El Prezidente Kaboom Presents: What My Father Saw Before The 60's Went Ka-BOOM! Part 1

[El Prezidente Kaboom]

EL PREZIDENTE KABOOM PRESENTS

An Examination of Black and White race relations, per Attorney General Eric Holder:

WHAT MY FATHER SAW

BEFORE THE 60’S WENT KA-BOOM!



June 8, 2009



Now racism is wrong, and we should all strive to be loving souls, but as we all know, the kum-ba-ya switch isn’t easy to turn on when things get heated between people. Racism has many sides to it, and it varies in degree. People all over the world participate in it, and the bad blood flows back and forth between our skin color based teams. The melting pot of America may have dissolved the false science of racial supremacy, but bitter sentiments still exist. There is still a race-based rift in this country based on grievances both real and imagined; and with this much grease still being spewed on the road, there’s always the danger that somebody might spin out of control as we travel these integrated lanes of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”



My Brooklyn born father used to say when parking the car in public that he wanted to park “where the white people park!” He meant this as a joke, and as was his habit too, he would often follow up on this political incorrectness by defending himself from the charge that he was a racist with ecumenical negative statements, like “Everybody Sucks” and “I dislike everyone equally.” And it was true, that my father had no quarrel with equality for all. In fact, to my father, the simple summary of all Judeo-Christianity instructions, Do No Harm, seemed to be the trump card; and it was from that wit alone, did he instruct me to treat everyone with the same respect that I would like to be treated with. However, at times, my father’s take on black people was a sad analysis, and he told me several times, that in his experience, that they were okay when he was one-on-one with them, but that their demeanor towards white people seemed to change when they got together as a group - “They start acting black” is the way he put it.

Now, I don’t believe my father was/is a hateful man, but obviously, his politically incorrectness is controversial by today's standards. While my father is a devout political liberal, often times, there is a sense of bitterness and betrayal in his thinking towards how race-relations turned out, and dark humor is his way of dealing with it. Now, I don't know for certain, but I get the impression, that like many whites, a little part of himself wished he was born black, and ultimately, my father feels scorned by the fact that his political liberalism didn't always win him the approval and friendship of African-Americans that he came into contact with over the course of his life.



Truth be told, my father grew up idolizing Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella; and he thought Sammy Davis, Jr. was cool; and he still listens to Motown. While it wasn’t until my father’s senior year that the first black student showed up, he and his peers treated the kid like a celebrity, for the 1st black student was also the star quarterback of the football team. But that was the limit of my father’s exposure to the black community while he was growing up on Long Island. My white flightin’ grandfather had moved my father’s family out of Brooklyn before they had the chance to have black neighbors; and while there was positive media-related black imagery, which affected my father’s thinking, my father also heard the disparaging words of racist discontent that were plainly spoken in his environment and by his own father.

There’s a lot of reasons for ‘White Flight,’ and many of them simply had to do with the fact that in the post-WW2 boom years a lot of white people could afford to move to greener pastures, but it’s abundantly clear that racism played a big role in many of the decisions to flee that were behind the curve. The end result was a self-fulfilling prophecy were the laws of supply and demand took over, leading to the collapse of the tax base which supported the expenses of running the inner cities that white people handed off to minorities.

While my father was taught, in the home and by his Catholic faith, to treat everyone with respect and not to pass judgment on others, he was also handed a bag of mixed messages on racial equality. His Irish father taught him how his ancestors were discriminated against in America; how slavery was wrong; and how his great-great-great grandfather was made a Captain in the Union Army by Lincoln himself – but at the same time, it was understood that his sister wasn’t allowed to date any of the people that Lincoln had freed; and that, while Jim Crow wasn’t around, it’s not like his community wanted a lot of black people moving in.

But all my father knew was that he liked Jackie Robinson and Roy Campenella, and he thought that they were good people. And, as he became more aware of the debate, he even thought Campenella was really a “Ginny” on account of the catcher’s Italian father; and while that may be ethnically offensive and sexist, it went against the “One-Drop Rule” and it was progressive thinking for its time.

The color barrier in baseball was broken while my father was in the crib, and once he learned that it had been in place, as young boy being introduced to the Dodgers in the late 40s, my father assumed that professional baseball had divided itself because, for some reason, the black players were better than the white players. He didn’t know what racism was until it was explained to him, and this domain of grown ups betrayed my father’s innocence. It was confusing enough for adults, let alone a little kid, but what it boiled down to was an early lesson in how life could be unfair.



By 1960 my father was a freshman in High School and JFK was running for President, and the Irish-Catholic community was jubilant with glee to see the electoral barrier finally broken for their kind. My father even debated a Nixon supporter in a class sponsored presidential debate; and he smote his opponent before his peers, with a line that would’ve been good for the country to remember 8 years later: “YOU CAN’T TRUST TRICKY DICK!” And it was from my father’s post in civics class that he watched, as the most favorite son of all the Irish-Catholics took reign of a new decade with the promise of a New Frontier. And my father couldn’t have been more patriotic, hopeful, and proud.

It wasn’t long, though, before the Cold War scared the country shitless, and my father was practicing missile drills like they were the real thing. The Bay of Pigs embarrassed Kennedy 3 months after taking office; and even though the people forgave him because he was forthcoming, it didn’t change the fact, that the Communists still had a base in our hemisphere, and it left the people terribly uneasy about the prospects of WW3.

And my father heard paranoid talk about how Nuclear War would be the End of All Mankind. But he couldn’t believe that anybody would pull the switch; the idea of nuclear holocaust was just too unreal. But the events with the Russians made him nervous, and following the Bay of Pigs, my father was tuned into the sense that the danger was reaching a critical mass.

And it was in the first year of the Kennedy Administration, with the Russians having put the first man in space in the previous decade, with the unease following the disastrous Bay of Pigs, and with the Russians threatening to build a wall encircling West Berlin, that my father looked up at the TV to see reports about the police brutality and unlawful arrests awaiting the Freedom Riders heading out from the North and into the deep South. The Supreme Court had desegregated interstate bus travel in Boynton v. Virginia (1960) and these activists had set out to shame Kennedy and the Congress for not enforcing the decision.

On these buses, the white people sat in the back and the black people sat up front, and when they got off at rests stops, they would go to the bathroom visa-verse, too. And their decision to manually override state and local laws that contradicted with the Supreme Court was met with tyrannical resistance; and the South was put on record, as to having said “%$#@ you” to all branches of the Federal Government, for the umpteenth time. But this time, their insolence and petulance had led them to put their hands on the white north’s collegiate graduates and their bright, young, and hopeful.

The beatings were severe; the jail cells were inhumane; a bus was firebombed; and the military had to be called out to prevent one Martin Luther King from being lynched, after he came out to show his support for the Freedom Riders, who never made it to Georgia as planned on account of all the mob violence and Nazi Pigs.

My father had heard about the Sit-ins, which began when Kennedy was still running for President, and he knew about Rosa Parks, and how Eisenhower had sent in troops to desegregate the schools in Little Rock, but my father had never seen any White Kids involved on the black-side. Now they were diving out of interracial buses and getting beat up by mobs of Southern Whites, who descended upon the buses like Storm Troopers, once they were held up by the Racist Police.



Kennedy had won the black vote by presenting himself as more sympathetic than Nixon to the cause of equal rights; but in the middle of 1961, out popped some folks on TV, who were openly questioning whether Kennedy was the man that he said he was, given the hesitance of his administration to come right out of the gate swinging at the Racist South.

Now, as a Kennedy kid, my father appreciated the position of the President more than the Freedom Riders in respect to what had been done by the new Administration on behalf of Civil Rights. The Russians were causing all sorts of problems for the Administration, and the Bay of Pigs had already pissed off the hawkish South, further complicating the Administration’s dealings with it on Civil Rights.

But those educated black and white students boarding buses on a collision course with the South didn’t give a shit of concern for the Russians, let alone the State Troopers and local cops waiting to stop those buses and have those in it beaten down like dogs. Where the powers that be, in the federal government would’ve otherwise stopped, the Freedom Riders were willing to pay the ultimate price to force the issue. And their grassroots non-violent insurgency showed a lot of courage, and it generated a lot of support and sympathy given the horrific abuse they suffered. And by the end of the year, the Kennedy Administration had the will and impetus to strike down the South with new orders to desegregate all interstate buses and terminals.

My father couldn’t believe what he had seen: Americans fighting Americans over who sits where, and who gets to use what water fountain, or toilet. It didn’t seem right; it didn’t make any sense; and it didn’t help us with the Russians, now, either. Jim Crow reminded my father of Hitler, and the Union, to my father, was more important than any one race. He believed, that as Americans, black people deserved equal rights, and that the South for the sake of the Union should yield to granting those rights - for there could be no chance at a permanent peace between the races without the removal of Jim Crow and segregation. And by the end of 1961, the impurity of the white man’s position, in respect to those notations on organized and civil life, had crystallized in his mind; and like many bright-eyed and bushy tailed liberals, my father asked, how can America fight tyranny abroad and allow it at home?



With the threat that the Communists posed in the early 1960s, America didn’t need any other problems spinning out of control. America needed to put all of her talents to good use to beat the Soviets, and this meant expanding the economy and developing new technologies. The only color that should’ve mattered to America was green. Jim Crow limited the volume of trade in this country by preventing Black Americans from fully participating in the economy; and the chaos and controversy surrounding the system didn’t help the bottom line any, either. Protests and mass beatings were bad for business.



In early 1962, there was a cooling off period in regards to the tension over Civil Rights, but when the kids went back to school, after their summer break, things boiled over once again. The Movement had spent the lull period registering voters and filing legal challenges to integrate Southern schools; and come September, it became clear that Mississippi wasn’t going to follow through with what it had been told to do by the Courts and Executive Branch – which was to allow James Meredith to safely enroll and attend classes at the University of Mississippi, and not falsely imprison him, like they did the last black kid that tried to go to school there.

The Deputy Attorney General of the United States, along with a few hundred federal marshals, escorted Meredith onto an empty campus midday on Sunday, September 30; but the locals took note, and by nightfall, their was a mob of several thousand people, left unchecked by state and local police. And as Kennedy took to the television podium that evening to praise Mississippi for cooperating, a riot began at Ole Miss, and the mob went from throwing rocks to shooting at those entrusted with Meredith’s security; 2 people died, and a combined-total of nearly 200 people were injured in the clash. Kennedy had to send in the military to restore order; over 20,000 police, marshals, and soldiers ended up involved in the efforts. And with the Army ready to put down any more rioting with some serious force, classes resumed the next day with James as a student on a campus covered in the smoldering debris of a street battle that had just ended in the wee-hours of the morning. What a way to begin a semester.

It was a mad scene. Eisenhower had to send in the troops to desegregate the schools in Little Rock because of rioting outside of Central High, but Ole Miss was on another level. It was a temper tantrum of enormous proportions, and it brought another heaping portion of shame to Mississippi. Meredith was an Air Force veteran, and like many others, my father thought that at the very least, Ole Miss should’ve made exceptions to their ‘whites-only’ policy for those that have served our country. It seemed like a fair compromise, to a Yankee with little at stake, but Racist whites in Mississippi and across the South wanted a victory for segregation, not a smaller one for the opposition.



Twice now, Kennedy had called out the troops to stop the complete breakdown of civility between the races somewhere in the South, and these civil disruptions had only been over public transportation and college enrollment. The Deep South resisted every effort to change their racist ways, and their psychotic bastard approach made things difficult for a President, who had pledged to end racial discrimination, but also had the Russians to deal with and elections that required the support of white southerners to win.

It was a perilous position for the country to be in: sandwiched between two ongoing and developing crises, occurring on the eve of midterm elections. Cuba was still unresolved, and with the clamor over the summer for invasion that my father heard, he thought that we’d be at war before the year was out. In September, Congress had put their opinion in writing and given their blessing to the President to use force in Cuba, as plans were finalized to go ahead the following month with military exercises in the Caribbean, which the Hawks hoped would dare the Communists into shooting at us first.

But then, Ole Miss happened at the end of the month, and it put segregation back under the spotlight, while emboldening the advance of those who fought for justice. The Administration had tried to slide Meredith on in, without violence and without federal troops. But the vain, shallow, and insecure governor of Mississippi screwed everything up; and the end result was a mini-replay of our Civil War, a few weeks before we almost had WW3 with the Russians.

The Hawks had spoken too loudly in September, and their intentions got out to the other side, which reacted by putting missiles 90 miles from our shores; and for 2 terrifying weeks in October, this country braced for a nuclear winter. It’s like the Ghosts of our nation’s Past, Present, and Future, coming back to visit us, even more pissed off about something else, a few weeks after already scaring the shit out of us. But Halloween was post-climatic, rather than apocalyptic, after Kennedy diplomatically arranged for the missiles to be removed in exchange for a pledge not to invade Cuba and the promise to remove our missile bases in Turkey, at some point in the future, which we did not do.

If the Southern States were ever going to successfully secede again from the Union, they missed their chance when the Missiles were removed from Cuba. But a deal with the Russians would’ve been one with the devil, and they don’t call it the “Bible Belt” for nothing.
What the Cuban Missile Crisis did for Civil Rights was it limited the extent of the white southern blow-back against the Kennedy administration for the integration of Ole Miss. Like the rest of the nation, the South was alarmed by the dark clouds of the Cold War, and their immediate concerns shifted to what to do about the Russians instead of Kennedy and the blacks.

Come November, the Democrats gained 2 Senate seats, and they only lost 4 in the House; and there were no upsets in the Deep South. Nixon even attributed his California gubernatorial defeat in '62 to the boost that Kennedy received in the polls for his handling of the October crisis. But this would be the last ride of the Democrat’s Racially Schizophrenic Caucus, as it would be the last time that the Party was able to keep the Racist White South and the blacks under the same tent.

END PART 1