Chapter 2: Early Years

Chapter 2

Early Years

       As I grew up, I found friends to play with in Forest Park. The town was small enough where everyone knew everyone else. Most of the families had deep roots in that town, and everyone knew your parents, so, if you got in trouble, it would get back to your folks quickly and you’d pay the price of your foolishness.

This was my first experience with prejudice. None of my friends knew about my odd mixture of family. I went to the local Protestant church and with a very simple name like Brown, it was assumed that I was like the rest of my friends; White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Many of my friends were Catholic and although I found their rituals somewhat confusing we all played together in Little League and enjoyed spending the summer in the local pool. They had things in their house like “Holy Water”, and they had to go to confession which seemed weird to me. Also it was a sin to not go to church on Sunday. They had their own schools and the nuns looked scary. The priests spoke Latin, and I wasn’t allowed to go inside their church if I wasn’t a Catholic. They also had a bunch of saints and I didn’t understand any of that. I reasoned that I could never be a Catholic. It was way too complicated. If you were a Catholic, you really took the rituals seriously.  My dad slept through church services.  There was no way we could ever be Catholic. 

Some of my friends began using slurs to describe people. They would utter anti-Semitic epithets in my presence thinking that as one of them, I would be in on the joke and find humor in their ugliness. I didn’t. They were hideous descriptions of my own family, and I found myself in many a fight back then. I was a pretty tough little kid back then, and I always won those fights. If you insulted my family, you paid with a bloody nose.  I was keenly aware of the Holocaust that had taken place in Germany just 10 years earlier. What was this animosity toward the Jews all about? They couldn’t understand why I would take offense at their lame attempt at racist humor. After all… I was as white and Christian as they were. There was something alien about this. My understanding of Christianity was completely different than what I was hearing from those claiming to be Christians. However, it wasn’t limited to the Jews.  In fact, it got uglier. 

My only experience with black people at this time came from watching Amos and Andy and listening to my parent’s records of Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, and others that I might have seen on TV.  There were no African-Americans in Forest Park Illinois back then. So, I was entertained by them, and offered the stereotyped caricatures of servants, and cab drivers, and a few super athletes. There were black people in neighboring Maywood and the local high school was integrated.  But prior to high school, my own experience with African-Americans was very limited. I rarely saw any in person. But the words describing them were painful to hear and burned my ears. I was always a champion for the underdog. I even became a Cubs fan and my favorite player was Ernie Banks. The “N” word was forbidden in my home. In fact, it was forbidden outside my home. If either of my parents heard that I’d used that word, life as I knew it would come to an end. It was understood to be vile and never to be used in any context. I would be facing the wrath of God Himself if that word came out of my mouth. And I believed it. I had been taught the Golden Rule when I was old enough to actually converse with my mother, and nothing in my religion or any religion could distill the truth as much as that simple concept. If I understood that, and lived by that axiom, everything else would always be clear to me. 

However, my friends used the “N” word freely. I was called “N-lover” when I would admonish anyone using that word. When they used that word, they were insulting and literally spitting on the lives of the great Ernie Banks, and Jackie Robinson and they were Hero’s to me. I was already sensitive to anti-Semitism, and saw this as coming from the very same attitude that was held by people that I found ugly. Their ugliness was revealed in their words, and their words told me what they thought of people who were different from them. I didn’t like them, and I didn’t like them thinking that I was anything like them.  I may have been white, and I may have been a Christian, but I was nothing like them.  Nor would I have wanted to be. Even at my young age, I found racism a sign of ignorance and stupidity and that was something I found scary. Hate was a dangerous thing when it was left unchallenged. Ignorant and stupid people do ignorant and stupid things, and people get hurt along the way.  I was beginning to hear about lynchings in the south. Three took place in 1955. I knew what those were, but to me, they were something from the old west. It was old history and not part of my era.  

The ideology behind lynching, directly connected with denial of political and social equality, was stated forthrightly by Benjamin Tillman, a South Carolina governor and senator, speaking on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1900: 

“We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.” 

 

Often victims were lynched by a small group of white vigilantes late at night. Sometimes, however, lynchings became mass spectacles with a circus-like atmosphere because they were intended to emphasize majority power.

 

 Children often attended these public lynchings.

A large lynching might be announced beforehand in the newspaper. There were cases in which a lynching was timed so that a newspaper reporter could make his deadline. Photographers sold photos for postcards to make extra money. The event was publicized so that the intended audience of African Americans and whites who might challenge the society, were  warned to stay in their places. I learned that a person like myself might not be safe in certain places of this country. When the majority of people were hateful, you’d better be hateful too, or you’d become a target of that hate. In August of 1955, that became all too real. http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html