Hatred and racism: From the typical to the extreme.

Another story about my mother tells you she was way ahead of her time. When she moved to Memphis, she was 17 years old. Ridgidly enforced segregation was the rule at that time. One day, she got on a bus and the only seat left was in the back. Being completely naive about segregation, she trotted on back to the back of the bus and sat down where all the blacks were sitting. The bus driver actually stopped the bus, went back and brought her up to the front of the bus. She asked him why? He said because you're not supposed to sit back there. She asked why. He said because whites sit in the front of the bus. She asked why. I don't suppose she ever got an answer.

If there's one great truth to be gleaned from all these stories, it's that we are shaped by our surroundings for good or ill. It takes a strong person to rise above them. And, as you've already figured out, my mother was a strong and wonderful woman. Did she have her problems? Absolutely, but nowhere near what they would have been if she had followed her mother's path.


Despite being a bizarre concept, officially sanctioned segregation existed in Texas all the way into the 1960s. When I first came back to Ft. Worth in 1961, they still had segregated rest rooms, segregated drinking fountains and segregated lunch counters. Never could figure out what made the water different that came out of the black fountain as opposed to the white fountain. And when I started voting at the age of 21, I paid a 50 cent poll tax. While no one said so, the purpose of the poll tax was to keep the poor blacks who couldn't afford 50 cents from voting. If there was anything good about the segregation in Ft. Worth, it was that it died with a whimper and not a bang.


But just when you think there’s more good in humans than you’d been giving them credit for, you run across stories like this one. My mother's oldest brother (born in 1893) was probably the worst of the entire family when it came to racism. By the way, I'll warn you right now that some of you are going to find the rest of this story highly offensive, brutal and/or even repulsive, both in language and action.

Now that I've warned you, I continue. Somewhere around 1919 or so in Mississippi, a white girl was kidnapped, raped and left to die. The man who did it, a black, took off running but knew even when he was raping the girl that he was going to get caught. Knowing that, why he did it in the first place in anyone's guess. But the important thing to remember in this is that he was absolutely, totally, undoubtedly guilty.

Well, they caught him. There was no trial and since he was undeniably guilty, it would've been a formality anyway. So, the plan was to execute him on the spot. Aside from the fact that they were actually getting ready to commit a lynching, you would have thought they planned to hang him. But that was not to be.

Instead, they drove a post into the ground, strapped they poor guy to it, stacked kindling and wood around him and lit it off, burning him alive.

My uncle came on the scene, presumably too late to help, but had absolutely no objection to what they were doing. In fact, he stood around and watched the guy burn until the last drop of grease sizzled into the flames. Then he went home and told my mother about it.

She was, as you would expect, horrified. "How could you stand to watch something like that?" she asked him. His response, which was so typical of his generation, was "What's the problem? He was nothin' but an old nigger."

Sadly, you will still find that attitude in existance today. It's just been covered up with a veneer of civilization. I'd like to think that the kind of hatred evidenced by this last episode will eventually disappear, but considering human nature, I'm not holding out a lot of hope.