I would never want to be a policeman. From my viewpoint, it is a dangerous job for which they are terribly underpaid. More often than not, they deal with the dregs of society, and their view of the world is colored by seeing nothing but the dark underbelly of a particular jurisdiction. A simple traffic stop can suddenly turn deadly, and the stress of the job must be incredible. My friend and college roommate, Bruce, was Chief of Police in our hometown of Burbank, Illinois for years. I always remember him telling me about his “ride-along” with the police during his internship. He said they were called to check out a domestic disturbance, and he was told to grab a flashlight before they went to the door of the house. This was one of those long, metal flashlights with a line of heavy, “D” batteries in the handle. As Bruce hefted the weighty item in his hand, he asked what he was supposed to do with it. He was told something like, “It’s not for reading maps, kid. If this goes bad, it can be a weapon.” This story illustrates how even a seemingly innocuous situation can be fraught with danger. On top of the obvious hazards of the job, police often find themselves in situations for which they are ill-prepared. In particular, they are put on the front-lines in dealing with psychotic or mentally ill people. Most of the intelligent calls for police reform do not call for actual “defunding” or the abolition of police forces, but for dividing responsibilities so that fully trained persons are able to deal with specific situations. I say all of this as a reminder of what a difficult occupation being a police officer can be.
Still, the situation that erupted in the US over the past few weeks points out that something has to change. In 1964, segregation and racial discrimination legally ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. A year later, voting restrictions based on race officially came to an end. Yet these problems are still very much with us today. The truth is, it is much easier to pass legislation than it is to change the hearts and minds of people; the government cannot create economic opportunities, open doors to equal education, or end systemic racism with a stroke of the pen. These issues are much more complicated, and we are still wrestling with them almost sixty years after those landmark laws were passed.
No one is born thinking they are better or worse than those of another skin color. Racism is an attitude that is taught by parents, friends, authority figures, and a particular society. I was raised in a racist household that, in both subtle and overt ways, taught me that black people were to be feared and distrusted. I remember my dad putting a Confederate-flag sticker on our front door, even though he had never been south of 127th Street. Our neighborhood of Mt. Greenwood was tucked into the southwest corner of Chicago. My neighbors were predominantly policemen, firemen, and other city workers who had to live within the city limits to keep their jobs. Mt. Greenwood was as far from the inner city as you could get while still officially living in Chicago. It was also a bastion of segregation, with a buffer zone of railroad tracks and cemeteries protecting its denizens from the encroachment of African Americans. In a neighborhood of Irish-Catholics of modest economic means, my family of Scottish-Catholics was the closest thing we had to a minority. That was my world growing up, and I never crossed paths with people of any color other than white. Until I was thirteen.
I went to a pretty good grammar school (K-through-8) of 1500 white students. That school fed into a good high school called Morgan Park. In 1967, the Board of Education in Chicago announced that they would integrate my school with eight black students so that those kids could get the opportunity to attend a better HS, and, hopefully, increase their chances of getting into college. On the first day of classes, my school was surrounded by 3,000 angry white people, reporters, and other interested onlookers. I watched as a station wagon dropped off those eight terrified kids, who then had to walk from the curb to the front door, a 100-foot gauntlet of people screaming, spitting, and calling them the worst names you can imagine. I recognized many of my friends, neighbors, and role models in that fuming mob. (See picture above)
Within a few days, though, things calmed down, and the school year settled into a familiar routine. Thanks to the institutional regimentation of the Chicago Public School System, I got to know one of the new students. Omar Hester and John Henderson were next to each other alphabetically, therefore, we were assigned neighboring seats in every class. With my upbringing, I’m sure I was leery and standoffish toward this new boy, but the artificial cultural barriers between us soon dissolved. I learned that he was smarter than I was, he worked harder, and he was funnier than me. I also admired his determination to withstand prejudice and verbal abuse in order to fight for what he believed was his right to a good education. It wasn’t as if we became close friends, and we never hung out together outside of school, but he taught me that I had nothing to fear and much to learn from people who were different than me. The summer after that school year, we moved a couple of miles away to Burbank, and I never saw Omar again. Even at that time, though, I often thought about how unfair it was that I should receive better opportunities for education and for life simply because I lived on one side of the cemetery and had white skin, while someone else on the other side with dark skin did not have those same chances. That year changed me in important ways, and college, my study of history, and especially having black teammates on the track team, made those changes permanent.
In the past twenty years, talking to my African-American next-door neighbor in Nashville, I became more aware of the fear of being pulled over for “Driving While Black.” I, of course, never had to endure that particular humiliation, but I once had a similar experience. In the 1980s, I got a gig singing at a North-Side club near Wrigley Field. It was a gay bar that welcomed people of all sexual preferences. I left the place at about 2:00 am, and, as I was walking the few blocks to my car, I noticed that I was being slowly trailed by a police car. When I reached my beat-up vehicle, the police turned on their flashers and got out of their squad. They made me open my guitar case and looked through it, apparently searching for drugs. They examined my license and asked what I was doing in that neighborhood, so far from my home, at that hour. They looked in my car with flashlights. They let me go eventually, but followed me for several blocks until I pulled onto Lake Shore Drive. I’m sure that if I had so much as a broken tail-light, they would have ticketed me or worse. As I drove home, I was shaking my head, trying to figure out what had just happened, when it hit me: they assumed, that since I was coming out of a gay bar, I must be homosexual. I had been harassed for being gay. I laughed at the time, because nothing bad happened, and it made for a good story. Later, though, I was struck by the unfairness of being judged by an officer’s false assumption. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live with that unfairness every day as black people do.
After my last blog entry, my friend Barbara commented that she and her daughter (both white), attended a Black Lives Matter protest in their small, conservative town in Illinois wearing shirts that read, “I am listening.” The next day, some of her friends politely questioned her about her participation in what they probably viewed as an almost subversive activity. That story reminded me of an anecdote from the 1840s. Transcendentalist author Henry David Thoreau was in jail, having been arrested for refusing to pay taxes levied to finance the Mexican-American War. Thoreau—correctly—believed that the war was being waged to take land from Mexico in order to add new slave states to the Union and thus expand slavery. He declined to support such an endeavor and broke the law as a protest. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson came to see him in jail, asking, with amusement in his voice, “Henry, what are you doing in here?” to which Thoreau replied, “I think the real question is ‘What are you doing out there?’” This situation is not a “Black Thing” or a “White Thing.” It is “Our Thing.”
That Thoreau story makes me feel a bit guilty for not doing more, but Kathleen and I are not the activist, protesting sorts. The Covid pandemic has also stifled any impulse we may have had to join marches in recent days. It may be a character flaw, but I have always preferred a quiet form of protest, relying on words and stories to change opinions. This has been my modus operandi while on stage as a folk-singer, in my classroom, or now, in this blog. Still, I have always admired the courage and determination of American protesters throughout history. Whether the cause was Black Lives Matter, an end to the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, unionizing workers in the 1930s, the right to vote for women, or the anti-slavery battles of the early 1800s, those people who fought and died for freedom in the streets of our nation were genuine heroes. They deserve our respect every bit as much as those who fought overseas in our wars.
In fact, one of the first protests in our history occurred in Boston, Massachusetts and helped spark the Revolutionary War. Tensions had been building in that city for months as the British soldiers increased in numbers and occupied the city with occasional brutal repression. Protests against that oppression and what were regarded as unfair taxes grew angrier. In March, 1770, fighting between people in the streets and the soldiers erupted and led to the British firing into the crowd, wounding six and killing five people. Many historians point to that event as the true start of the Revolution, which eventually gave us our freedom and started our democratic-republic.
Protests have been a crucial part of our nation since its inception. We are a great nation today, in large part, because of those people who were brave enough to stand up for their rights. It is also important to remember that the first man killed that March day in Boston and, thus, in the Revolution, was an African-American man named Crispus Attucks.