America Behind the Color Line (20 page)

How could the army achieve such spectacular results in terms of this color-blind society that he describes? Historically, the army was notoriously racist. My father was in the army during World War II; he told us horror stories when I was growing up, and now the army, of all things, is held up as a model of what a color-blind society could be. How did they do that? “I can’t speak for the previous fifty years of racial integration,” said Colonel Sando, “but the armed forces were the first institution in our country to be racially integrated. It works for no other reason than we have to make it work, and we’re going to make it work.”

To make this work, each barracks is assigned an Equal Opportunity officer to deal directly with any race complaints. The army as a whole may claim that it is color-blind, but what about the individuals who make it up? Can the army change the racial attitudes that recruits bring with them? And what about white recruits from the South?

“I grew up first through fifth grades with all white kids in the neighborhood and all white kids in my class,” Colonel Sando told me. “Depending on where these kids come from today, they may have grown up in a similar situation. There’s nothing but white kids out in the rural Midwest, and that’s who they’re going to go to school with. Maybe they haven’t lived with people from different races or different socioeconomic backgrounds or religious affiliations . . . One thing we tell the parents during family days is that we get the soldiers, we give them a haircut, we give them a uniform and then put them in a room with sixty of their closest friends and ask them to get along . . . Are there some difficulties? Absolutely. It’s hard enough to share a bathroom with a brother or two brothers. To share a bathroom with sixty kids, there’s some growing up that has to go on. So that’s part of it, and they realize that they will succeed as a group or they will not succeed as a group, and that they have to take care of each other.”

Colonel Sando’s right-hand man is Sergeant Major Kenneth Wilcox. I wanted to ask a black man if attitudes had really changed. As we walked through the parking lot, I spotted a Confederate flag on a license plate.

“But what about this, Sergeant Major?” I asked him.

“That’s a Confederate flag,” he responded. “I’m personally offended by that. It doesn’t represent me as a black American.” Was this person a member of his infantry?

“This soldier is an officer. I’ve got to figure out who the truck belongs to,” said Sergeant Major Wilcox. “The flag is flying high. So I will deal with him when I figure out whose car that is. It could be one of my cadets . . . So I’m gonna deal with him.”

Sergeant Major Wilcox has been in the army for twenty-four years. I asked him if it was race-neutral.

“I come from South Georgia, from an environment where racism was an everyday way of life. The military has allowed me to grow a lot in comparison to my brothers who are down South. So I’m grateful for the military. It’s a great place to grow, but you still have people in the military who display racist attitudes, who haven’t made the mental change . . . The new form of racism is subversive, like the young man with a Confederate flag flying high on his car . . . It’s underneath the surface; you can’t see it, but you sense it. Our task is to root it out and expose how ugly it really is.”

Colonel Sando recounted a tale: “I had a soldier when I was a company commander, fifteen years ago, a white soldier, and he had a black platoon sergeant. And the white guy was having trouble with that. He told me flat out. He says, ‘My daddy told me I didn’t have to listen to a black man.’ He was told that. I’m not going to talk about his father to him, so I said, ‘Well look, you know, that’s not acceptable here, okay? He is your platoon sergeant. He is your superior, and you’re obliged to obey him. We all share a common oath, to support and defend the Constitution and obey the orders of the officer who is appointed over us, and you have to do that, son. You’re going to have to figure out how to deal with that, all right?’”

And what did the soldier say?

“He said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and went on. Now, did I change the way he felt about his father? Probably not. Did I give him another perspective on life and explain the fact that we were not going to accept that behavior? I can’t change his attitude, what he’s going to think, but I can certainly change how that attitude is manifested in his behavior.”

Sergeant Major Wilcox explained the army’s philosophy of social transformation as a kind of shock therapy. “We’ve been challenged not only to train these guys; we’ve been challenged to take all the abnormal behavior that society has taught them and turn them around. And psychologically, we do wonders in fourteen weeks.

“We talk about men who have died on the battlefield to give us our freedom and how all that blood is red. There are no colors, there are no boundaries; all men on the battlefield are brothers. That man, no matter where he came from, I tell the guys, is your brother.”

So far, so good. But what happens if somebody’s busting your buns and you’re so pissed off that you want to call him a name, so under your breath, instead of saying “you MF,” you say “nigger,” and he hears that. What does the sergeant major do then?

“That soldier will be told to go to my office, and he is looked at very straightforwardly as being a racist. As a sergeant major I would probably deal with him personally, and he’ll definitely get punished. He’ll lose money in his paycheck at a minimum, and at a maximum he could be discharged just off that one statement.”

And do about 10 million push-ups?

“No, well, the drill sergeant will probably do a little more than I do. But it’s a serious allegation, and you can’t not deal with it . . . Whether it be between two black soldiers using the ‘n’ word in their slang, it doesn’t matter. It’s wrong. No matter who uses that word, it’s still degrading language, and I say to anybody, no matter who uses it or where, don’t use it at all.” So even two black people can’t use it? “Exactly.”

In institutions like the army, the police, the mayor’s office—where integration is enforced—there has been dramatic progress in race relations. But what about in the hearts of the people, their deepest attitudes about race? How far has Dr. King’s dream been realized in the New South?

I headed to Birmingham, Alabama, to find out. Martin Luther King called Birmingham “the most thoroughly segregated city in America,” and that was saying quite a lot, given the extent of segregation everywhere in the South at the time. It was here, in 1963, that white supremacists bombed the all-black Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four girls. It was only in May of 2002 that a man responsible for the bombing was convicted.

I couldn’t believe that I was standing so close to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. I was thirteen years old and I was sitting in the living room with my parents when we got the news on the television that it had been blown up and that children, my age, had been killed. I think the Civil Rights Movement came into my life, came into my living room, that day in a way that was scarcely imaginable otherwise. People like me, or people in school like me, were being killed as martyrs. Birmingham was a metaphor for all that was wrong within the South and with segregation. It was the symbol of the heart of darkness, the evil of white racism, of white supremacy. It was the front line for the movement itself. Dr. King knew that if he could win in Birmingham, then he could win throughout the South.

Understandably, Birmingham has worked hard to bury its past. Today it is a thriving service city of about a million people, a third of whom are black. It has a black mayor, an integrated workforce, and a growing black middle class. On the face of it, at least, Birmingham is a new city. And perhaps there are few examples of racial progress in Alabama more dramatic than interracial marriage. Chris and Lura both grew up in the South. They met two years ago in college, where they were music majors. What in the world is it like being an interracial couple in Birmingham, Alabama?

“We’ve never had a person come up to us while we were out together and make a racist comment,” said Chris. “But you tend to feel the things that people aren’t saying. You feel people checking you out. Once in a while if I’m by myself with our baby, I can see the look of concern on someone’s face, either a black person or a white person. They’ll look at Aria and look at me and notice enough resemblance to think she’s my daughter, but I can see them wondering, is her mother white?”

Did anybody give them a hard time, either in the community or in their family?

Lura responded: “Chris’s black girlfriends gave me a hard time in the beginning. They didn’t say to me, how can you steal a good black man from us? But that was the feeling. They were mad at him for leaving behind all the great black women he grew up with, as if it was a slam against them.”

“Black women friends of mine asked me, why would you date a white girl when there are so many perfectly good black girls to date?” added Chris. “I tried to explain to them that when I met Lura and developed feelings for her, I didn’t have a grocery list of things I was looking for in a woman. We met; we became friends; we developed a relationship.”

I wondered if he ever thought about the fact that he would have been lynched for sleeping with a white woman twenty years ago, thirty years ago?

“As much as I would like to think that no one would bury a cross in my yard and set it on fire in these times, every so often you hear of somebody getting dragged down the highway chained to the back of a car. Or some policeman is beating someone shitless for seemingly no reason. I’m not going to dwell on it. There are moments when I wonder, have I taken a step that my family could pay a price for? But the answer tends to be that Lura is worth the risk and my child is worth the risk.”

“I usually shrink from confrontation,” Lura interjected. “I walk away and figure, whatever you want to be mad about, you be mad about it in your corner and I’m going to be happy in my corner.”

Would they raise their child in the South?

“We haven’t decided whether we’ll have our daughter attend school in the South,” said Chris. “In most any school in the South, there’s a predominance of black or white students, and that’s still hurting race relations . . . So I would love to get Aria out of the South, to some area where there’s a little bit more diversity.”

Will the South ever be a place in their lifetime where race won’t matter? “In my lifetime?” Chris said, laughing.

“I’m sure Martin Luther King, Jr., hoped that day would come,” said Lura. “Most people hope for world peace, but if people don’t take steps to make it happen, it’s not going to come any closer. Everyone can take small steps toward that goal.”

The fact that Chris and Lura can build a family here is certainly a sign of change, even if some attitudes toward interracial marriage—among both blacks and whites—are still entrenched in the past. Astonishingly, interracial marriage only became legal in Alabama in the year 2000. But does this reluctance to accept mixed marriage extend to other areas of personal choice?

Dr. King once said that the most segregated time in America was at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, which is why I was intrigued to hear about an interracial church in the heart of Birmingham: the Church of the Reconciler, founded by the Reverend Dr. R. Lawton Higgs, Sr. Higgs spent his adolescence in Huntsville, Alabama, and moved to Birmingham in the late 1960s.

“I was convinced in those days that I was a racist,” Reverend Higgs confessed. “I was not a violent man, but I definitely concurred with the view that black people are less than human and that they needed to stay in their place. I had no relationships with any black people. None whatsoever.”

What made him change? I asked.

“I read Martin King’s ‘Letter from the Birmingham Jail,’ and it broke my heart. I cried for about three days. I discovered I was in opposition to God.”

Higgs established the Church of the Reconciler ten years ago, after previous attempts to integrate his all-white church had been met with hostility by his parishioners. He won a special commendation from President Bill Clinton for his work with race relations. But outside of Birmingham’s homeless and the poor, he has struggled to attract a large congregation. So far, the Church of the Reconciler remains one of Birmingham’s few mixed-race churches.

I asked Reverend Higgs why it is important for a religious congregation to be mixed.

“If we don’t integrate, we don’t know one another. If we don’t know one another, we’re afraid of one another. If we’re afraid of one another, we’re gonna hate one another. And if we hate one another, James Baldwin’s message in
The Fire Next Time
will cease to be prophecy; it will be realized.”

I told him that many of my friends choose to live in predominantly black neighborhoods, with other well-educated black people. So what’s wrong with that?

“Well, nothing is more wrong with that than white folks choosing to live in white neighborhoods with white folks. It’s segregation!” he exclaimed, as if any fool should be able to see that.

Did Reverend Higgs believe that his fellow white Southerners were less racist today than they were fifty years ago?

“Yes, because they won’t kill you. That’s true. That’s the major change that’s taken place. The segregation is not enforced by active violence, and that active violence is no longer acceptable, and that is a glorious gift of God. Let’s give God—and them—a big hand for coming this far!”

I had heard mostly optimistic things about race relations in Birmingham. It’s held up as a city of great racial progress. To hear Reverend Higgs talk about it at the level of the spiritual, at the level of who goes to church together, where they go to church, where they live, how welcome people would feel, how slow the rate of progress has been, was quite a surprise. It would be marvelous if the larger transformations in race relations in the South are typified by what’s happening in Birmingham, but judging from the commentary of Reverend Higgs, it doesn’t sound as though the social transformation is complete.

My next stop in my quest to discover the New South was its spiritual capital, Atlanta, Georgia, the birthplace of Martin Luther King and now home to more than a million African Americans, including my daughter Liza, a student at the historically black Spelman College. In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote metaphorically about the Negro’s place in the South: