an article entitled "What I learned as a white girl in a black school". Written by a young woman given the name of Tru Love, it described her experiences at Finney High School in Detroit, Michigan.
Ms Love provides the reader with an interesting perspective on what it is like to be the only white girl at an all-black school.
Her retrospection is filled with one incident after another wherein she was well received and treated by her black classmates. While she did cite two negative recollections, for the most part her time at Finney High was a positive experience.
In 1952, I was the only black student at Lowell Longfellow, an all-white elementary school in Harvey, Illinois, a suburb just south of Chicago. I was in the fourth grade. Ms Love's experiences starkly contrast with my own. The fourth grade at Lowell Longfellow was a very dangerous place for me.
Not just now and then, but every single day I had to physically defend myself from the attacks of roving gangs of white students — sometimes several times in one day. There were times when certain students could not concentrate on studies because they were too busy plotting their next attack on me. Violence became so necessarily routine in my school experience that I learned to attack my attackers, one by one, when I could catch them alone, to pre-empt and retaliate for their gang attacks on me.
After a while I lost count of how many times I was sent to Principal Fry's office for fighting. Mr Fry would decree that I had started the fight, whether I had or not. He would then administer corporal punishment to me via a 40-inch paddle that his fraternity brothers at college gave him. How many "whacks" I got would depend on how well or poorly I had defended myself: if my attackers had no marks on them I would get five; if any of them had marks or blood on them I would get 10 or 20 "whacks".
No white classmates ever interacted with me in an overt fashion, and those who did so covertly were careful not to be seen, lest they be ostracised by the bigoted and racist pack of bullies who individually and collectively did battle with me each day.
Under no circumstances did any of those white classmates come to my aid — as did Ms Love's black classmates in the two incidents she cited at Finney High School.
Both schools referred to here are in what most North Americans consider to be liberal regions — that is to say, they are only 300 miles apart and are not in the more conservative "Southland".
Surely some must wonder why Ms Love's treatment at an all-black school was so different from my treatment, nearly 40 years earlier, at an all-white school.
Let's begin an investigative dialogue on this subject. I see in these paradoxes opportunities which we might use to better see ourselves, one another and how race and racism impact on our lives, not only in America and Australia, but all over the world. So let me hear from you. Perhaps we can enlighten each other.
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He is happy to receive letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G2-51, GD&CC, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]