Race Relations

I ran into Jim E. a few days ago at the YMCA and complimented him on the Sphex Club paper he had delivered the evening before: "How Shall We Answer Dr. Johnson?" -- an erudite examination of the slave-holding practices of the Founding Fathers -- Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington -- whose behavior, the Club concluded, can variously be characterized as inexplicable, blatant hypocrisy, bonafide adherence to their perverse rationalizations and racial prejudices, or a simple manifestation of Dr. Samuel Johnson's aphorism: "Why is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?"

This theme prompted a brief interchange between the two of us, his perspective on the prevailing racial attitudes in the Tennessee community where he grew up eliciting similar comments from me and subsequently inspiring me to reflect more extensively on the subject.

Although I have no empirical evidence at hand, it would seem safe to allege that no one is born a bigot and that our prejudices are products of parental, peer, and institutional -- religious, educational, and social -- influences, with parental being the strongest, at least during the first decade of one's life. Therefore, in thinking about my own evolving racial attitudes, I tried to assess how each of these factors might have impacted me, especially the parental one.

I have an early memory of my father taking me to a black family's Christmas Day celebration. (I use the term "black" because it is the one I am most comfortable with, even though it may be anachronous. The most common appellation in the fifties was, of course, "colored.") An extended multi-generational group seemed to be in attendance, exchanging gifts and enjoying an abundance of savory dishes: children, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, and cousins, in spite of the fact that the house -- located, I believe, on Wise Street, off Fifth Street -- wasn't very big. The patriarch of the gathering was a tall, thin white-haired gentleman of quiet demeanor and regal bearing named Hylan H.

Hylan H. was a man whom my father held in high regard. Whether he was still employed by Schewel Furniture Company at the time of this visit or had retired, I do not recall. But in either case, he was -- or had been -- its warehouse manager.

In the mid-fifties, a period of vigorous economic growth, the Lynchburg Schewel store, a Main Street anchor, was undoubtedly thriving. While the dollar volume of revenue was far less than it is now, when one considers that the items comprising that figure -- sofas, chairs, beds, chests, tables, etc. -- were much less costly, it is entirely conceivable that the number of pieces received and delivered in a given period would match that of today. The warehouse manager, then and now, held an important position, one critical to building good customer relations, since a satisfactory selling experience could be spoiled by poor delivery service.

Hylan H. -- and his successor, another black man named Tom L. -- were responsible for hiring, training, and firing warehouse personnel, unloading trailers and rail cars, checking in new merchandise accurately, putting it away systematically, pulling and prepping it for delivery, and seeing that orders were delivered to customer homes in good condition and in a timely manner. Although not highly educated, these men had to be common-sense smart; they had to be able to judge and manage entry-level employees; and they had to be honest. In a day when there was no automated inventory control system, owners depended solely on the integrity of their supervisors for theft prevention.

I believe my father's and grandfather's racial attitudes were conditioned by their working association with black men like Hylan H. and Tom L. Because the success of their business depended on the talents of these men, they were less likely to see them as inferior and as objects of opprobrium, vilification, and abuse.

In addition to the employment factor, there was a second complementary mechanism by which blacks were drawn into a symbiosis with my father and grandfather: the merchant-customer relationship. In this segregated post-war era, black income levels were severely restricted, and if blacks were going to buy any furniture, appliances, or electronics, it would have to be on credit -- which was not as accessible or widespread as it is today. Schewel Furniture Company was willing to extend credit -- to blacks and whites -- when many other firms would not, and thus its customer base increasingly came to include many blacks, another reason for its owners to view that community with tolerance and sensitivity. (In a striking example of customer appreciation and astute marketing, the Schewel store was one of the few Main Street establishments to provide facilities for blacks; in a peculiar iteration, there were two female rest rooms in the basement, one for blacks, one for whites, and one male rest room, apparently used by both races.)

I experienced a similar acculturation on a personal level when I began working at Schewels in the early sixties during the summer and Christmas breaks. Since I was relegated to light warehouse and assembly duty, my cohorts were all black men, for whom I developed a curious admiration and reverence -- for the strength and stamina they exhibited in effortlessly unloading truck after truck; for their jovial camaraderie and constant verbal jousting; for the skill and efficiency with which they were able to perform any task requiring manual dexterity (at which I was sorely deficient); for their prodigious exploits with women, about which I heard daily, their confident boastful expressions the only evidence I needed to be convinced of their veracity; and for their easy acceptance of me, whether because I was the boss's son, or in spite of that fact, I could never quite fathom.

It amazes me now that I can picture these men so clearly and even remember their names: Eugene P., known as "Hot Dog," a tall, lean, gangling former Dunbar High School basketball star; Smith F., soft-spoken but tough, a coiled spring of belligerence lurking beneath his sly, smug grin; Phil Q., a gentle, grandfatherly giant of a man, his existential nature a consistent, calming presence; Henry J., a chattering, illiterate, middle-aged rogue, whose principal preoccupations were chasing and escaping women and losing and regaining his job, which he appeared to do with unrelenting frequency; and Dry Bones (I don't remember, don't think I ever really knew, his real name), all-purpose janitor and later chauffeur to Messrs. Abe and Ben Schewel, whose paper-thin fragility belied a sinewy strength, and who, it seemed, would crumble to dust in the face of a harsh wind.

Finally, there was the aforementioned Tom L., the Schewel Warehouse manager at the time I came to work there permanently in 1970. Tom L. was short, rotund, round-faced, and bald -- a flurry of activity, brash, outspoken, proud, demanding respect from blacks and whites alike, competent, dependable, and honest, Hylan H.'s protege, with an entirely different personality. He acknowledged me as the boss, or the boss's son, but never failed to put me in my place when I ventured into territory I knew nothing about -- like running his warehouse. Looking back, I believe Tom L., in spite of his genial, garrulous, exuberant manner, saw himself as somewhat of a tragic figure, who subconsciously believed he was worthy of greater achievements if he had been born in another skin, place, or time.

My other youthful exposure to blacks came in the form of my family's female servants, or maids, who were a common sight in many Southern households in those days -- and still are. I remember a series of these women passing through our homes, some even staying for extended periods on a live-in basis, and my mother's constant refrain that she could never find a "good one," whatever that meant.

The maid most clearly delineated in my consciousness is the classically christened Eula Mae L., a diminutive, vivacious, coal-black workaholic with a squeaky, high-pitched voice that never seemed to abate -- a female version of Tom L., if you will. When charged with the task, she was a stern disciplinerian, which ultimately only endeared her to my siblings and me more. Her most compelling attribute -- really the primary prerequisite for any accomplished maid -- was her cooking skill, exemplified by her tasty fried chicken, which we devoured one Sunday evening, only to discover afterwards that we had enjoyed the three chicks our father had brought home six months earlier as pets but had handed over to Eula to raise to maturity in her back yard when they outgrew their tiny cage.

My grandmother's maid, Alice, a fixture in her home for many years, conformed to the model more closely. She was so shy, laconic, and unobtrusive that she seemed to melt into the woodwork.

The question at hand, now, is whether these encounters with blacks -- as customers, as menial handlers of furniture, and as household servants -- engendered authentic liberal, open-minded thinking or whether they merely substantiated a traditional, paternalistic paradigm -- through which blacks were viewed as contented in their roles and inferior in the sense that they were qualified only for these roles.

No matter how fairly we treated her or how sincerely we attempted to define the relationship as one between an employer and employee, it is difficult for me to divorce the the black female's role as a maid from the paradigm defined above; it resembles a little too much an ante-bellum Southern plantation scenario.

The other two circumstances -- black males as menial laborers and blacks as customers -- seem less problematic, the former because of the level of responsibility entrusted to the black supervisor (but, admittedly, ignoring the condition of his subordinates); the latter because it presupposes a certain independence on the part of the customer. Such reasoning induces one to ask: if blacks were so capable, why were they not promoted to better, higher-paying positions? Which leads me to some concluding remarks in further support of my argument that these forms of black-white interaction -- the two noted in this paragraph, at least -- effectively counteracted prejudice and fostered tolerance and understanding.

Like the Founding Fathers -- who, in spite of their genius and courage, were unable to break through conventional racial barriers -- Southerners of the fifties and sixties were constrained by contemporary mores, especially segregation. Other than the contacts I have described, blacks were invisible to us, and the curtains were drawn to keep them that way. I remember blacks banished to the back of the bus and to the balcony of the movie theater, practices which, according to her, shocked my Pennsylvania-bred mother when she first came South. If my parents and grandparents weren't bigots or racists, neither were they by any stretch of the imagination activists, never openly promoting equal justice or the redressing of dimly-perceived (at that time) wrongs. In fact, my father declined to join the Civil Rights March on Washington when invited by a former Lynchburg rabbi, fearful of negative business repercussions. And it would have been too revolutionary -- and too threatening to employees and customers alike -- to place a black person on the sales floor or in the credit office -- even if such a thought ever entered his mind.

In further defense of my forbears, their language and behavior towards blacks were, to my knowledge, considerate, respectful, and non-abusive. I suppose in making that claim, I am absolving my grandfather and father -- particularly the former -- of the use of the derogatory Yiddish term for blacks: "svartzers," or, as they pronounced it, "swatzas" -- excusable, I submit, because its meaning was unknown to the general populace, including those to whom it referred. Yes, it was the "n" word in Yiddish, but it wasn't the "n" word, which I never heard either man speak, in a time when it was a fairly common epithet. Thus, I interpret their posture towards their black employees as genuinely caring and not patronizing.

I would also assert that with respect to all three generations -- myself included as the third -- a more tolerant attitude was informed by our Jewish heritage, and not by any prescribed religious beliefs but rather by a knowledge of ethnic persecution. It was surely no secret to any family member that my great-grandfather had fled Czarist oppression in late nineteenth-century Russia, where Jews were deemed second-class citizens, excluded from certain professions, and not allowed to own property, a state of affairs eerily similar to that confronting Southern blacks. While my religious school textbooks were ominously silent on the Holocaust -- this was a period when American Jewry was reluctant to broadcast its victimization and martyrdom -- they consistently emphasized the forceful separation and confinement of Jews throughout history to selected and less attractive living areas, called ghettos, another phenomenon echoed by the contemporary treatment of blacks. The parallels were subtle, never openly expressed, but they were undeniable; and it was left to the individual, student or adult, to look to his own conscience and draw the analogy.

If, looking back on my formative years in a segregated society, I regret anything, it would be an obtuseness, an obliviousness, a bland incurious acquiescence in the shameful standards of the day, a failure to move beyond the benign, isolated connections I forged with a handful of black people. When E. C. Glass High School was integrated in 1963 (or 1964) -- with the admission of two students, one male, one female, into a corpus of fifteen hundred -- reactions were predictable: some violently and vociferously opposed, a small minority supportive, a silent majority in the middle, where I place myself. At least I tried to be cordial and helpful, if not overtly friendly, as both students were in several of my classes. I am proud to report that I had a few friends who actively reached out to the boy and invited him to join their rock-and-roll band. (Or was that just another stereotype: the rhythmic black singer enhancing his white musician back-ups?)

Today, fifty years later, in spite of revolutionary changes that have created a myriad of opportunities for blacks and raised their standard of living significantly, de facto segregation persists as the order of the day. While public institutions are integrated, I suspect interracial socialization is minimal at best, just as it in the greater society. Outside the workplace, I rarely cross paths with blacks, other than at an occasional non-profit meeting or the YMCA. Many individuals harbor hostile feelings towards blacks and some profess them openly. They resent the deployment of tax dollars for social services and public assistance for blacks (and whites), refusing to acknowledge that not every person brings into the world the same intelligence, interpersonal skills, and parental and peer nourishment required for upward mobility and success.

Great minds struggle with these issues every day. The conundrum of our Founding Fathers espousing liberty and equal justice for all while failing to manumit their slaves suggests that solutions will remain elusive.