Don

They were well off before the Civil War because they owned a company called The Richmond Cedar Works, but the Civil War ruined it along with everything else. George fought for the South, but I don’t even know his rank, because no one talked about his military experiences. Today, that seems odd because when I was growing up, most people with Confederate ancestors wanted to talk about them. After the war, George worked as a charcoal burner, maybe for the Tredegar Ironworks near Richmond. Mary Anne and George had a daughter named Deliah Anne. I’m not sure if they had any other children.

Chapter 7 · p. 251

In 1939 or 1940, when I was about eight, I heard the adults in our house talking a few times about Nan’s Klan group harassing a Black guy who’d made an advance toward a White girl. Back then, an advance could have meant trying to strike up a conversation or even saying hello. I don’t know what kind of harassment the Klan used, but the four adults seemed to know and approve. I don’t know whether Nan took part personally in it. A few months later, I heard I don’t know what the Klan would have done if he hadn’t moved, nor did I ever think about it while living in Norfolk. I just wasn’t interested in the Black and White situation unless it was something very close to home. When Andy asked me if I thought Nan would have supported using violence to make the Black man move, I said I didn’t know enough to say one way or another.

Chapter 7 · p. 258

I was like the other Whites I knew in that we had few reasons to talk about Blacks among ourselves, and fewer reasons to talk to them. When we did either, we differed about the word we used for “Black,” and whether we meant the N-word as an insult. I think we all thought that the N-word had been the Blacks’ preferred word for themselves since the 1700s, when newly arrived slaves couldn’t pronounce “Negro.” Nan used the N-word exclusively and almost always as an insult. Before the mid-1950s, I didn’t have feelings, one way or the other, about Blacks as a group, meaning I didn’t like or dislike them. Therefore, while I was growing up, I used “Colored people,” which no White person meant as an insult, about as often as I used the N-word. When I used the N-word, whether I meant it as an insult depended on the context. I think the way I used the N-word was much more common among Whites than the way Nan did.

Chapter 7 · p. 260

Before I joined the Air Force, the only Blacks I spent enough time with to recognize were the huckster man, his son, and a Black woman who worked for us while Nan was sick in 1947. I saw others sitting in the rear of trolleys, where Blacks and Whites sat separately but moved toward the front or rear as their numbers changed. Blacks had to stand up, if necessary, to accommodate more Whites. I never saw a White stand to let a Black sit.

Chapter 7 · p. 261

President Truman signed an executive order to desegregate the military in 1948. When I joined the Air Force in late 1948, basic training was still segregated, at least at Lackland AFB in San Antonio. In January 1949, I was transferred to Biggs AFB in El Paso for more training. I had my first experience of integration on my first day at Biggs, when I realized there were three Blacks in my barracks. I was startled to see them, but not too much, because I had known it was coming, and because I still hadn’t developed strong feelings about Blacks, one way or the other. It helped that many of the Blacks in my barracks spoke better English than those I’d heard in Norfolk and Oakwood.

Chapter 7 · p. 264

There was a small group of Blacks discussing mainly what the White people could do to improve race relations. To me, the program didn’t appear to be going anywhere. The way I recalled it was almost like two factions. The White people were saying, “What can we (people of both races) do to improve race relations?” And the Blacks were saying, “Yeah, what can you do to improve race relations?” It just seemed to be a good chance for people like Al Sharpton to hop up on his soapbox and start ranting about inequalities, suppression, and denial. Recently, I watched part of another dialogue featuring a panel of Blacks discussing their memories of school integration. These Blacks were calmer than those in the first dialogue, but I don’t think the dialogues have amounted to much.

Chapter 7 · p. 267

I tried again. “My parents didn’t hate Blacks. My brothers didn’t hate Blacks. I had no reason to think that my friends or their parents hated Blacks. We had little sense of physical danger around them. They didn’t threaten our fathers’ jobs. There was nothing to hate. Some Whites seemed to hate Blacks, such as the teenage White kids who bullied my friends and me, but I never understood why. I think most Whites I knew were oblivious to what segregation was doing to Blacks, at least before the unrest of the 1960s. We were guilty of blindness and indifference but not of hatred.”

Chapter 7 · Updates and Addition · p. 282

Recall that I began with two assumptions about the racial attitudes of ordinary Southern White people during the last few decades of the Jim Crow Era. First, I assumed that many, like me, remembered seeing separate facilities for Black people and White people, respectively, and observing that the quality of most facilities was unequal in favor of White facilities. Second, I assumed that most of those Southern White people failed to appreciate the level of injustice associated with separate facilities. I am now convinced that both of my assumptions are correct.

Chapter 7 · Updates and Addition · p. 285