I was in eighth grade before I really began to understand racial issues in Omaha. I was not very culturally aware. I did not read news in the paper. If it was not on the funny pages, I never saw it. We did not have a TV until I was in high school. The only thing I listened to on the radio was the Long Ranger, The Shadow Knows and Fiber McGee and Molly. Dad and mom did not discuss world news, at least not when I was around. What I did know came from school. The only thing race related I had ever heard or may remember is that Abraham Lincoln fought against Nebraska becoming a slavery state.
That last year of elementary school I began to notice things and hear things and questions were forming. Austin and I looked at each other with different eyes.
I had seen “White” and “Colored” restrooms and drinking fountains in JC Penny’s and Brandies. But now I was wondering why. I didn’t know anything about the inside of the restrooms, but the fountains where very different in style and quality. It looked like the colored fountains were picked up from Frank the junk collector. We shared the same restrooms and drinking fountain at school and never gave it a second thought. I had ridden the bus with Austin and Robert and we sat in the back of the bus. The driver kept looking at me through his mirror. I wondered why and Robert had to explain it to me. Apparently I should have been sitting closer to the front. But I wanted to sit with my friends and I was blind enough to think they preferred to sit in the back. The bus was only one third full. There were plenty of seats. The bus-seating plan should have jumped at me as we had just experienced for friends rejection at the roller rink.
Earlier I had been invited to Austin’s birthday party and was the only white person there. Five were from Webster school, so I knew some of the kids. His other friends seemed to be looking at me out of the corner of their eye, or I was imagining things. I could feel the stares and knew they were wondering what I was doing there. I wondered the same thing. That same year I was beginning to understand that our relationship was not culturally accepted. I could also feel that he and I were beginning to pull apart. It was a strange feeling. It was a huge loss and it was going to get worse.
I had heard my brother-in-law, Harry, spew his bigotry venom on more occasions than I care to remember and I hated him for it. I always took it personally and could not imagine the pain the objects of this verbal abuse were feeling. He was a crude, rude and nasty man who physically abused his wife and children. I knew there was something seriously wrong with him. I was only beginning to connect it with the culture and his southern heritage.
It was in this last school year that Austin and I were chased away by an angry white man for what appeared to be him beating me up. We were playing fake fighting. It was this year that Lillian and my photo appeared in the paper because a black and white couple was square dancing at a city competition.
Everything was coming together in my mind and I was not good. It was frightening. It was painful. I can’t say I was angry. I wish I could say that now. Previously I had considered the various black and white issues faced with my friends to be strange, maybe even funny. I had missed the seriousness and pain they were experiencing. If they were subjected to that at school I never saw it. They were not seated at the back of the classroom, but alphabetically with the rest of us. They were not segregated at recess or any activities. If the world was really trying to maintain a separation of the races they were messing up big time at school. There was equality in my grade school; at least I always thought there was. I know of nothing that would say it differently, but then I wasn’t “Colored.”
If anyone were aware that the colored kids situation was different it would have been Robert. He wasn’t extremely vocal but he would say little things. He complained about the grades that he and the others received. He complained about the places in the city where he could not go. I didn’t know there were so many places. There should not have been any. He complained about anything that kept the races separate or belittled them and most especially about being sent to the back of the bus.
I was beginning to understand slavery and the after affect still going on these one hundred years later. It was in high school when slavery was discussed in American history. Civil Rights never came up. Now I was learning of the large issue it was right here in Omaha, right around me, right under my nose, right here supposedly in these northern slavery free Yankee states. We were just as bigoted as the south in some more subtle was and others just as blatantly. In the next four years the issues would become more demonstrative as Martin Luther King’s voice was being heard and violence was increasing breaking out across the south.
Four years later I was at work in Kinney Shoe Store when a fellow employee came back from lunch and reported of a sit-in at the Woolworths lunch counter. I had the next break and ran the block up to see what was happening. All the lunch counter stools were occupied by Negros. The wait staff was standing behind the counter doing nothing. A call had been placed to the manager on his day off. He was on his way. Police were inside standing behind the stools and holding back the white crowd pushing and shouting in behind them. A minor skirmish broke out when one white man tried to shove a Negro off his stool. Police hauled the white man out. There was very clear tension.
When the manager arrived, he looked at the situation and diffused it quickly when he told the cooks and wait staff to serve these customers.
My high school years were filled with conflict and fights. Austin and I lost track of one another. While we both attended Central High, we never once had classes together. I never even saw him again at that 2000 member student body.
My life was changing rapidly and drastically. I was leaving the happy, joyful fun filled days of childhood, at least for me. Fear began to settle in. The future was increasing less secure. Fear was hovering over my little world.
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