Your father-in-law's view, if you stated it accurately, is nothing like my father's. My father thought more in terms of the strife that arose from the painful process of integration. He thought Blacks were perfectly capable of handling freedom, but he thought the racial warfare we in fact experienced would have been avoided with a slower transition. I think he was wrong, but it wasn't a big issue with our family and we never argued over it.
The questions you asked your father-in-law were the right questions.
I'm not the one who had a Black "Mama" living in my house growing up. My mother worked, so we had a housekeeper. She was white and we called her Warnie because her last name was Warner. She cooked meals, sometimes gave us baths, and made sure we were safe. We loved her and considered her a member of the family. She was poor in money, but rich in spirit. My parents were not rich, and worked very hard all their lives. If it hadn't been for the Social Security deposits my parents made for Warnie's work, she would have had no Social Security check after her retirement.
Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, not 1964. (He received the Nobel Prize in 1964.) I remember getting the assassination news clearly, and I when I heard it I thought this country was breaking up. I never had any doubts of the country's future when Kennedy got shot--I knew we could survive that. I wasn't that sure we would survive Dr. King's assassination.
Roy and I were best friends in grade school. I don't remember when I first met him, but we two were the only scouts in our Troop to go to the camps. I had a shelter-half pup tent, and we both slept in it. I messed up one time when we were practicing flapjack flipping for the contest when I backed up and stepped in his frying pan. On another camp, we tamed a magpie fledgling and had it sitting on a stick in front of my pup tent. I think I still have a picture of Roy with that bird someplace.
In high school, we developed differing interests and drifted apart. I think he still lives in Missoula, and works for Waste Management, the corporation that bought out the garbage business his father started. I'd love to see him again. It has been forty years now.
We only had one school system and one Boy Scout Troop where I grew up and everybody went to it (although on retrospect I think the Flathead Reservation had their own school--could be wrong on that). I knew about segregation and thought it was ridiculous. On our single family trip to the South while I was growing up I saw two sets of restrooms at the reststops on the freeways. I'd seen neither freeways nor segregation up until that point, and it was part of my education. I nearly got in trouble by freely expressing my opinions about Orville Faubus in an Alabama restaurant where we stopped to eat. Several of the patrons got up and left, but not before shooting a glare in my direction. (Faubus was governor of Alabama at the time, and a segregationist.) I was too young and foolish to realize the conditions those people existed in. I had a condition that I now recognize as northern hubris about racial matters. |
