The good old days were good for everybody

I was a child of the ’50s and life was pretty perfect back then. There were few regulations, we minded our parents, there were no school shootings or gang violence and we could do practically anything we wanted to do, provided we came home before the street lights came on. We were expected to do well in school and if we didn’t, our parents supported the school system instead of opposing it. We learned to work at an early age so we would have an appreciation for money and how hard it sometimes was to make any. We treated our parents and elders with respect and the words ‘yes sir’ and ‘no mam’ were an often used part of our vocabulary.

Now people write about this all the time. They write about the freedoms they had and how it was the perfect time to be a kid but they don’t tell the whole story. Because I, along with all the other kids I knew, were beneficiaries of white privilege. I had no idea what that meant when I was growing up but I later discovered it meant we got to enjoy life to its fullest simply because of the color of our skin. People of color, different nationalities, cultures and religions, and even white women didn’t have the same benefits that white boys had.

I was a regular churchgoer during my growing up days and was asked by my Baptist pastor one day if I would mind going down to the black community a few miles south from our town and help them put on a Bible school. I accepted with a certain degree of trepidation because I had never interacted with blacks before. Arkansas was totally segregated, as were all Southern states and the only black person I ever saw was a guy who shined shoes at our barber shop who couldn’t speak or hear (called deaf and dumb in those days). He seemed nice enough but because of his maladies, I didn’t try to interact with him.

So me and a couple of other kids from my church drove the few miles south to the black community and spent five days helping them put on bible school. It was the most eye-opening five days of my life up until then because I discovered they were just like me. They laughed, they cried, they experienced joy and heartache and they responded to things going on in the world essentially the same as I did. The only difference was they were left out of the world I inhabited. I knew that whatever I wanted in life was within my grasp if I had the ambition to work for it but they didn’t have those opportunities. And so for the first time, I was faced with racism without knowing how to deal with it. Sadly, after Bible school was over and I came back to my town, I didn’t give it much more thought except to understand that simply by the color of my skin I was afforded opportunities and luxuries that kids the same age as I who lived only six miles south of me would never be afforded. And so six miles became six million miles as far as they were concerned.

It was almost dark one night after their bible school was over when there was a knock at the front door. My grandmother looked out the window and in a panic, cried out to my grandfather that a black kid was knocking on the door. He rushed into his bedroom, pulled out his shotgun, loaded it on the way to the front door and told the kid he had best get out of town before dark or he would be shot and killed by someone. The kid was one of my Bible school students who had just stopped by to thank me for helping them put together their first Bible school. My grandfather was the greatest man I’ve ever known but he was old school down to his core and believed, as a vast majority of adults believed then, that the races should never mix.

Flash forward 50 years and we find that things haven’t changed all that much. Racism has been pushed underground because it’s no longer socially acceptable to be a racist but it hasn’t gone away. To accuse someone of being a racist often constitutes fighting words even though in their actions, behaviors and words, it’s obvious that they are. We have a level of public intolerance to everyone who doesn’t look, talk, dress or worship like we do that hasn’t been publicly displayed since the 1950s because it’s perceived by that group of people that they’ve been given the green light to act foolishly once again.

I like living and am not ready to give up the ghost yet. I enjoy sitting and talking with my friends, although we often disagree, I enjoy seeing technological advances that are occurring almost daily anymore, and I enjoy watching my boys find their place in the world and all the things that go with it.

What I’ve never liked is hatred focused towards a group of people simply because of their group membership which they had nothing to do with but it seems that has become a norm once again with some segments of our society that many people thought was gone forever.