Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  Dad was related to Shirley Graham, who married W.E.B. Du Bois. Dad’s grandmother, Lydia Graham, was a refined and nurturing woman. His grandfather, James Graham, was very emotionally withdrawn, and he seemed defeated by forces my father did not understand as a boy. Dad and his grandfather did not talk very much. Dad remembers feeling lonely as a child, and climbing a tree in his grandfather’s yard to escape to the world of intellect and imagination. Sometimes I think Dad never fully emerged from that remote place from which he learned to view the world.

  My father’s grandparents lived in an integrated working-class neighborhood in Terre Haute. His grandmother was a housewife, and his grandfather worked in a foundry, pouring molten iron, which was grueling work. It’s no wonder he had little to say when he got home after spending the day in that excessive heat. Still, Dad’s grandparents were perceived as a higher class than the poor whites who lived around them. The family attended Spruce Street AME Church—located in a Terre Haute neighborhood of middle-class and professional Negroes. The church was in a popular neighborhood, but his grandparents preferred to live in the integrated area. So my father, unlike a lot of other Negroes of his day, grew up knowing white children.

  My father’s racial awakening came in a series of blunt little blows, the sort of incidents that were commonplace but still painfully unique to any child forced to endure the experience. When he was about six, before he had started school, a white girl he often played with asked why there was a difference in their skin color. The palms of their hands looked very much alike, she noticed, but the other sides were strikingly different. He had no explanation, so she said she’d find out at home.

  “The next day,” my father told me, “I heard That Word from her.”

  The word, of course, was “nigger.” She’d apparently heard the word in response to her inquiry to her family. My father had never heard that word before, he says, “But the way she said it, I could tell it must be a bad word. And we weren’t friends anymore.”

  When it was time for him to start going to school, he noticed that the white children who lived near him were sent to a school much closer to where they lived, but he had to walk nearly two miles to attend Lincoln Elementary, an all-black school. That was curious to him, but it didn’t really bother him on a significant level until the day his teacher, Miss Harris, rounded up all his classmates and told them they were going to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at a movie theater across the street from a park where she often took them to play. His class cheered. It was supposed to be a good day for them.

  It was 1942, my father says. Even in the days before television, he and his classmates had heard about Disney’s Snow White on the radio. World War II was underway, and my father’s grandparents, like many families, kept their radio on constantly to hear updates on the war effort. Between news bulletins and programs like The Shadow, my father had heard the cheerful, alluring advertisements for Snow White. There were probably few children in the country who weren’t eager to see that film. Miss Harris lined up a combined class of kindergarteners, first-graders, and second-graders and walked them in single file to the nearby movie theater, where she went to the ticket window to purchase tickets.

  The man behind the ticket window said something to Miss Harris, and my father saw her face change. Something was very wrong. Visibly surprised and upset, the teacher turned to the children, looking like she hardly knew what to say. “I’m so sorry, but we can’t go see the movie, children,” she told them. “Colored people aren’t allowed in this theater.”

  Shock waves traveled through the assembled youngsters, and many of them, including my father, began to cry. It was one thing for a friend to call him a bad name, but how could anyone keep them from a movie that had been made especially for them? “I felt very upset and resentful, because at the time we thought that movie was supposed to be so important for children, for us. And we were denied the opportunity to see that movie,” my father says.

  Not satisfied by his teacher’s explanation, when he got home, he asked his grandparents to explain this terrible occurrence. Their response, in retrospect, was very understated, trying to minimize the incident. Like many Negro families, they wanted to shelter their grandson from the realities of racism. And his mother did not have the kind of relationship with him where she would talk about such things.

  So Dad filed it away, gradually forming opinions both about himself and how he could expect to be treated by the world around him. He could sense this big Thing all around him, and no one seemed to want to discuss it openly or name it for the ugly injustice it was. Dad was too young to realize it, but Negroes in Indianapolis and other parts of Indiana had made accommodations and developed their own survival mechanisms. A fairly high number of them were prospering, and few people wanted to rock the boat. The region enjoyed a high number of doctors, nurses, and lawyers, and Indianapolis had been home to the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, one of the nation’s top Negro businesses. Even Negroes who worked as domestics for whites often considered themselves superior to people like my father’s grandfather, who toiled at the foundry. Negroes in Indianapolis supported arts programs and attended socials and speeches by visiting dignitaries like W.E.B. Du Bois, but they had made their painful peace with the status quo. Not only was the Negro middle class very conservative, but Dad felt his share of snubbing from other Negroes because his skin was dark brown and not light like his mother’s and grandmother’s.

  Still, from time to time, Dad heard subtle messages that steered his consciousness. At the “colored only” Lincoln Elementary School, the colored principal, Mr. Lewis, was Dad’s algebra teacher in sixth grade. Mr. Lewis, who was also the music teacher, took a special interest in Dad, encouraging him to play the trombone. He arranged for Dad to represent the school in a radio discussion where he had to make the case as to why it is important to hire the handicapped, giving Dad his first opportunity to do research at the library. Mr. Lewis also had a unique way of teaching math, designed to give his students problem-solving tools that went far beyond algebra.

  “The way he taught algebra, he also taught black history,” Dad says. “For example, he was saying, ‘If the city of Indianapolis is twenty-five percent black, one-fourth black, what would that mean if people would unify their votes?’ He was a very black-conscious principal.”

  He was also controversial, Dad recalls. “Mr. Lewis was retired, and they brought in another black lady to be principal of that school. And I always remember being conscious of the fact that it was like a sense of getting even, of retaliation, because this lady was not like Mr. Lewis. She did not talk about current events during that short time I was still at Lincoln School.”

  Mr. Lewis’s seeds had found fertile ground in my father. He won a spot as the only Negro student in Terre Haute’s citywide band. When he went to a mostly white junior high school, Woodrow Wilson, he noticed that the white counselor was trying to steer him toward general courses, designed for students bound for a technical high school, and he spoke up.

  “I had enough sense at the age of thirteen to realize that this was not what my grandparents would want,” Dad says. “So I enrolled in the college preparation academic program in junior high school. I remember that all my colleagues from Lincoln sat in the back of the room. I realized then I couldn’t sit in the back with my Lincoln School friends, so I sat in the front of the class and was very assertive about classroom questions and being involved, to the point where one day Miss Shortridge, a white teacher, asked me to come out into the hallway. She wanted to talk to me. And she said, ‘I’m very proud of you. One day you’re going to be a leader of your people.’ I didn’t know what she meant by that, but I remember how excited that made me feel.”

  Having grown up near whites, like my sisters and I did, Dad was not intimidated by white children the way his other classmates from Lincoln were, but he wasn’t protected from other universal experiences encountered by Negroes. He was assigned Huckleberry Finn for an English
class, and he thought the book was well-written, but there was something about the book’s tone that bothered him and made him feel like an outsider, the way Amos and Andy did on the radio. And once, he did a favor for a white girl he had a crush on by writing a paper for her in class. The paper she passed off as hers, which Dad had written hurriedly, got an “A”—but his own paper, which he thought he’d written much better, was marked “C.” The unfairness of that smarted.

  In high school, he had another turning point: He was again at a mostly white high school, Wiley. On the first day of school, he and a white friend, Glenn, left the school grounds in downtown Terre Haute to have lunch, heading to a popular local café near the railroad tracks. Glenn, a stickball pal Dad got along with very well, was probably his best friend—one black, one white, but race was of concern to neither of them.

  “We both ordered navy beans and something else, and they put his plate on the counter, but they had put my beans in a sack they wanted me to take out,” Dad says. He looked at the sack, shocked, and then looked back at his friend to see his reaction. “I remember him sitting there eating those beans like nothing was going on, like he forgot who I was. So I began to realize that your so-called white friends, whenever it comes to a point of choice, might just let you down.… And I can still see his gray eyes today. It’s like I want to cry even today. I’m sixty years old, and I almost want to cry today because he just kept eating those beans. But what was even more humiliating was that I accepted the sack and took it back to school to eat secretly. I was so embarrassed about complying, conforming. I think from that day on, I took peanut butter and jelly.”

  Despite his small awakenings, Dad was still shocked to hear the attitude of a Negro friend of his when the two boys were at a Terre Haute movie theater. It was 1952, and the Korean War had just begun, so while they climbed the stairs to the theater’s balcony, the only place where Negroes were allowed to sit, the two high school boys were mulling over whether or not they would be drafted. Dad’s friend, whose name was Manford Carter (and is today a Washington, D.C., minister), suddenly muttered angrily, “I’m not going to get drafted and get killed for America. When I graduate from high school, I’m going to join the Air Force because I’m not going to get killed fighting for so-called democracy.”

  Dad was shocked by his friend’s words. He knew that joining the Air Force was a less risky proposition than being drafted into the infantry because only officers could fly planes into combat. A Negro enlisted man in the Air Force would probably be a mechanic, safe at a base. But at the time, Dad didn’t understand his friend’s bitterness. Why didn’t his friend believe America was a true democracy worth fighting for?

  He and Manford both attended meetings of the NAACP Youth Council in Terre Haute, but they did not participate in any kind of civil rights activities. Mostly, the NAACP was a place to socialize and to learn about racism in an abstract sense.

  The summer after Dad graduated from Wiley in 1952, he enrolled in Indiana State Teachers’ College because his grandparents wanted him to be a teacher. But Dad knew he wanted to be a minister or a lawyer—even if he had only a vague notion of what a lawyer did—so he transferred to Indiana University in Indianapolis after a year. Dad still hadn’t found his political footing. He followed the music fads, went to jazz clubs, and began meditating and experimenting with Zen Buddhism, which was the rage on the campus. Colorful pastel shirts were his trademark fashion statement.

  Then he had the nerve to try to join the Young Republicans Club, since his grandfather and uncle were Republicans. However, the Republicans in the club did not feel hospitable, and again Dad felt like an outsider. “I remember attending that first meeting, but based upon the body language—they were very diplomatic—I could tell I did not want to be with them,” Dad says. Their eyes gave them away. Silently, they snickered at his clothes: his “Mr. B” wide-collar purple shirts (named after jazz singer Billy Eckstine) and knit ties.

  Dad began to give more thought to what he did want.

  “I think Booker T. Washington had a lot of impact upon people of my grandparents’ generation—which was if you work hard and earn credentials, you’ll be respected. Although when I was at Indiana University I called myself a liberal, I wanted to be a lawyer who would be involved in labor relations. I was concerned about the poor more than I was concerned about the interests of black people, because I thought that black people’s interests could be resolved, and the problems we had were just isolated situations. I didn’t wake up until after 1955 when I was in the Army.”

  Dad had volunteered for the draft to get GI benefits to finish his college education. At the beginning of what would have been his senior year, he reported for duty and was sent to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. “That’s when I began to feel the dual system. Although we worked together, black and white, during the day, at night, and on our own free time, whites went into their separate world. Also in 1955, that’s when the gruesome murder of Emmett Till came up in Mississippi. I remember how the Charlotte Observer, which was supposed to be a liberal or moderate newspaper, condemned the NAACP, saying it was just as bad as the Ku Klux Klan in raising ‘racial’ issues about this murder. So I began to get sensitive. Then, while I was in North Carolina, that’s when Montgomery, Alabama, came up.”

  Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The bus boycott. The beginning of the era that became known as the modern civil rights movement. Dad hadn’t been impressed by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision because he had already been attending integrated schools, and he knew school integration wasn’t the whole answer. But Rosa Parks’s determination not to give up her seat on the bus moved him.

  “I began to become rebellious to authority unconsciously. I was not comfortable being a traditional soldier and I couldn’t conform, so in order to do something with me, they assigned me to the library or K.P., Kitchen Patrol. That’s where I had plenty of time to do a lot of reading and understand what was occurring. That’s when I began to read books like The Black Metropolis, about Chicago, and Carl Rowan’s book about the race riots in Tennessee, so I began to educate myself about racism while I was in the Army. When I was released from the Army as a private to go back to college in 1956, the first thing I did was to join the college chapter of the NAACP at Indiana University.”

  The main goal of mine is to be a leader, or a community leader, though I haven’t shown much talent for it yet, Dad wrote to his grandmother in June of 1956, shortly before his release from the Army. The future will show itself soon.1

  Through the NAACP, Dad began taking part in sit-ins at segregated restaurants, even though in 1956 the NAACP as a whole did not embrace the direct action approach. The strategy of Dad’s NAACP college chapter was to enter the restaurant to document whether or not they were served. If they were asked to leave, they got up and left. They planned to ask the university to sponsor a boycott of those restaurants in its literature for incoming students. It was all very measured and polite.

  Through the Indiana University college chapter of the NAACP, Dad met his civil rights mentor, John Preston Ward, a Negro Indianapolis attorney, one of the first Negro professors at Indiana University. At that time, a girl Dad had yet to meet, named Patricia Gloria Stephens, was still a high school student in Belle Glade, unaware of her future in civil rights, but just as Mom would be electrified by CORE’s summer workshop in 1959, Dad was electrified by John Ward.

  John Preston Ward was a political science professor at Indiana University, and he also served as the director of Indiana’s ACLU chapter and as adviser to the NAACP chapter. To Dad, Ward seemed tireless and very focused on what he wanted to accomplish. He was a young man when Dad met him, probably only about five years Dad’s senior. Their friendship continued after Dad graduated from Indiana University in 1958, when Dad remained in Indianapolis to continue his work with the NAACP. Further influenced by John Ward’s legal profession after volunteering with him at the Indiana Civil Liberties Uni
on, in 1959 Dad enrolled at Indiana University’s law school.

  In early 1960, the student sit-in movement in the South swept national headlines, and Dad read about two sisters named Priscilla and Patricia Stephens, students at Florida A&M University, who had been arrested in Tallahassee, Florida, and sentenced to sixty days in the county jail. “Will you look at this?” he said to his grandmother, showing her the Jet magazine while they sat at her kitchen table. For Dad, seeing those pictures in Jet gave the Movement a human face, the same way the picture of Rosa Parks had—one of sacrifice and putting one’s future at risk in order to be considered human. His grandmother seemed to feel what he was thinking.

  “I don’t know about all that, Johnny,” his grandmother said.

  He knew the rest without her having to say it: the Booker T. Washington philosophy of building capital with education, avoiding trouble. But Dad wanted to stir up trouble, and he was growing frustrated. He was involved with the Indianapolis branch of the NAACP, but the old alliance of Negro and white radicals he’d known in the beginning had been swept out, replaced by more conservative Negro ministers. Those ministers had little use for Dad and others like him. When Roy Wilkins, the NAACP executive secretary, sent telegrams to the NAACP’s northern branches asking them to support the student sit-in movement in the South, the Indianapolis branch balked. To be certain they wouldn’t be associated with the sit-ins, the ministers met and arranged for somebody to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star—a major white-owned newspaper, where advertising wasn’t cheap—and they signed their names denouncing the sit-ins. Dad later heard that ad was worth $5,000. He was deeply disillusioned.

  A young man named William Raspberry, now a famed Washington Post columnist, was head of the Indianapolis NAACP Youth Council. Dad worked with him and other young men and women who had launched sympathetic pickets against Woolworth stores—the same stores that refused to serve Negroes at their lunch counters in the segregated South—at Indianapolis’s business hub, Monument Circle. Many of the Youth Council members were no more than adolescents, but as was often the case, young people were willing to venture where the elders would not tread. The Youth Council did its best to push for change even with the vacuum of more progressive adult leadership.