My Evolving Views on Race, Part 2

In the mid-1950s, we moved from our South St. Louis City flat  to a new North County house in a subdivision where all of the houses looked alike.  It was a great place to grow up because I had 4 sets of aunts and uncles that lived in the same subdivision.  My school was very new with a real cafeteria which served hot lunches and everything was very clean and white:  the houses, the class rooms, the people.  I no longer "rubbed shoulders" with people of color, but that didn't mean I wasn't influenced by the Black culture.

When I was in junior high school, I began to discover Black entertainers.  Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis were favorite singers of mine.  They opened the door for me to spend many hours listening to The Temptations, The Supremes and other Black singing, syncopated groups. I spent hours singing and imitating that dancing style in front o the television.   I also loved musicals with two of my favorite songs from Showboat:  "Old Man River" and "Fish Got to Swim and Birds Got to Fly". I even translated Porgy and Bess's  "Summertime" into German for fun. The depths of sadness in those songs reached out to my teenage angst.

Television and Films were also beginning to feature Black performers--- Bill Cosby in "I Spy" and Sidney Poitier in "Lillies of the Fields" a role which earned him an Academy Award.  Locally, we had several wonderful Black broadcasters:  Julius Hunter and Fred Porterfield.  But we were especially proud of Dianne White who was the first Black female weather broadcaster in the country.

Riverview High School in the 1960's was mostly white, but we did have several Black students---2 were siblings Lois and Morris.  Morris played football and was often seen laughing and socializing with the other football players.  His yearbook photo shows a confident and happy young man.  His sister Lois had a more difficult time without the athletic connections opening the social doors.  Her yearbook photo shows an anxiety I don't recall her having or maybe I am better at interpreting facial expressions, now.  I would have said, she was stand offish, but now I see what a difficult role she had as a Black female teen in an almost all white school.

We also had a Black teacher---Mrs. Neal.  Technically she didn't teach any of us and the yearbook calls her a "visiting teacher" which was usually more like a substitute.  She had a degree from Sam Houston College but worked more as a truant officer.  She worked all day in a small windowless room on the phone, calling to see why each student was absent.  I volunteered in the office as a runner who collected the attendance and she was on my regular run.  She was always friendly, cordial and took lots of notes with each phone call.  I didn't think it was odd that we had a Black woman on the staff, nor did I think it odd that she was hidden away in a windowless room.

I could now see that some Blacks could be successful through entertainment or athletics.  The most successful were often those of lighter skin, had special talents or those who were well educated.  But, the vast majority of the Black population still weren't accepted by  everyone or were hidden away in windowless rooms working at jobs below their level of education like Lois or Mrs. Neal.  Athletes like Morris had some social doors opened for them.  He was friends with those on the football team but wasn't selected as an escort for the Homecoming Court, an honor for the Senior football players.  With an all white court, a black male escort was still unthinkable.  But there was a crack in the door.