Black Like Me (23 page)

T
here were six thousand
letters to date and only nine of them were abusive. Many favorable letters came from Deep South states, from the whites. This confirmed my contention that the average Southern white is more properly disposed than he dares allow his neighbor to see, that he is more afraid of his fellow white racist than he is of the Negro.

Justice Bok sent me a copy of his controversial speech at Radcliffe. He put it clearly:

I worked all afternoon and then went home and took a cold shower. Returning to my office in the evening, the desolation of a little town on a frightfully hot Sunday struck me. And it struck me, too, that no one there forgets, no one there forgives. I ran the lines of disapproval every time I drove through town to my office at the edge of the woods. This afternoon the town had been deserted except for the loafers who stood around the filling station and the street corners. All of them eyed me with animosity. Teenage boys in their jeans lounged against building fronts. They stared. One of the town’s citizens who had been cordial to me drove up and stopped beside me at the red light. I waved. He looked grimly away, not wanting the loungers to see him make a friendly gesture, not wanting them to carry tales. I smelled the sun-softened asphalt, smelled the summer odors of clover, swallowed the rebuff and drove on. But I found myself looking down the country lane that leads to the barn, checking to make certain no one’s car blocked the path.

The lane was clear, but the neighbors were out in their yard. The woman stared hard at her feet. The husband lifted his head from weeding and glared at me as I drove past. I fixed my gaze on the sandy ruts and looked neither to right nor left. (I had tried nodding too many times.) In my rearview mirror, I saw them after I had passed, saw them stand like statues peering after me through the fog of pink dust raised by my wheels.

I
t was late
in the afternoon of a cloudy, humid day. My parents, unable to bear the hostility, had sold their home and all their furniture and left for Mexico where they hoped to find a new life. We, too, were going, since we had decided that it was too great an injustice to our children to remain.

But I felt I must remain a while longer, until the bullies had a chance to carry out their threats against me. I could not allow them to say they had “chased” me out. They had promised to fix me on July 15th, and now they said they would do it August 15th.

Across the pastures, the incredible vulgarity of highly amplified hillbilly music drifted from the café on the highway. I sat in the barren studio where I had worked so many years, emptied now of all except the table and the typewriter and the bed, stripped of its sheets, with only the mattress ticking staring up at the ceiling. Empty bookshelves surrounded me. A few yards away, my parents’ house stood equally empty. I wandered back and forth from the barn to the house.

I
stayed on, and the lane leading to my barn office remained empty. They did not come for me.

I hired a Negro youth to come and help me clean up my parents’ house so it would be spotless for the new owners. The youth knew me and had no reticence in talking since he was sure I was “one of them” so to speak. Both Negroes and whites have gained this certainty from the experiment - because I was a Negro for six weeks, I remained partly Negro or perhaps essentially Negro.

While we swept and burned old newspapers, we talked.

“Why do whites hate us - we don’t hate them? he asked.

We had a long conversation during which he brought out the obvious fact that whites teach their children to call them “niggers.”
He said this happened to him all the time and that he would not even go into white neighborhoods because it sickened him to be called that. He said revealing things:

“Your children don’t hate us, do they?”

“God, no,” I said. “Children have to be taught that kind of filth. We’d never permit ours to learn it.”

“Dr. Cook’s like that. His little girl called me nigger and he told her if he ever heard her say that again he’d spank her till she couldn’t sit down.”

The Negro does not understand the white any more than the white understands the Negro. I was dismayed to see the extent to which this youth exaggerated - how could he do otherwise? - the feelings of the whites toward Negroes. He thought they all hated him.

The most distressing repercussion of this lack of communication has been the rise in racism among Negroes, justified to some extent, but a grave symptom nonetheless. It only widens the gap that men of good will are trying desperately to bridge with understanding and compassion. It only strengthens the white racist’s cause. The Negro who turns now, in the moment of near- realization of his liberties, and bares his fangs at a man’s whiteness, makes the same tragic error the white racist has made.

And this is happening on a wider scale. Too many of the more militant leaders are preaching Negro superiority. I pray that the Negro will not miss his chance to rise to greatness, to build from the strength gained through his past suffering and, above all, to rise beyond vengeance.

If some spark does set the keg afire, it will be a senseless tragedy of ignorant against ignorant, injustice answering injustice - a holocaust that will drag down the innocent and right-thinking masses of human beings.

Then we will all pay for not having cried for justice long ago.

What’s Happened Since
Black Like Me

T
he experiment
that led to writing
Black Like Me
was done at the very end of 1959, before the first “freedom rides” or any other manifestation of national concern about racial injustice. It was undertaken to discover if America was involved in the practice of racism against black Americans. Most white Americans denied any taint of racism and really believed that in this land we judged every man by his qualities as a human individual. In those days, any mention of racism brought to the public’s mind the Nazi suppression of Jewish people, the concentration camps, the gas chambers - and certainly, we protested, we were not like that.

If we could not accept our somewhat different practice of racist suppression of black Americans, how could we ever hope to correct it? Our experience with the Nazis had shown one thing: where racism is practiced, it damages the whole community, not just the victim group.

Were we racists or were we not? That was the important thing to discover. Black men told me that the only way a white man could hope to understand anything about this reality was to wake up some morning in a black man’s skin. I decided to try this in order to test this one thing. In order to make the test, I would alter my pigment and shave my head, but change nothing else about myself. I would keep my clothing, my speech patterns, my credentials, and I would answer every question truthfully.

Therefore, if we did, as we claimed, judge each man by his quality as a human individual, my life as a black John Howard Griffin would not be greatly changed, since I was that same human individual, altered only in appearance.

If, on the other hand, we looked at men, saw the mark of pigment, applied all the false “racial and ethnic characteristics,” then since I bore that mark, my life would be changed in ways I could not anticipate.

I learned within a very few hours that no one was judging
me by my qualities as a human individual and everyone was judging me by my pigment. As soon as white men or women saw me, they automatically assumed I possessed a whole set of false characteristics (false not only to me but to all black men). They could not see me or any other black man as a human individual because they buried us under the garbage of their stereotyped view of us. They saw us as “different” from themselves in fundamental ways: we were irresponsible; we were different in our sexual morals; we were intellectually limited; we had a God-given sense of rhythm; we were lazy and happy-go-lucky; we loved watermelon and fried chicken. How could white men ever really know black men if on every contact the white man’s stereotyped view of the black man got in the way? I never knew a black man who felt this stereotyped view fit him. Always, in every encounter even with “good whites,” we had the feeling that the white person was not talking with us but with his image of us.

“But,” white men would protest, “they really are like that. I’ve known hundreds of them and they’re all the same.” White men would claim black men were really happy; they liked it that way.

And in a sense, such white men had good evidence for these claims, because if black men did not, in those days, play the stereotyped role of the “good Negro,” if he did not do his yessing and grinning and act out the stereotyped image, then he was immediately considered a “bad Negro,” called “uppity, smart-alecky, arrogant,” and he could lose his job, be attacked, driven away.

White society had everything sewed up. If you didn’t grin and yes, you were in deep trouble. If you did, then you allowed white America to go right on believing in the stereotype.

People like Martin Luther King, they said, were just troublemakers and subversives. Whites told their black employees, and really believed it, that the NAACP and Martin Luther King were the black man’s greatest enemies. They were offended by any suggestion of injustice. They claimed that they always treated black people wonderfully well and always would so long as black people “stayed in their place.” If you asked them what that “place” was, they could not really say, but every black man knew that place was right in the middle of the stereotype.

Often they would face the black employee with this direct question: “Aren’t you happy with your situation? Don’t I treat you good?” If the black man had any hopes of remaining employed, he had to plaster that smile all over his face and agree.

Once when I was employed at some menial job I noticed that one of the white middle-aged bosses kept looking at me and getting more and more irritated. I could not imagine what I was doing wrong. Certainly I was sad, and that sadness must have shown, for finally he yelled at me: “What’s
eating
you, anyway?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Well, what’re you so
sullen
about?” he said.

“Nothing,” I repeated.

“Well, if you want to hang on to this job, you better show us some teeth.”

And I did my grinning.

In those days, the deepest despair hung over the lives of black people, a sense of utter hopelessness, for it seemed that no one in this country knew - or if they knew, couldn’t care less - about this hopeless situation.

Good whites - not the type that is overtly bigoted - urged us to “work, study, lift ourselves up by our bootstraps.” They really thought that was the remedy. They did not realize that every time black men thought they had found a loophole in the closed society, a way to accomplish this, that loophole was quickly plugged by the consent of all white society. For example, we did not see WHITE ONLY signs on the doors of libraries (where we could find learning and books), but we knew we had better not try to enter one. We saw no WHITE ONLY signs on the doors of schools or universities, but we knew it was suicidal to try to enter one. Above all, that good advice sounded hollow to us because we knew that when men, even educated men, judged you by your pigment, it didn’t matter how much you had worked, studied, or lifted yourself up. The Ph.D. had to walk just as far to get food, water or rest- room facilities as the illiterate, and he could be turned away with the same base discourtesy.

So the predominant feeling was one of hopelessness and despair.

“That white man is not going to let you have anything,” black people said.

With the beginning of the freedom rides, the sit-ins, the display of heroic courage and commitment on the part of many who engaged in these activities, and with the rallying around Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, that feeling of despair began to change into hope. Someone did know. Someone did care. Even white men showed concern. White priests like the Markoe brothers and Father John LaFarge; Lillian Smith and others had long pioneered and suffered the fury of racist resentment. Newsmen like P.D. East and other white Southerners showed that the white man who advocated that this country live up to its promises to
all
citizens was no more free than any black man. Any white man who advocated justice in those days could be ruined by his white neighbors. This message did not get across to white America. Men kept thinking they were free and that these “rabble-rousers” were really getting what they deserved. Certainly many who had a sense of justice did not dare show it for fear of reprisals. So no one was free, and yet most lived under the delusion that they were free. Heaped on top of the economic reprisals and the dangers of physical reprisal was perhaps the most damaging reprisal of all - the deliberate character assassination that sprang into play the moment a man suggested that there ought to be equality among citizens, and this in a land where we claim equality as a first principle. How easy it was to destroy a man’s good name and reputation by suggesting he was in some way subversive or by calling him a communist. This got so bad that concerned people would come to me and say: “I’d like to speak out, but if I do, my neighbors will call me a communist.” It got so bad that Lillian Smith wrote: “It’s high time we stopped giving the communists credit for every decent, brave, considerate act” white men might show in regard to black men.