My Evolving Views on Race, Part 1

My first memory of people being different from me and all of my friends and family, was going shopping with my mother and grandmother.  I would see Black people in the store and was very curious about them.  On several occasions I would leave my mother's side to get closer to them.  What I really wanted to do was touch them to see if the color would come off.

I was a very curious child asking lots of questions and I'm sure my parents and grandparents tired of my questions and just gave me random answers.  Once, on a car trip to DeSoto, I saw a man with a fishing pole near a pile of rocks, "What's he doing?"  "Catching rock fish".  Another time on a city bus, I asked, "Who makes curbs?"  "Negroes".  I can remember I was constantly on the look out for black people making curbs---until a few years ago, I had never seen anyone make curb.  I can now report I saw them being made on Henry Rd. by white men.

When I was a little older, my mother got black women to come to our house to iron.  I remember one I liked really well---Beulah, a large woman who laughed a lot, but then there was one I was not so fond of, Lizzie, who was very tiny.  We had a lot of friends in St. Louis and De Soto who worked for the shoe factories.  The sample size shoes were very small and I had them in my "dress-up" clothes, clothes for me to play with. Lizzie spotted those brand new shoes and suddenly I didn't have any of them in my dress up clothes.  I don't know if she asked Mother if she could have them, but I was indignant that she had "stolen" my shoes.  That resulted in my mother explaining that Lizzy was poor and didn't have nice things and wasn't it better that the shoes were being used and not just sitting in my play clothes?  NO, I wanted my shoes back!

Another event I recall was going with my dad to the Mill Creek Valley in St. Louis (click here for

For more maps of the area, click here.

more on this area---home to 20,000 Black people).  I don't know if this was after my discussion with mother about Lizzy and my shoes or if it just happened.  It seems to me Dad was going there to pay the rent on our South St. Louis flat.  I had never seen such poverty before or so many black people in one place. It was dark everywhere:  the buildings, the people, the streets, the yards.  I was afraid and I couldn't put my finger on what made me so afraid---just the darkness of it all.

One year, I went to Memphis with my grandparents to visit my great aunt Ruth.  While driving around, I saw the zoo and asked if we could go there. Uncle Everett said, "We can't go today, it's Negro Day at the zoo.  You have to be a Negro to go to the zoo on Fridays.  Whites can go all of the other days."

So, by the time I was 8, I had a pretty good idea of what black people were:  poor, worked for white people, were to be feared, lived in horrible places called slums, are to be segregated  and they steal. It was better to be white with green grass, shoes, having black people work for you and getting to go to the zoo 6 days a week.  Sadly, this is where many white people stop.  But I continued to evolve..  . ..