In 1999, the local newspaper in Beaver County, Pennsylvania asked for letters from readers giving their thoughts or reflections in recognition of Black History Month. I submitted the following. It opens by referencing a letter I’d written to the same paper the previous year.
Last year, in response to a series of articles in this newspaper addressing the various issues involving race and racism in Beaver County, I wrote a letter to the Times in which I stated that I wasn’t taught racism by my parents. While that statement is true, it is, of course, not that simple. I don’t recall, for instance, my father ever speaking badly of black people. But then he never, as far as I can remember, said anything at all to me about race or the problems of racism in America. My mother, on the other hand, was born and raised in Alabama and more than anything else it is the stories she told of the injustices she witnessed, first in the south but also later in Pennsylvania, that forever shaped my own views regarding matters of race.
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I want to share two of these stories with the people of Beaver County, certainly in recognition of Black History month, but moreover because of the effect that these stories have had on me; in helping to form my own understanding of the ways in which America has so often failed to honor its promise of equality and justice, and the ways in which so many Americans have dishonored their country’s legacy, infusing it with a history of violence and oppression.
It’s important to note that the racism my mother witnessed and relayed to me was not the vague disquieting negativity that is, sadly, something seemingly intrinsic in varying degrees to all of us, black and white. My mother’s stories were of overt acts, vivid examples of the outrageous and indefensible social crashes that developed from and were legitimized by the culture of mistrust and hatred that has existed for centuries in America. They are stories told from a perspective that is not often heard on the subject of profound racial injustice: that of a white person who was there and who is not socially or psychologically constrained from bearing witness. And, of course, these are the accounts that have been traditionally left out of official records and newspapers. They are alternative views of events in a historical era that one is not likely to find in history books.
The most extraordinary of my mother’s stories occurred in Augusta, GA immediately after World War II. My father had been injured in Europe and was convalescing in Oliver General Hospital, adjacent to the same golf course which now, ironically, hosts the prestigious event that Tiger Woods’s name will always be synonymous with, The Masters Tournament.
My mother was having lunch in a coffee shop in downtown Augusta when a black window-washer fell from his scaffold to the pavement below, just outside the restaurant’s window. A crowd, which included my mother, formed around the critically injured man and an ambulance was summoned. But when the ambulance arrived, those in charge refused to transport the injured man to a hospital. The ambulance, it seems, was for whites only. A black ambulance would have to be called. My mother, having spent a number of years in the north, was outraged and pleaded for the immediate transport of the fallen window-washer. “If I take him in this ambulance,” the driver explained to her, “no white person will ever ride in it again.”
By my mother’s account the window washer would have died anyway, no matter what medical procedures were taken to save him but, incredibly, he died there on the sidewalk with no medical attention being administered whatsoever. And the story does not end there. In Augusta, small city that it was, news of my mother’s behavior traveled fast. Just hours after the tragedy she was informed by the owner of the boarding house where she was staying that she would have to find someplace else to live. “We don’t coddle our n—— around here,” she was told.
This was the south before African Americans effectively organized themselves, fought for and won the civil rights that most of white America in those days seemed quite comfortable denying them. But another story that my mother told took place in our own Beaver County, during the early 1960’s. And although not of the tragic magnitude of the window-washer’s outrageous treatment, it may be, due to the local political environment in which it takes place, a more useful example of manifest systemic racism.
In 1960, during John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, my mother was a close friend of this region’s state senator. Due in part to this association and due in part to the fact that my mother founded and held the charter to an organization called The Democratic Women of Greater Aliquippa, the senator assigned her the privilege of choosing Aliquippa’s Kennedy Girl. The Kennedy Girl concept was a campaign gimmick wherein teenagers from individual communities were chosen and presented solely for the purpose of creating a buzz of local publicity for the decidedly un-local Senator Kennedy. In the process of choosing the right teenager, my mother recalled one girl in particular whose singing and stage presence at a Democratic Party banquet had impressed both her and the state senator. And so, with the state senator ‘s full blessing, my mother chose a black girl from Aliquippa to be the town’s representative young person.
A group photo shoot featuring all of the local Kennedy Girls was scheduled for 9:00 AM one morning at the old Beaver Valley Tribune with pictures in the newspaper to follow shortly thereafter. In the days preceding the shoot, my mother began receiving phone calls from two prominent Beaver County democrats imploring her to reconsider her choice for Aliquippa’s Kennedy Girl. Each of the two elected officials had, it seems, chosen his own daughter for the distinction and both openly voiced the objection that they did not want their daughters to be photographed with the black girl. My mother argued that Kennedy needed the support of the area’s black voters, but she was told that the black vote in Beaver County was so minute as to be insignificant. Without painting an overly complimentary picture of my own mother, let me simply state that she did not alter her selection as requested by the two gentlemen.
On the morning of the shoot, my mother and the young lady took the drive to Beaver Falls for what they both assumed would be quite a moment for the local girl. But even after arriving at the newspaper twenty minutes early they were informed that they had come too late; the scheduled time of the photo shoot had been moved up from 9:00 AM to 8:00 AM and the photographs had already been taken. The other Kennedy Girls and their sponsors were gone. Of course there were tears on the part of the teenager from Aliquippa. One can only imagine what she must have thought at that point about white people or Democrats or even about my mother, who had naively set in motion the series of events that had resulted in her rejection.
The promise of fairness and equality prevailing above all else in America has existed ever since the founding of our nation. Yet today, just as in the window washer’s day, millions of black Americans can still claim access to only limited health care resources. How many die each year because they don’t receive proper medical treatment or procedures that are unavailable to them is anybody’s guess. And today, just as in the days of Kennedy Girls, most young black people in this country continue to be turned off at the local level by a political process that could and should enable and empower them to positively effect their own lives.
One can’t help but wonder what Aliquippa’s Kennedy Girl must have been thinking when the president she attempted to publicly support said, in his 1963 televised address on the issue of civil rights, that “The time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise.” President Kennedy’s words speak specifically to the covenant of equality that we as a nation so often take for granted. And they yet endure as a blunt challenge to all Americans.
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