Two decades away from Rochester (much
of it in the southern states) can lend a unique perspective on the city, especially
for a native Rochesterian. Our guest essayist departed Rochester in 1985 on a
military adventure. Five continents and a nearly a generation later, he says there
is one thing that sticks out about this city more than any other: Racism is a
blatant part of the Rochester community.
(Part 1 of 3)
"We
hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal…"
- Thomas Jefferson
"All truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed,
then it is violently opposed and finally is it accepted as self evident."
- Arthur Shoepenhouer
AN INTRODUCTION TO PREJUDICE
Outside the
windows, the late evening sky was a pretty orange color. Passionate yells could
be heard all around. The only thing that ruined what might have been a festive
atmosphere was the acrid smell of smoke. It was no party, but a race riot; welcome
to Rochester in 1964. I was not yet four years old and this remains one of my
earliest memories.
In the aftermath of that riot and those that followed,
the city's 10th Ward looked like a battle zone - very similar to some of the early
pictures of Bagdad after occupation forces started "occupying." There
was hardly a square inch of pavement not saturated with shards of shattered glass.
Burned out husks smoldered where sturdy buildings were doing business only weeks
before.
However, what I remember most vividly from that time is that we
children had no safe place to play. Ruination of play areas was a relatively minor
consequence of those querulous times; yet the major events of the 1960s went largely
unnoticed to a child my age. What were political assassinations, war and nuclear
weapons buildup to a child who could no longer get on the playground swings? Those
swings were the only freedom from a tiny, overcrowded apartment.
Inner city
residents complained about the fact that it was "our own" neighborhoods
torched during the rioting, but some of those same complainants were smashing
store windows for loot in "our own" neighborhoods. Downtown Rochester
was virtually untouched - RPD did a remarkable job pulling back from the most
affected areas to put a protective ring around the business hub of the city. Nonetheless,
the neighborhood where I grew up - the area I considered my world - looked a lot
like the pictures sent back from the first moon landing; then still a future project.
Rochester was the first city to have a major race riot, but the pattern
caught on like wildfire throughout the rest of the country. President Lyndon B.
Johnson declared that there were two "separate and unequal" nations
in the United States - one white and one black. A special commission was charged
with studying how well our nation stacked up in the international Civil Rights
arena. The results were not pretty.
For many black Americans, life had improved
very little a full century after the Civil War. Topeka vs. Brown notwithstanding,
segregation was still the norm in schools, churches and especially legislative
bodies, where blacks were nonexistent except in municipalities where "minorities"
comprised the majority. The Republican Party, hero to Blacks from the time of
Lincoln, was now stomping ground for such lovable humanists as Richard Nixon and
Ronald Reagan, while the "Dixiecrat" side of the aisle on Capitol Hill
was stalked by such staunch Civil Rights champions as Jesse Helms and his brethren.
Metaphorically, black folks were up the infamous creek - and without the proverbial
paddle.
Thus the setting for the dawn of the Civil Rights era was a dark
time for Blacks all over America and Rochester was no exception. However, many
in the city felt differently about it.
The home of such humanist heroes
as Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony could never be part of the insidious
system that kept a whole nation of people in second class status, they said. Surely
it was coincidental that whites abandoned the inner city in droves as blacks moved
far enough up the economic ladder and become property owners. Surely it was mere
happenstance that banks extended interest rates consistently higher for prospective
black homeowners than for whites. The educational budget dried up when the city
schools took on more of a black and Hispanic flavor, but surely that was only
a result of the shrinking tax base. Besides, things were tight all over, weren't
they?
If all one did was read the Rochester Times Union and the Democrat
& Chronicle, it would be easy to fall into that thinking pattern. Those two
bastions of Gannett power were daily fodder for the majority, but those living
in that second and unequal America - Rochester's minority community - felt differently.
Organizations began to rise up like FIGHT, Action for a Better Community, the
Urban League of Rochester, Model Cities and a score of other groups working hard
to bring change that this city still denied was needed. More than even most northern
cities, Rochester turned a blind eye and listened with a deaf ear to the sights
and sounds of racism that only grew more subtle, more insidious, more automated
and more inexorable.
EAR-LIFTED TO PERDITION
As a Catholic school
student, I was somewhat insulated from much of the intolerance that smoldered
beneath this then-industrial town. Most of my elementary teachers were Catholic
nuns, who had absolutely no patience for "silly nonsense." Perhaps it
is the vow of chastity that gave them such strength, but I was taught by sisters
who could lift a kid straight up in the air - by one ear! - at the slightest provocation.
Race - baiting was about the surest way to get rapped on the knuckles with an
old-fashioned yard stick and ear-lifted to perdition: the principal's office.
The
absolute first encounter I remember with bigotry occurred when I was seven. My
school gave me a cheap 110 mm camera and put me in Project Green Grass, some liberal's
idea of a way to soothe the heart of the savage Negro by bunking him with a white
suburban family for a week. I drew the Chappells, a married couple in Webster
with two sons, one my age (Chris) and one a little younger (Tom). We hit it off
right away and the Chappells secured a promise from my mother that I would spend
an entire month with them the following summer.
The suburbanites were charmed
by the rough-and-tumble city kid who refused to believe his senses; that real
people could have houses with such HUGE yards, where everyone had his own bedroom,
where there were no fences and where it appeared that almost every home was equipped
with a swimming pool. Most incredible: no matter how often you got hungry there
was always enough food! I felt I had walked off the street and onto a television
episode of "Leave it to Beaver." Nor did I ever want to leave.
The
day of the bigotry incident was a lovely summer day. Chris, Tom and I had ridden
bikes to a nearby creek where we were doing our best to capture salamanders in
mason jars. Some of my host's friends rode up and one of them, upon spotting me
blurted out: "Holy Christ! Chris has a nigger with him!" It wasn't my
first time hearing the word, black people used it freely in my neighborhood. But
it was the first time I'd ever heard a white person use the word and it didn't
sound the same.
On the back streets of Joseph and Clinton Avenue, the word
was more fraternal. Coming from the mouth of this freckled young boy, it sounded
very derogatory. I was trying to decide whether or not I was angry enough to do
something when Chris solved my dilemma by punching the newcomer in the mouth.
"He's NOT a nigger!" Chris shouted. "He's my friend!"
The
incident stayed in my mind and, after returning home, I relayed it to my cousin
Lorenzo - the war hero just returned from Viet Nam. He was unimpressed. "What
else did you expect from a bunch of crackers?" he snarled. "I don't
know why you like going out there with them any way. It ain't natural." Thus
within a few days time I experienced racism from both sides of the fence.
Prejudice
I understood, my own relatives baited me for the light complexion of my skin,
calling me "white boy" or "Puerto Rican kid." My mother often
said she was sure I would one day bring a white girlfriend home and she didn't
know how she'd take it. There was no stated basis for these things. My cousins
knew my pedigree and that I was neither white nor Hispanic, but just very light
and with the kind of wild, curly hair you might expect to see on a young Jewish
boy, or an Italian kid. A narrow nose and thin lips didn't help my claim to "blackness"
so I did what any other ghetto boy would do when hit with insults he couldn't
counter - I fought a lot.
BRING YOUR OWN DATE
The rainbow-hued
composition of my Catholic classes changed drastically when momma managed to wrestle
a scholarship to McQuaid for me. There was a total of 811 students enrolled in
the Jesuit academy my freshman year, but only 9 of us were black. That included
British national Carl Lowe, who we dubbed "Wolfman" because of his long
sideburns. Carl said he was amazed by the prejudice he witnessed around him and
that London was very different.
The predominant ethnic mix at McQuad in
the mid 1970s was Irish and Italian but there were a few Jewish people sprinkled
throughout the student body as well. These were not as visible as we blacks for
the obvious reason, but also because Jews were sometimes viewed with as much disdain
as blacks and Hispanics. It shocked me to find out that whites would discriminate
against other whites, but it made sense when I considered how blacks often treat
each other differently, depending on how dark or light the skin.
The differences
became most painfully apparent during lunch and school parties. There was one
table in the cafeteria where all the blacks sat, except for sports heroes like
Eugene Goodlow, who were allowed to hang out in the Senior Lounge (even though
Eugene was only a junior). Few blacks bothered to attend the school parties and
when they did they would usually bring their own dates. It was hard to have fun
when your "best pal" Vinny was breathing down your neck all night because,
nervous that you might ask his sister Stella to dance, terrified that Stella might
say "yes."
One of the great things about freshman year was the
reading list. Even before Black History had any power in its punch, the Jesuits
had on our mandatory reading list such ethnic jewels as Richard Wright's Black
Boy and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. However it was Black Like Me, a book written
by a white man who went through a courageous transformation to see America through
the eyes of a black man, that touched me most deeply.
The author spoke about
"the hate stare" - a look of pure malice he said he received from some
whites who were total strangers. It was the first time the phenomena had been
made tangible with a name, but I understood. I was intimate with the hate stare
and I was glad for a label to put on it. I didn't see it all the time and my young
experience was that most white people were genuinely good people. Nevertheless,
those times when the hate stare was seen chilled my spine; a cold I doubt forgetfulness
can ever purge.
MUST BE THE MUSIC
It came as a great surprise
to discover some of my cousins had converted to Catholicism, shortly before I
left Rochester to join the navy. They joined St Bridget's - my first parish and
the church where I was baptized. St. Bridget's was one of the first inner city
churches to embrace diversity. I returned to Rochester just in time to witness
its closure.
However, those high school years marked the time of becoming
more sensitive to racial differences. The free love hippie era gave way to a more
selfish age and the flash and glitter of the disco era blurred some cultural boundaries
as whites and blacks mingled in discotheques; primal music achieving beat by beat
what marches, protests and legislative exercises failed to accomplish.
Hip
hop emerged and even more crossover appeal was indicative on cable - videos on
shows like MTV and VH1 displayed the new cultural tolerance. However, those inner
city schools which remained open for business after these catalyst times lost
their music programs. Most of the affected students cared little; the new music
was all about canned sound, not live instrumentation.
Community recreational
programs - from swimming classes to basketball leagues to free summer lunches
- were obliterated and young people were left with few positive diversions. The
mid 1980s came and brought with it an insidious epidemic of crack cocaine addiction.
Reaganomics - or as then Vice President Bush called it: "Voodoo Economics"
- resulted in jobs drying up all over the city. Many ex- Kodak and Xerox employees
sought freedom from stress in the crack pipe. The darkest of days had arrived.
Unable
to find steady work, I enlisted in the Navy and set off for boot camp, training
school and adventures beyond. My first duty station was Norfolk, VA. The only
think I knew about Virginia was that Richmond was the capitol city of the Confederate
States of America during the civil war. I mentally prepared myself for more exposure
to the hate stare than I'd ever had to that point. But it never happened.
I
found southern whites in Virginia to be mostly down-to-earth, helpful and very
friendly. Rochester, the city I'd always perceived as a champion of diversity
and tolerance, suddenly looked like a little backwater town with a lot of discrimination
issues that were not being dealt with. What I thought would be cultural shock
was shaping up as cultural education. Myths that had shaped my perception about
race in America since childhood - myths that were at the foundation of how I identified
myself with those around me - myths fostered and fed by growing up in my native
Rochester - those myths were about to be exploded.
(Part 2 - Racism in Rochester's
Economy)
