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David Mitchell
A few short (true) Stories
Preface:
To those who insist that white priviledge is a "stupid idea", or that the answer to Black Americans struggling with a lower place in society is to get off their victim train and work harder, I say, Hold on!
There are many heroic examples (Mary Margaret named a list including George Washigton Carver and Tom Sewell - one of my favorite Black Conservative thinkers) but there are also tens of millions of Black lives who have tried but never caught a break, and never had that one "door" opened to them. More accurately, had doors specifically closed to them. 450 years and tens of millions of lives being enslaved, abused, and denial of their basic rights is pretty hard to deny historicly. It's like denying the Holocaust, or claiming that storks bring babies.
(note: playing the victim is not just a Black "thing". Many of us do it to a degree. I still believe many people have played the victim and are their own worst enemy)
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The stories involve three lives.
First;
Mr. Jacob Martin - Bluffton, SC
Shortly after I moved here, I met an elderly local man named Jacob Martin, who is Black, and a long-time member of the local all-Black Campbell Chapel A.M. E. Church. He is one of the old lions of the local Black community. And he can roar like a lion when he gets his back up - which he did on my first encounter with him (at my first monthly meeting of the all-black - save one curiuos new white guy from Columbus, Ohio - Bluffton Community Association). I learned that he had grown up here and then had been a cop in Detoit for almost 30 years, and then moved back here after retirement.
But Mr. Martin had another more interesting story. Somewhere around 1956 he had applied for entry into Law School at the Campus of South Carolina Universtity in Columbia, South Carolina. Mr. Martin was accepted and if I recall correctly, planned to attend as the first black man to enter South Carolina Universty Law School.
But he was blocked from entry by Senator Strom Thurmond. This preceeds the attempted blocking of James Meredith from entering Mississippi by several years, but never made news. A door was closed to Mr. Martin, but he found another one that was open. How different his life could have been?
Second:
name unknown, a relative of an aquaintence at the same Black church here in Bluffton
The woman who related this story is the mother in law of a young man who experienced another door being closed. She explained that he had come home from the first gulf War. It was the early 1990's when he returned home from the Navy to one of our rural counties in South Carolina.
He wnet to register to vote and was met with the old Jim Crow "inteligence test" which I thought was long since gone from existence. He had to correctly guess the number of beans in a large glass jar.
Yes! in the 1990's! I'd say that door was slammed in his face.
He was a physician and had been a Lt. Commander in the Navy on a hospital ship in the Gulf. The town needed another doctor but he and his wife moved clear out of the South where he found work in a large hospital.
Third;
This is a story about a man named George.
I worked with George at my last job before leaving Columbus - at a small Mortgage Compnay up above Worthington. George was about 70 when I met him, about 25 years my senior at the time. He was Black, handsome and a wonderful personality for us "younger" guys in the office. He always brought encouragement to anyone who encounterd him.
George had been a Major and a Squadron Commnader in the Air Force after the Korean War. I was fascinated that he flew the B-47 - that first long-range strategic bomber that never flew in a War. It came too late for Korea and it preceeded the revolutionary B-52 by only a few years. Many were once staitioned at Lockbourne AFB.
After the Air Force, he put his savings into a gas station near Cleveland, where he had grown up. Then he bought another one near Akron, and then another, and another. He eventually owned a small empire of Mobile stations from Cleveland to Columbus. He shared with us once about how much he was paid for the final one (on East Broad Street) to end his carreer as an owner - It had been his pride and joy so to speak - and he received a small fortune for just that one station.
One day George shared this touching story with us. He had grown up in about the late thirties or early forties, on the East sdie of Cleveland - and gone to the Catholic Acadamy (Benedictine if I recall correctly?). George was one of only a few Black Catholics I ever knew, or even knew of.
He had to ride a very early morning bus downtown to serve early Mass at the school. The buses he rode on began to be stopped by the police. They would order George to get off the bus and search him, then ask the young Black school boy what he was doing and where he was going? It frightened George and became a routine. George was getting warnings from the priest about being late for Mass so often that he would be dropped from alter boy duties and put on warning. Finally, George broke down in tears and the Priest asked him what was wrong?
Little George spilled his third-grade guts and the priest was enraged. He called the bishop of Cleveland and passed on the story. The Bishop apparently then called the Cleveland Chief of Police (whom, I think was Irish and Catholic himself). The Bishop told the Chief of Police what the problem was and threatened the Chief of Police with excommuication if it ever happend again.
The police never stopped another bus again. Someone had opened a "door" for little George.
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