In 1963 I hitch-hiked down to Huntsville in the Deep South of the USA at the start of the Civil Rights disturbances. I had been offered a job in one of the few racially mixed workplaces by the father of a White girl, Sharon Johnston, whom I had met in the UK the previous summer. Now read on .
I stayed downtown in a hotel which was little more than a doss house for poor whites. They were ‘rednecks’ (from being out in the sun all day), ‘white trash’ and, of course, racist. Blacks were ‘niggers’, a sub-species like Blacks in South Africa. My fellow dossers took the Jim Crow laws for granted. In fact they were more than laws, they were a way of life. Negroes were segregated from whites and although this was intended to mean ‘separate but equal’, just like under apartheid in South Africa, no-one was fooled. There were ‘Whites only’ signs everywhere including on buses. Blacks could vote but there were restrictions. Education and Housing were ghettoised although this was partly by choice. Inter-race marriages were forbidden and it was a very brave mixed couple who dared date in public. These ‘Jim Crow’ laws had been passed to keep the negroes down after Civil War reconstruction and lasted two more years until 1965.
In downtown Huntsville the signs were everywhere, outside restaurants, on benches, in shop windows: ‘No Blacks here’ or ‘Whites only’ . Among the poor whites there was hate. This was stirred up by the Civil Rights movement. The downtown hero was the new Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, who had just come to office (1963) with the slogan ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation for ever’. Sharon took me to Birmingham, the state capital, just after a civil rights demonstration had turned nasty with police clubbing protestors. Tension was in the air. I never saw any actual violence or confrontation during my time in the Deep South but I think I could see it coming and the March on Washington the following month, August, was a watershed.
In the evenings when I wasn’t with Sharon I would wander round the inner suburbs of Huntsville, segregated into black and white ghettoes - cheap white clapboard houses with porches, where families sat to escape the heat inside, for there was no air conditioning; black faces almost invisible in the shadows, the murmuring of voices and the chirping of cicadas. After a week or so I moved to Mrs Barrett’s Baptist Boarding House, a similar premises but in the white inner suburb, where the cost was $2.50 a night.
I worked with Blacks in Papa Johnston’s cement mixing plant and perhaps this excuses the patronising, unintentionally racist article I wrote for a local paper when I got home. The headlines give away the state of mind implanted by segregation nearly 60 years ago:
Offchurch Man Worked as a Labourer with Negroes
IS THERE AN ANSWER TO THE COLOUR PROBLEM ?
…Irresponsibility and apathy govern the negroes’ standard of living. Many negroes are ill-disciplined, illiterate, and immoral. On my plant 60% of the employees were illiterate and the 40% who were not did not vote because of the small fee involved.
Conversation between us was cheerful if somewhat stupid. After I had been working four weeks my partner said to me in his southern drawl, ‘Say, buddy, what language do you speak up there?’ He thought England was ‘near the top of the world’. Someone else said ‘My Grandpappy he say Noah’s Ark landed near London. Have you seen it?’
This inferiority is due to a lower standard of living and not to an ethnic difference, although many Whites from Governor Wallace down think otherwise. ‘Look at the size of their heads. They can’t even grow proper hair’ a woman in Memphis said to me.
I can just about believe these conversations took place but I don’t remember them. It’s not what I wrote but how I wrote it that offends me now, but that’s because Blacks, negroes, ‘niggers’ were ‘the Other’ as sociologists say; out there, not part of, but that’s what segregation does. I see from photographs that I went to a mixed Fourth of July party given by Sharon’s father. We parked under trees near a lake and black children amused themselves by throwing dry ice into the water and getting out fishing rods. What I remember about work was the dust and heat inside the cement silos which I was supposed to clean out, wearing a mask, and being rescued frequently by the plant foreman Mr Milligan who realised I wasn’t much use. We would sit in his pokey office and discuss politics. He was an elderly Irish American who hated communism with all his heart so with me he focussed his dislike on the British National Health Service. The NHS was socialist and that meant communist. To be American, he said, was to be free and that meant being capitalist. We did not discuss race.
What I remember more vividly than any other episode that summer was going to a black Southern Baptist service in the ‘Black Belt’ one Sunday. This was arranged by an Episcopalian minister Rev Charles McKinnon whose church (Whites only) was nearby, and the Black pastor of the Baptist church. Sharon and I went together and apparently I was the first European to visit. We drove out through cotton fields. I witnessed a scene that cannot have changed much since Confederate times except that the cotton pickers were no longer slaves but sharecroppers, meaning that they were lent the land by the owner in return for him receiving as much as half the profit at harvest time. We saw Black women and children dragging large sacks into which they put the white bolls of cotton they picked off the waist high plants. The sun bore down, the pickers crouched over silently and picked mechanically, left hand, right hand and so on. There were no Whites around and no features to the land except rows of cotton.
The church was a ‘tabernacle’ with a corrugated iron roof. It was packed and sweltering. The service was already 2 hours old. The congregation swayed to the spiritualist singing and then the pastor picked up speed with his sermon on the text ‘As in Adam all die’. He described a death from the Old Testament, graphically, and the congregation became a chorus chanting ‘Praise be the Lord, we shall not want,’ ‘You’ve got it, preacher’. This was the overture to the main act. The organ swelled, the pastor called on worshippers to come forward, confess their sins and receive salvation. There was no shortage of the guilt of confession and the gratitude felt from the preacher’s blessing. The congregation sang softly, tears mingled with sweat, group theatre. As I went outside I thought that the role of the church in slavery times and now was to provide solidarity and the hope of a better life. I was wrung out by it all, I remember.
Behaviour at the Huntsville Country Club was the complete reverse. It was refined and restrained, polite and gentle: whites only of course and some sort of Confederate lineage helped. Sharon was not exactly a ‘southern belle’ because that meant going to one of the old Confederate Ladies Colleges like Sweet Briar or Agnes Scott. But South Western Memphis was OK and there was talk in the family that they were distantly descended from the last Confederate general to surrender, General Joseph Johnston.
The Club was in the old Oaklawn Plantation house and its classic Doric column facade gave it a ‘pre-bellum’ feel. It did not fly a Confederate flag but it could have done. Plenty of private houses had flags on display and Confederate car stickers were common. As we stood around drinking mint julep in the crisp air conditioning, Sharon and I (wearing a tux borrowed from her father) were the centre of attention. I described the course I was attending at Cambridge on ‘The Mind of the Pre-Bellum South’. My hosts said that the Civil Rights disturbances reminded them of the Civil War a hundred years before but, they insisted politely, the Civil War had been over States rights and not slavery. Those I met did not want to discuss the civil unrest but I got the impression that segregation was so imbued in their lifestyle that they took the sense of superiority/inferiority for granted.
Then it was time to leave.