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First: a disclaimer. The following is a snippet of what it was like for me growing up in the American South. Dallas, Texas, specifically. If you are offended by the word “nigger” used in the context of the real world 40+ years ago, please do not read this. It is certainly not my intention of offend, only to offer a story. I hope those of you who continue will find something interesting.
It’s been more than twenty-five years since I drove through the neighborhood where I spent my first 13 years. Roughly, 1985. Much had changed, I’m afraid, and I sadly felt it wise to remain in my car. At the moment when it suddenly struck me to take that trip back to the grounds where the opening volleys of my life still echoed, I had not been back there since the family moved in 1972. Hell, not just my family. Everybody! They called it White Flight…at least those who were willing to talk about it in the sunlight did, which was almost no one. It wasn’t an elephant in the room; it was an entire herd. But there was whispering, and there was panic in the whispers. “The niggers are coming! Better get out while you can still get something for your house.” And the whisperers became self-fulfilling prophets as they sold their homes to the very people they so feared. And their ex-neighbors cursed them for their leaving. Then, they too, left. And the community shattered.
A little history. The neighborhood I grew up in was about a 2-square mile area in South Dallas called Polk Terrace. Bound by Wheatland Road (south), Hampton Road (west), Red Bird Lane (north), and I-35 (east), this area was hundreds of 900-1200 ft tract homes that sprang up in the early 60s…hardworking, poor and white. Not poverty, exactly, but definitely poor. There is an odd phenomenon about being poor. If everyone you know is poor, then you just don’t know the difference. The “better off” people lived over off of Red Bird Lane, but I didn’t know any of them. Polk Terrace people were clearly not too poor or overworked for sex because there were kids EVERYWHERE. Baby Boomers. It was like Lord of the Flies; always someone to play with, and someone to fight with. Hierarchies, friends and foes.
During this time, just about every American city had a place where its black population lived, and the Dallas blacks lived just south and east of downtown near an area known as Fair Park. Niggertown. Of course, if you wanted to be politically correct, these people were Negroes, but white people didn’t think too much about being PC, because blacks and whites just mostly stayed out of each others' ways. Ha! “Politically correct” wasn’t even a term. Hell, this was only 10 (ish) years after Rosa Parks did her thing, and not much had really changed. They stayed “over there” and we stayed “over here”. Then, the rest of the 60s happened, and it happened fast.
The Baby Boomers started growing up. The Bay of Pigs fiasco. The Missiles of October standoff. The Cold War was in full swing. The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. Kennedy was assassinated. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm (X) Little were killed. The hippie movement emerged. Race riots. Anti-war riots. Guys were drafted straight out of High School and sent to Vietnam. College kids were killed by troops at Kent State. Draft dodgers fled to Canada. The Black Power movement emerged. Women’s Lib emerged. Anybody with a complaint took it to the streets, and the “rage against ANYTHING” hippie ideology would embrace the new cause. Rebellion was hip. Drugs and rock were groovy. “Turn on. Tune in. Drop out!” Bras were burning. Draft cards were burning. Flags were burning. Life as we knew it was getting the living shit kicked out of it. People were expressing their ideas, even if they were *gasp* unpopular. And many of them were dying for it.
I know you read this and think, “all hell was breaking loose”, and I suppose it was. But in Polk Terrace, we were mostly just living our lives. I went to grade school, ran in Ricketts Creek, and was as happy as anyone could be. It didn’t frighten me when we ran “Atom bomb drills” at school, where they ran us into the hallways, then taught us the art of cowering, covering our ears and our eyes to protect them from those Commie Russian missile blasts that could fall at any moment. They called it “Duck and Cover”. There were little unobtrusive, yellow and black signs all over on public buildings, designating fallout shelters…areas of relative safety in the event of an attack. I didn’t find it odd that 18-year olds were being shipped off to die on the evening news, that political and social leaders were killed, or that kids would march in the streets and fight with police. Adults seemed concerned with it, but I grew up with these things. It had always been that way.
Over in Fair Park, the Dallas black community began expressing themselves. They saw blacks marching in protest for rights, some peacefully, others violently. They saw the window beginning to open for them to get free…to get out of Niggertown, both literally and figuratively. Slowly, they moved south along I-45 into southern Dallas. At the same time that my subdivision was growing in Polk Terrace, another one just like it was sprouting up a few miles east called Singing Hills. This was a better place than Fair Park, and the black families embraced it.
So, there sat two communities, both poor, both reasonably happy, both living in tiny, tract homes, separated by I-35. Yes… very separated. Then somebody (not anyone in Polk Terrace, or Singing Hills, or really any of the people who’s lives were about to be shocked) decided that this separation was a bad thing. How these same people “fixed” it is a case study in Big Brother interference failing monumentally.
The Feds determined to change how blacks and whites viewed one another. First, they correctly figured that altering ingrained racial bias in adults would be completely futile. They would start with the children. A study was done (studies were very popular at this time with the aim at illuminating the myriad social injustices being perpetrated against women and minorities) to determine if the Dallas school system was segregated. This study was done all over the country. Now, it didn’t take Einstein to figure out that most schools were black or white, but as soon as the study confirmed it, somebody filed a lawsuit or ten, then the federal courts got involved. Remember this: Any time the US federal courts assign themselves to oversee ANYTHING, it is going to be fucked up. Desegregation, they called it. Judge Barefoot Sanders was placed in charge. The plan? Send buses into black neighborhoods to pick up kids for transport to white schools in other neighborhoods. To be fair, some white kids were transported to black neighborhoods, as well, but black kids bore the brunt of this program, despite what the official line was. NOBODY liked it. Therefore, like most government plans, it was brilliant.
I remember vividly my first day at D. A. Hulcy Junior High School. Hulcy was for grades 7, 8 and 9. This was my seventh grade year. The school was newly built. It was the first I had attended that had air conditioning. It was bright and clean. The gymnasiums and lockers lining the hallways were painted in fluorescent pinks, greens, yellows and blues. There were no windows. I played in the percussion section of the school band. This was my first period class. Arriving school buses unloaded on the large, asphalt parking lot behind the band hall. When the buses arrived that first morning, most of the band (all white) stood outside on the lot watching. Eight buses rolled up filled with outsiders. Eight buses filled with people who did not want to be there. Eight buses filled with niggers.
Understand, this is all we heard around the neighborhood. “Why are they forcing our kids to go to school with niggers?” Pretty much, all we knew about black people was the riots we saw on the news, certainly not the reasons behind it. The biggest thing I knew about those people living their lives over in Singing Hills was that they didn’t want me over there. All of our lives, we lived with the certain knowledge that separation was best, because our parents and grandparents had spent lifetimes in a society that demanded it. Now this. And we felt resentment.
The black kids? What they heard was, “Same old shit! You can’t trust whitie...EVER! Why aren’t they busing those honkies over here?” And the black kids got up earlier every day than we did, and rode the bus farther than we did passed the schools in their neighborhoods to get to a place where they were unwanted. And they felt resentment.
Standing on that school parking lot that first day facing each other, we were all only kids, but we all knew that it wasn’t going to work. Both sides came with too much baggage. There was no question of whether there would be trouble, just the when, where, and who. And, boy, did trouble come.
Boredalt - 80 Dwarf Priest - Dissension
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