When I was growing up, we only had segregation, which was good because everyone likes to live with their own, and prejudice, which was bad (at least in our house) because no one should be judged by the color of their skin or their nationality. I wouldn't like it if someone called me a honky or a cracker, therefore, I didn't call other people names they wouldn't like. I was about three when my mother taught me "Enny, meeny, miney mo." It was followed by catch a colored man by the toe . . . because it was not polite to call black people niggers. They preferred to be called colored, and we were to show respect to everyone.
When we moved into our house in the hoioty-toity Chicago suburb, there were no colored people in town, but then there were only 14,000 people and a lot of vacant lots. Sometime when I was in junior high, I remember one of the kids telling me there were still Jim Crow laws on the books in town. He told me "that means black people have to be off the street by sundown." That was stupid, and if there was such a law, no one paid any attention to it. Of course, we rarely saw a colored person in town.
Colored people were the people who got on the el at Ridgeland. That was the street of demarcation in Oak Park. Colored people lived east. White people lived west. There was no "back of the bus" on the el that I can remember. We were all grateful to get a seat. The most important thing my mother taught me about colored people then was that colored women were beginning to bleach their hair. That was not good. The texture of their hair and the bleach didn't do well together. Their hair tended to turn orange rather than blonde, and it usually looked bad with their skin tone. They should let their hair be the way God made it grow. (She believed that until she went gray and began a personal love affair with Nice 'n Easy). I remember sitting at the counter at Walgreens on State Street having a nickel coke when a colored woman with bleached hair came and sat a few stools down from us (hmmm, I just thought about that. Walgreens. Lunch counter. Pre-Rosa Parks.) Anyway, my mother leaned over to me and whispered, "See what I mean about colored women bleaching their hair. Look how funny it makes her skin look." I looked. She was right.
I knew about segregation. I learned about prejudice when I was about five. My aunt and I were waiting for the bus in Chicago and a warm spring day. It took forever for the bus to come, and she finally had to do her magic trick of lighting a cigarette and poof, the bus would appear within a minute. But while we were waiting, a colored mother and daughter were standing off to one side. The daughter was a year or so younger than I, and I remember thinking she was cute but had on a hat with a wide brim that put her face in a shadow. So I walked over to her, bent the brim of her straw hat back (and probably broke it), and said, "There. Now everyone can see your pretty face."
My aunt called me back to her side and told me I shouldn't have done that. I wanted to know why. She answered, "Because we're not supposed to mix with colored people." That was a stupid rule. My new friend and her mother got on the bus before my aunt and I. They went to the back of the bus, and I followed them. My aunt called me to come sit beside her at the front of the bus. "But I want to sit with my friend." "You can't. You have to stay up here." That was another stupid rule, telling me where I had to sit on the bus. There were a lot of stupid rules, but ones about where you could sit on a bus and who you could talk to were really, really stupid.
I don't think I had any other interaction with a colored person until I went away to college when I was seventeen. While I was filling out the application for the dorm room, there was a question about having prejudice against colored people. It was so dumb, I had to ask my mother what they meant. She said they were making sure there were no problems in the dorm (whoops - pre-Rosa Parks again) by putting people with a roommate they would fight with or feelings would get hurt. She didn't imagine there would be many colored people at school. I asked her how I should answer the question. She said, "Why should you care? Somebody else has nothing to do with who you are."
Interestingly, when we moved into the dorm, the only person who had said they would have trouble with a colored roommate was the person who got the only colored girl on the floor. I remember her telling me, "I learned a lesson today. When I complained about being in a room with a colored, they told me it was done on purpose so so I would get over my prejudice. They're right because she's nice."
There were a bunch of us who went everywhere together that first few weeks of school, including Marcia, our new colored friend, - until the night I learned about intra-racial prejudice. About six of us were walking into a sock hop. We stopped right inside the door to check out the guys (what else do eighteen year old girls do at a dance). Marcia saw a fellow from her neighborhood she didn't know was at school. "Ah. I like him. But he never looked at me at home. Now that he knows I'm smart and at college, maybe he'll talk to me." At that same moment the guy spotted Marcia. His voice was so hateful. "Hey, Marcia. What are you doing with those white people? What did you do, some up here and become a white lover? Get over here." We were all shocked. Marcia was devastated. She looked at him and him demanding tone. She looked at us. In a split second the bright, happy girl we had walked in the door with shriveled before our eyes. "I guess I'd better go over with them." "No," we protested. "I have to," she said and never went anywhere with us again. She became a recluse at first, sitting in her room studying, and then started staying out until just before curfew every night. She had been such a happy girl. She became so unhappy, and that one incident broke up our little group and had everyone walking on tenterhooks around each other.
I'd known what segregation was since I was a kid. In one fleeting moment I learned what prejudice was. I didn't like it.
But then, later that summer, came racism. Did things got better after Martin Luther King's March on Washington? I've been told they did. What I know from experience is they got very different - overnight. And racism is a far dirtier word in my vocabulary than segregation or prejudice.
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