My Experience of Racial Prejudice on the East Coast

Growing up in a working class section of North Philadelphia, I experienced very little prejudice as a child. This was true when I attended school in Philadelphia and when I moved to the suburbs. As I began my life as a workingman, I witness a little more.

I can remember that when I was very young my mother had a colored lady who came to help her with the house cleaning. I over heard her tell a friend of hers, “I love Betty like she was my own sister, but I would never invite her to eat with me. It isn’t right eating at the same table as a colored.” (Back in the 1940’s all non-whites were referred to as coloreds.) My mother was a very gentle loving person, but she was raised in the South.

As I grew older and began going to school the white lower class neighborhood that I lived in became more and more integrated. By the time I was in third grade, my school was at least ninety percent African-American. Once I was walking behind a new kid whose last name was Lewis. He told the girl that he was walking with that Joe Lewis was his father. “Yea, sure, if Joe Lewis was your father you wouldn’t be going to school with all us poor. Ain’t that right, Jackie?” she asked me. There was never any racial tension between the African Americans and the Caucasians at my school. We pretty much accepted each other.

I played stickball and step ball with the colored kids in our neighborhood. We had snowball fights and built forts. We shared the boxing gloves that my dad bought for my brother and I. We use to take turns boxing in the front yard. We played marbles together. But, I never had an African American as a best friend. I never brought one into my house, and I never was invited into their houses. I guess this was an unwritten rule from our parents.

One of my first jobs came about the summer before fourth grade. I was hired by the iceman who had a shop a couple of blocks from our house. He taught me where to cut a ten cent block, a twenty-five cent block, and a fifty-cent block and left me in charge of his shop while he went off to make deliveries. He paid me a dollar a day. I worked for him for a week or so when my Uncle Lee happened to stop over. “I got a job Uncle Lee. I’m working for the ice-man up the block,” I told him bursting with pride.

“Ain’t he a colored?” Uncle Lee asked.

“Yea.”

“Well, no nephew of mine is gonna work for a colored. What does he pay you?

“A dollar a day,” I told Uncle Lee. He whipped out a dollar, gave to me and asked me to quit the iceman job. I did so, but I don’t remember ever receiving another dollar from Uncle Lee.

My brother and I could walk the streets of Philadelphia from one end to the other without any fear. Though one time a couple of African American kids stopped me on the way home from the grocery store and took the change from a ten-dollar bill. They just pulled me into the alley, told me to empty my pockets, and took off running.

When I was just entering seventh grade my parents broke up. My mother got sick, and my brother and I were placed in a foster home in Newtown, Pa. The school there was ninety eight percent white. There were two African Americans in my class. They were both outstanding athletes and looked up to by their classmates. I felt some little prejudice toward myself as a foster child. I use to cover up my papers when I had to fill out forms that asked for my parent or guardian’s name. I didn’t want my classmates to see that their last name was different from mine.

I saw little if any prejudice during my high school years, but that changed when I started working. My first real job was at a screw machine plant. All of the guys that worked downstairs were straight out of the hills of Kentucky. The only African American that came near the plant was a really nice heavyset guy who came in about once a week to pick up the scrap metal. One day he used our one-seater rest room. One of the guys from Kentucky put a sign up on the door. “No niggers allowed.” One of the guys up stairs tore the sign down. But the Kentucky boys put up another one.

“How would you like to sit on the seat after his sweaty butt was on it?” one of the boys asked me.

“It be no worse than your sweaty butt,” I told myself, but didn’t say anything to the Kentucky boy.

After a couple years at the screw factory, I went to work at North Philadelphia Airport as a line boy. One of the security guards there, Charlie, was an African American. He was a super nice guy and really helped me get acquainted with the place. He took me to coffee with him my first day there and introduced me around. The other security guards there treated Charlie politely to his face, but when he wasn’t around, the referred to him as the n-word. They were actually jealous of him because he was smarter. Charlie had wanted to work for a newspaper running a printing press, but he couldn’t get into the printer’s union because they wouldn’t accept blacks. Later he became assistant operations manger for Philadelphia International Airport.

Just after I turned twenty-one, I lost my drivers’ license. One night when we were working swing shift together, Charlie offered to give me a ride home. We stopped at a bar where I use to hang out before I was twenty-one. The bartender asked to see my license. I showed him the non-functioning card. He said that it look like the date had been changed and refused to serve me even though I had been served there numerous times when I was under age. We went to another bar, called The Anchor. When we asked for two beers, the bartender rang a bell and said, “Sorry anchor is up. We’re closed.”

We were served at a third bar. Charlie never said anything about our not being served, and I thought that it was because I looked underage. Later, when I stopped to think about it, I realized that we were not served because Charlie was African American. Over the next several months, Charlie took me to several jazz clubs in Philadelphia where I was not even asked to show I. D.

Right around this time, a friend and I opened a beat coffee house, The Trivia. The building we rented was in a lower class section of Trenton, New Jersey. There were lots of African Americans in the neighborhood and some of them became regulars. Concho and several of his friends would play their bongo and Congo drums and accompany poets who read their beat poetry. Greg read poetry and washed dishes. John was an intellectual who sat in on our late night discussions. Black Barb waited tables and sat in on our discussions though she never said very much.

The Triv. was really popular with the college kids who were off for the summer. Everyone wanted to be a part of the in crowd. We had five or six young girls who waited tables just for tips. One of the girls, Karen, was the police chief’s daughter. He stopped in one night and saw the mixed crowd that hung out at the Triv. He forced his daughter to quit telling her that he didn’t want her hanging out with a bunch of low life beatniks. He talked to the other parents and all of our white girls quit.

Then the police started parking a squad car in front of our place. When my partner, Vance, told them that they were scaring all the customers away, the officer told him that if the costumers weren’t doing anything wrong, they wouldn’t be afraid of the police. I talked to Karen later. She explained that her dad felt that it wasn’t safe for her to hang around an establishment with so many colored people. He more or less told her that if wanted to run a reputable place we should filter out the colored.

Of course, I am looking at racial prejudice from a white man’s point of view. I have an African American friend who grew up some ten or so blocks from me in Philadelphia. He had a totally different experience telling me that he had to fight his way back and forth to school, that the whites were always jumping him and his friends. He explained that at one point the white kids would chase the blacks off the basketball court. Later when the neighborhood grew more African American, the blacks would chase the whites off.

As look back on the racial prejudice that I experienced on the East Coast, it seems that the people who were intolerant were the uneducated, people from the South, and those who made up the establishment, police and union leaders. The racial prejudice that I experienced on the West Coast was quite different, but that’s another story.