OF RACE AND PREJUDICE: A REMEMBRANCE

I watched a program on P.B.S. a few nights ago---I’m a real P.B.S. junkie---called “American Experience”, a series documenting important people and events in our history, about the Freedom Riders of 1961 who dared travel by bus to the deep segregated south, subjecting themselves to injury, abuse and arrest for the cause of Civil Rights. Interviews fifty years later with participants were fascinating and frightening,and I was amazed at their courage and resoluteness. Their whole approach, as you may recall, was inspired by Martin Luther King’s passive resistance and nonviolence, which, in turn, was spawned from Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent revolution in South Africa and India. Coincidentally, the same week I also watched Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-winning “Gandhi”, starring Oscar-winning Ben Kingsley.

My wife asked me after the documentary on the Freedom Fighters if I could have done that, and I quickly and instinctively answered, “Hell no, I’d have been scared to death.” I wish I would have had the courage, but I had to be honest. How many of you out there in cyberspace would have had the guts to do it? It took a special breed of devotion to the cause and of willing martyrdom to be a Freedom Rider.

We have come a long way in the last fifty years and made significant improvements in overcoming prejudice and racism. If you had asked me fifty years ago if we would have had a black President in my lifetime, I would have scoffed at the possibility. Yet here we are…

Looking back over my life in terms of prejudice and racism, the two major area of conflict have been Civil Rights for blacks and Anti-Semitism. I grew up in southwestern Ohio, and Ohio fought, obviously, for the North, the Union, in the Civil War, but that did not guarantee tolerance. I grew up in an era where prejudice against blacks was rife. No, we did not have Jim Crow, but the attitude about blacks was neo-southern. Snickers and racial jokes were common and the use of the N-word, Jigaboos,Jungle Bunnies, Night Fighters and the like were everyday pejoratives.

In my small town in Ohio, at the Greyhound Bus Terminal was a lunch counter, and even after World War II, blacks could not eat there, until in 1946, our cook’s son, a brave soul named Darrell Taylor, led a sit-in resulting in the opening of that lunch counter to the black community.

As for anti-Semitism, I even have some personal experience there. My grandfather was the American-born son of German Jewish immigrants from Bavaria. My grandfather Leo married a woman in 1889 of English ancestry named Gertrude Smith. He told my grandmother, “Gertrude, your Christian religion is more important to you than my Jewish faith, so raise the children any way you want”; hence, my father and his siblings, as well as my generation (since my father also married a Christian) grew up as Christians in the Episcopal faith.

When I went away to prep school, The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, for the first time in my life I ran into anti-Semitism. One of my classmates from Cincinnati, a supercilious ass named Gary, with whom I did not get along, knew of my family background and used to comment on it to his friends and make snide allusions to my Jewish background. I was puzzled, somewhat hurt, and had never run into such personal prejudice before, as my grandfather was deeply respected as a successful businessman and philanthropist in our area. I remember being home on spring vacation and mentioning these slurs to my mother. She looked surprised and said to me, “Gary said that? Why, he’s got more Jewish blood than you. His father is Jewish, and his family changed their name from Schlumberger.”

When I returned to school, one Saturday I was walking down my dormitory hall, and Gary saw me passing by and shouted, “Hey, off for the synagogue?” I put my head in the door and said, “Yes, Schlumberger, care to join me?” He looked visibly shaken, and one of his friends said, “What the hell does that mean?” “Ask Gary”, I replied and went on my way. After that, Gary was very quiet around me. This was in 1945 and even with a war winding down where Jews were victims of horrific tragedy this kind of anti-Semitism was out in the open in certain snotty Waspish circles

Don’t delude yourself that racism and anti-Semitism have gone; they are simply better camouflaged today with code words and flanking attacks. Look at the right-wing kooks and our President. I’m sure a large part of the hatred out there is racially inspired. And Jews have enough enemies in the Islamic world, not to mention envious and resentful Christians who grouse about and envy rich Jewish bankers and merchants. Too many narrow minds resent the success of American Jews who have set high standards of accomplishment under trying circumstances.

I must add, we are doing better and improving in our understanding and acceptance. We have come a long way in my lifetime on both racism and anti-Semitism, but have no illusions: those dragons still breathe fire in the dark areas of our lives and souls.