On Dr. Martin Luther
King Memorial weekend this year I led an Adult Class at my church on the topic
of racism. It once again caused me to confront the racism with which I grew up.
I think it was unconscious and reflected the attitudes of all my acquaintances
around me. In some ways it was not vicious or overtly destructive but it
was there and it was wrong.
Of course, I never went
to school with a black person, never worshipped with one, never played with or
against one or knew a black person by name until I was in high school.
An early memory is that
we knew of one black family that lived about 5 miles away close to the small
town of Weir. The word was out that if anyone from that family came to the
local Walburg Mercantile Store they had to be carefully watched, as they were
sure to shop lift if they weren’t monitored every minute. The mother of that
family must have had a reason for her own actions toward us. I recall that as
we sat in the back of a truck and drove by their home the mother had her children
pull their pants down, turn their backs to us and expose their rear ends
directly at us.
I also interacted a bit
with a few black people when we visited at my Grandpa Kieschnick’s farm. He had
several black families living on his property. Some of them had been slaves or
the children of slaves. I remember Grandpa as demonstrating benign benevolence.
They paid no rent. Grandpa helped them out with their medical costs and paid
them cash for work done on the farm. I know that when it was dinnertime Grandma
K always fed them a meal she herself prepared. It was good solid food; however
it was not as choice as what we had at our table and the black people had to
eat it at a table out on the porch, not with us.
All of this was in the
context of very prevalent state and federal laws intended to preserve the
superiority and purity of the white race. In 1930, for example, Alabama still
had a law prohibiting white and black people to even play checkers or dominoes
together. Another state law forbade blacks and whites to ride in the same boat
or go fishing together. All railroads had to provide separate cars for black
and for white people. All public restrooms were designated either “White” or
“Colored”. White baseball or other sports teams were not allowed to compete
against black teams and no team could have blacks and whites on the same team.
I had never known of a
black person who went to college or held a professional position like an
attorney or medical doctor.
I had my eyes
dramatically opened with an incident when I was a high school sophomore-in
1943. I was at worship at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Austin. A black
serviceman who was a U.S. Air Force 1st Lieutenant entered the church with his black wife.
They took their seat in the middle of the church. Very quickly two ushers came
to them and asked them to leave. When I saw this my inner voice screamed, “This
is not right!”
Also during this time I
worked at Wukash Brothers Café on the main drag next to the University of
Texas. If any black person came to order a meal or even an ice cream cone they
were asked to receive it “in the back-next to the alley”. This again offended
me, especially since I was working with a black gentle man dishwasher who was
always kind, faithful, hard working and nice to me, a silly teen-ager.
I am grateful that
slowly I saw the errors of my ways and hopefully no longer practice racism. But
I must confess that, as much s I hate it, there are still occasions where some
of those old prejudices and misconceptions creep into some level of my
consciousness. I ask God and my black brothers and sisters to forgive me. And I
earnestly seek to now always be open to all people regardless of creed. color,
or nationality and firmly and gratefully acknowledge that we are all equally
created in the image of God.
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