A Kids Life in the 1940s, Part 3 - Prejudice

We headed south on Lafountain and passed a big warehouse on the corner of Monroe on our frequest walks downtown. There was never any kind of activity around it. It was a thing we were aware of but it offered nothing to grab our interests - no windows to look in. It was still sitting there the last time I went by it in 2008 - painted differently, but the same.

Three blocks further and we'd come onto the Christian Science Church sitting at the corner of Market and Mulberry. Don and I attended that church for about five years. It represented the only religious education either of us received in our youth, and we stopped attending in about 1953.

Across the street from the church, on the corner, sat an old house enclosed by a tall fence that bordered the sidewalk. Its windows and doors were shuttered. Weeds and brush, growing wild, had formed a tangled jungle in the yard. No one lived in the house and it had been vacant for as long as I could remember - for years. We passed by frequently but never without a sense of haunted wonder about who had lived there, what had happened, and why it was still empty.

Three of us were making our way to town one summer evening when we got our first taste of racial conflict - or maybe it was just kids making mischief. Don, Gerald Giles and I were passing through the Negro section when four black boys, about our age, suddenly appeared. The tallest one, wearing a yellow baseball hat, was the ring leader, and he walked in front of us while the others fell in behind. We never stopped walking, nor do I remember that we said anything. Yellow hat was facing us but walking backward. He was talking , but I have no memory of what he said, but the tone was mocking and it was not friendly.

We went on that was for more than a block, and had turned onto Monroe when things got more serious. Don was suddenly scuffling with Yellow hat, Gerald swung on one of the others as I was grabbed from behind, my arms pinned to my side. The littlest black boy, probably younger than I, stood in front of me making threatening faces, and shaking his fist at me. Don through Yellow hat over is hip and the guy landed on his back at the base of a tree. He hit his head and got up slowly, obviously stunned. It was over - that fast - just like that.

I remember Yellow hat making a gesture toward Don. I can’t say to this day, what it was and possibly its my aged imagination, but I think he was yielding to a superior force. Don was not a person to be toyed with - not even as a kid. Maybe Yellow hat was surprised by the sudden action. I certainly was! Maybe he had planned nothing more than a bit of intimidation, and had miscalculated. But he picked up his hat and walked back in the direction from which we had all come. The other three followed.

There was excited talk among the three of us. I repeatedly said that I could not do anything because I was held from behind. I did not tell them that I had not struggled to get loose, but stood placidly watching it all transpire. Now, missing the glory of victory I was feeling a bit chagrined that I had not joined the melee.

We never told Mom and Dad about the encounter. The incident hadn’t intimated us; we were never accosted again, and we did not stop going that way. But I had found it disturbing just the same.

Prejudice may be planted in youth through overt expressions of hatred and contempt, but it can also be inserted into the subconscious by more subtle means. I was about eight years old when we had the fight, and was still very much insulated from the world. I had only recently been allowed beyond Leornard Pennington's, a couple houses north of us (his barber pole marked my limit), and though we lived less than a block from the black district I knew no black people.

We had no black acquaintances, and the incident was possibly my first encounter. There was an established segregation, voluntary, that no one spoke of - blacks grouped with blacks, whites with whites. I was told the word “nigger” was a highly offensive term and so I never uttered it, but Grandma Frank used it. She was not meaning to be disrespectful - it was just her way. Grandma was of another generation, from the border state of Kentucky, and that was an accepted way to speak when she was growing up. I don‘t remember her ever saying anything hateful or mean about blacks, but she frequently referred to them as “niggers”.

And then there was the language. Words placed in such a way to insinuate that blacks were different, words positioned to hint that they were inferior, - words equating black with evil and white with good: black hearted and pure white, a black mood and white hope, black sheep and white knights, black widow and white dove, black hat villains and white hated heroes. Blacks always played subservient rolls in movies, they couldn’t eat at many restaurants, were not allowed to rent rooms in some hotels, and sat in the back of the bus. By the time I was eight I was prejudice and didn’t even know it.

But what about those black kids? I know that they were seeing a different world than I. Theirs was more hostile, more dangerous. They were not alive in 1930 when a mob lynched two black men in Marion, Indiana, but their parents would remember. That happened not twenty years before, and less than thirty miles away. And the Ku Klux Klan’s Malfalfa Park on the west side of Kokomo was dedicated a year before that - a shrine to bigotry. Those were a few things I did not know in 1948.
GO TO: Part 4