United States of Race Podcast

An Arsenal for Dealing with Race

Season 1, Episode 1

Listen to Episode 1 of United States of Race on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn + Alexa, or PodChaser.

Description: John learns about race growing up during the Jim Crow era in Mississippi and develops early on in life an arsenal of tools for dealing with oppression.

John 0:10 I think it’s very confounding to me, this notion of race. I learned very early on, you’re going to evaluate me based on your biases, you’re not gonna, nobody is going to evaluate you based on fairness.

DB Crema 0:29 This is united states of race, personal stories of how our earliest memories determine a lifetime of relationships. I’m your host, DB Crema.

Every episode, what I’d like to do is start with just a very early experience, related to race, and what that was like, for you personally, what happened?

John 0:57 Now, I was born in Jackson, Mississippi. 1942. We moved from there, in 1944, to the south side of Chicago. But from birth until 1955, when Emmett Till was killed, I spent every summer in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, where my father was born, and Cuba, Alabama, where my mother was born. Between those two places. Ah, my first encounter and awareness of race was, it was in Mississippi, in Crystal Springs, Mississippi. My father converted to Roman Catholicism, I guess when I was four or five years old. And we were spending a summer and we went to church, my younger brother, he was on one side and I was on the other. We went to this church. And in the Catholic Church, the priest stands out on front and greets the parishioners coming in. And he said, Father, are we welcomed here?

DB Crema 2:07 Your father asked the priest that question?

John 2:10 The white priests in a white congregation. I guess I was 7 or 8 or 9. I don’t remember the year. But I remember that, vividly. And we went in, we were the only black people in the church. That’s all I remember of that incident. But the other, and I don’t know whether this occurred before or after that. Ah, on Saturdays, we would stay with with my uncle who owned the farm and my aunt, my Uncle Ernest or Uncle Tight, they called him because he was tight with his money. We would stay with one or the other. And on Saturday, after they had worked in the fields, and we played all day, on Saturday, we would get our shower or take a bath and drive maybe 20 miles into Crystal Springs. And we, my brother and sister and two cousins, would ride on the back of the truck. It wasn’t a pickup truck, it was a farm truck, that had a flatbed. And we’d ride on a dusty road into town to go to the movie where we sat up in the balcony. That’s where black people had to sit. I never understood that. And the part that I remember most, there was a stairwell, a walkway up to the balcony. And there was a hole in the wall. And you could look through and see the back of the candy counter. That’s where we had to buy our candy — that’s the way we had to buy our candy. Because we could not walk around into the lobby — we were not allowed in the lobby. So my recollection of the last one of the few times that I acted out was when I went around into the lobby and pointed to a box of candy. I think it was Good and Plenty, or that other one that’s gelatin type thing. And all I can remember is a hand like a vise grabbing me by the back of my neck, and literally lifting me off the floor and pulling me out. And we went into the movie and saw the movie and my father never said a word to me Never chastised me or anything. That’s been a part of my being since I can remember. Just because you have a hole in the wall. And that I have to sit up in the balcony, which is the worst place for black people to be sitting because you can throw stuff down on the people. I mean,

DB Crema 4:44 Did they not think of that?

John 4:48 Well, they have little nets up in front, you know, so to keep stuff start from going down. But I mean, it’s been my my question of authority for long time, okay. And those two incidents, I remember vividly, because where we stayed, on the farms we stayed on, there were no white people anywhere. They may have driven by on the road, but the road was so desolate and unpaved, that you rarely saw white people driving through there. And I was 25 years old before I ever went back to Mississippi.

DB Crema 5:29 When you say you at that time, you never understood it? What was it that you didn’t understand? Did you recognize this like, okay, there are spaces where there are only black people and no white people. And then there are spaces where it was all white people and you had to ask permission, did any of that really register for you?

John 5:45 Not, not at the time. But as I experienced more and more, the light started coming on. And the recognition of there is a line of demarcation, which theoretically, I’m never supposed to cross. And the thing about it was, I never dealt with it from the standpoint that there’s something that I’m not supposed to do, there’s a behavior that I’m not supposed to exhibit. And then there was an incident in eighth grade, where my father stopped disciplining me in a particular way. When I called Sister Mary St. Elise — I was being punished for some indiscretion — and she had me sitting after school in those old desk, and I called her an Old Crow. Okay,

DB Crema 6:40 I’m sure, that didn’t go over so well.

John 6:42 No, it did not. And it was at that juncture that my father’s disciplining of me changed. And he was less stringent and harsh and punitive. It became more rhetorical

DB Crema 7:00 Meaning?

John 7:03 Meaning, I’m not going to tell you not to do that again. Okay, you don’t have any more times to behave in that way. And it was not race. But it was because the only example, in my school education was white — their worldview, their values, were being instilled in me. In high school, which was also on the west side, I went to Catholic High School, all boys high school, I was made even more acutely aware of race, as a 13, 14, 15…18 year old. And at lunchtime, we were allowed to go out on the football field. And there were nine black males admitted to this high school in my cohort out of about 1,000 boys. And what they would do at lunchtime was they take a 16 inch softball, and they’d throw it and you’d run and pick it up and see how far you can run before somebody tackled you. Well, there’s only white boys doing this. And I said, these jokers can’t catch me, I know that. So big, bad, John ran out there, picked up the softball. And, it was a football field. So at one end was the school building, at the other end where other goal posts. So I picked it up near the school end and run 120 yards and nobody could catch me. So they started calling me the N-word. And I would tackle them but they couldn’t catch me to tackle me. So they resented me tackling them. So one of my classmates, black classmates, at Marshall High School, which was a black High School was four blocks away. And they asked me if I wanted wanted them to go over and get the brothers from there and come back and take care of these boys that called me the N-word. I said, no, no. Now, the very next year, I played on the varsity basketball team. I was the only black on the team. But none of those white boys could jump as high as I could. You know that movie “white boys can’t jump?” So the whole dynamic of the school changed because of that.

DB Crema 9:23 When you became of value.

John 9:25 When I became of value, yes. Here’s an interesting dynamic of that. They nicknamed me BJ. And it wasn’t until a class reunion maybe 10 or 15 years ago that the significance hit me. BJ, Big John, or Black John. I don’t have any confirmation of that from anyone.

But being the only black on on that basketball team.

DB Crema 9:57 But in that sense, it could be seen almost as a term of endearment like, Oh, this is our black person.

John 10:03 It was a term of endearment. Yes, I accept them. Because I had the respect of all of them, the coaches and everything, cuz they couldn’t

do what I could do.

DB Crema 10:14 And how did it feel to realize that later on?

John 10:17 This is stuff you don’t know until after the fact. But what it does is, when you’ve been discriminated against for whatever reason, it becomes a part of your arsenal, your defense, response, retaliatory Arsenal for having been mistreated. And I don’t think I’m jaded or bitter or any kind of thing because of it. And I’ll give you an example at work. My last supervisor was the kind of person, a Jewish guy who on one day is the most affable and then on another day, he was as racist as he could be under the guise of being a supervisor. And when you’ve been discriminated against because of your skin color, or your race, or your gender, your whatever, that goes into your arsenal, and when a situation arises that you must confront this offense, you go into that Arsenal and pull out one of those tools to defend it.

DB Crema 11:24 And what do you mean by you reach into your arsenal and from your past experiences and pull out the tools? Are you talking about, like how to deal with that racism in the current moment? Or is it talking about from a sensitivity standpoint?

John 11:36 Both, both. From the sensitivity standpoint of well,

I need this job, so I just can’t kick his ass, which has been my first instinct. Just cold cock him, knock him out. Just knock him out, ok, break your hand, break his jaw, break his head, you know. That’s in the arsenal, but then also in the arsenal, from the experience is, do that without laying a hand on him. Do it verbally. Don’t use any pejoratives or expletives or any of that. But cut him up, slice him and dice him and walk away. And he’s sitting there trying to figure out what just happened to me. That’s part of your arsenal, you have to learn all of the tools that are given to us via oppression, to thwart it. So in all of these things, I’m trying to piece together that going back to that church, when I was nine or 10 years old. Why was it necessary for my father to ask that question? Or the hole in the wall and the candy counter and all of that? And what prompted me to go around? And why are both of those instances, paramount in my thinking about things? Why do they cut when when I’m dealing with notions of race? Why do those two things come back? Because they’re, they’re aspects in them that I can’t see yet. That I cannot understand yet. Because I am continuingly dealing with it from the standpoint of being a nine year old, looking up at this white priest holding my father’s hand and trying to figure out what are they…why are they even having this conversation? Because in Christianity, Jesus died for us all. He didn’t say, if you’re black, you got to go over here, and if you’re white… so why has there got to be this difference? I think it’s very confounding to me, this, this, this notion of race.

DB Crema 11:45 Mm hmm.

You talked about your dad kind of taking a very different disciplinary approach at a certain point in time. Do you recall, you know, what you were taught about how to act once you left your predominantly black house or household or farm area? Or like, what were you told by your parents about how you needed to carry yourself and behave and act in the outside world?

John 14:11 To be quite honest, I don’t remember anything explicit. Being told anything explicit.

DB Crema 14:17 Even with you going from Chicago to Mississippi every summer. There was no messaging about now, it’s different there, or did you see a difference?

Or, did you feel

like you needed to act differently?

John 14:29 Here’s here’s the message — Nonverbal. 1949 Buick, my mother, father and three children. Chicago to Mississippi is about, where we were going was about 560 miles. Mother didn’t drive, daddy drove. We didn’t stop many places. We had bag lunch. We had to go to the bathroom, the boys used the milk bottle. The girls, we found places on the side of the road where they could go. And that was 60–70-some years ago. And to this day, to this day, if I’m going from where I live to Cape Cod, I only stopp to go to the bathroom,

DB Crema 15:15 It’s the sort of stuff that sticks with you.

John 15:17 Sticks with you. I don’t trust places, even routes that I drive routinely. It’s the nature of trust and all the values, all the values that become a part of our persona and our behavior are shaped and influenced by what we experienced as children and young adults and adolescents.

DB Crema 15:38 And y’all stopped going to Mississippi at a certain point, mid 50s, like Emmett Till was murdered…

John 15:43 1955. That was the last time I was there, until I was…

DB Crema 15:49 Do you know why you stopped going, At that time when he was killed, did you realize that?

John 15:54 I didn’t realize until I was like, in college why. Because when they found his body, Jet Magazine, his mother published…. and you’ve seen that?

DB Crema 16:06 I have, I have.

John 16:07 That’s, that’s why. We didn’t go back to Mississippi after that.

DB Crema 16:15 So, 1955. Okay, so you were 18 at the age of 1960.

John 16:29 Right at the beginning of…in the cusp of the shift from rigid, Jim Crow and segregation to the beginnings of the civil rights movement.

DB Crema 16:43 Talking about that history, there’s so much history kind of reaching back to the civil rights movement in particular that’s all, you know, very textbook for me, right? I read about it in black and white, and it was pretty much consumed to the extent that I had to either regurgitate it on an exam or in homework. I mean, that was the significance it held for me, particularly in my early years, but that you grew up in that, you grew up with that, you grew up around that. And you were also older, you were old enough, you were a young adult, what was that like to be in that time and space and place where the civil rights movement was, was in action? How did it feel growing up with that around you? What did you think of those people, the people who were leading that, did you ever think about joining them?

John 17:27 It’s interesting you ask that because I did participate in one demonstration. One. It had to be 1960-something. ’65 or ’66 at the desegregation of rainbow beach in Chicago. I was with a group, NAACP, and we had put on our swimming trunks and going out into the water and these white boys were throwing a rock about the size of an Idaho potato. And the attorney who was my partner, we were all partnered up, the attorney who was a few years older than I said…He said, Now you see those guys throwing that rock? Who’s ever back his turn, we gotta alert the other one that they’re coming and throw it in our direction in case they throw it to hit us. And it occurred to me right then, what the hell am I doing out here? I’m out here, desegregating a beach and I lived on the west side of Chicago and this was on the far south side of Chicago. I ain’t never coming to this beach. So why am I here? And, I left the country. That’s, that was right in the period I was living in Liberia, West Africa. I was 24 or 25. I was going because it was an adventure. And I knew that I was going to grow in immense ways and I did, and it changed my perspective about life. Because I saw black people in charge of stuff, which I’d never seen in those 25 years. And I remember, April 4 1968. We were awakened in the morning. And there was what, a six hour time difference. So it was real early in the morning, we were awakened that he had been assassinated — Martin Luther King, that’s when I learned and the emotion, I don’t know what it was. Because I’d been in Liberia a year and a half. So, I was disconnected from the United States. And then when I came back, and went to graduate school, I was back in it again, and had to deal with this stuff firsthand. And to be involved, I read, I participated in the demonstrations and all, and all of that, and all that. Those were really interesting times. And it’s like something that I believe in very strongly that we are here for a specific purpose. And that specific purpose is to help anyone and everyone that you can in any way and as long as you can. Whether they think like you, act like you, look like you, or not, you must do your part to help them understand their humanity.

DB Crema 20:33 Thanks for listening to United States of race. This podcast was written and produced by me, DB Crema. Thank you to Aly Creative Co. for designing our artwork and to Nick D and Nick S for technical support. If you love great storytelling, please subscribe to United States of Race on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also show us some love by rating and writing a review on Apple podcasts or PodChaser. And go ahead and share this podcast with your friends and anyone who believes in the power of building connection through sharing personal stories. You can also follow us on Instagram at UnitedStatesofRace. And as always, if you — Yes, you have a compelling story to share, and would like to be featured in an upcoming episode, send us a message at [email protected]. Until next time!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai