It’s the day after MLK Day and for me, frankly, it doesn’t seem a lot different than the day before — or the day before that. The mail arrived. The bank’s open. City services are back on schedule. I operate my own company and declared MLK Day as an official holiday. I was surprised so many others did not. I’m not entirely sure why I chose to close shop for the day. It just seemed to be the appropriate thing to do. For me, when the U.S. Postal Service shuts its doors, it’s pretty much a genuine holiday. In addition, no one with a remotely reasonable view of the world could argue against the idea that Martin Luther King Jr. was a genuine American icon, one of the few leaders of our generation who truly changed the world.
I grew up in a small town in Eastern North Carolina, a child of the late 1950s and early 1960s. For no apparent reason, I am flush today of memories involving some aspect of race. With no particular purpose or order in mind, here are some thoughts I cannot shake:
My grandfather and others proclaiming the best barbecue to be not from one of the well-known pork palaces in the town where we lived, but from the back porches where some of the inventors of what we now refer to as “Eastern North Carolina Barbecue” cooked and served their food. These culinary pioneers were black, of course. Few had their own restaurants, at least the kind of establishments their white counterparts ran. They literally served plates of succulent barbecue from their back stoops. Most lived in what we called the “black part of town,” while most of their customers where white men dressed in dark suits on lunch break from their office jobs downtown. Of course, few of those white businessmen would have allowed themselves to be seen entering the front door. So they ate out back. My grandfather said he’d be glad to sit on the front porch for all to see. It just wasn’t done in those days. I believe him.
I vividly remember my mother taking me to a local civic center in 1972 to meet Shirley Chisholm during her historic run for president. I was only 14, but the significance of the moment still had meaning for me. My mother made sure of that. She told me multiple times I was witnessing something special. I collect political buttons and I still have one from that event. It’s orange in color and proclaims: “Get On The Chisholm Trail.”
I’m old enough to recall the integration of our public schools. Before it happened, black and white kids at my schools all attended classes together. But I didn’t realize the ratios were what they were. It never occurred to me there were so few black kids. We all seemed happy enough though. Then school officials took our town’s traditionally “black” schools and made the student populations roughly 50-50, while the “white” schools underwent similar changes. It was not easy. I remember terrible brawls, violent ones, in the courtyard outside the cafeteria at my middle school. In one fight, a friend of mine was beaten badly. Kids of both races were hurt. For weeks after these fights police patrolled the hallways at our school. The uniformed presence sure seemed odd. But we all got used to it. I’m not sure when the cops left, but eventually things cooled down at our school.
All those memories seem a lifetime ago. I guess in some ways, they are.