Report from Kenya #637 -- An Anti-Racist Upbringing
David Zarembka
An Anti-Racist Upbringing
Report from Kenya #637 – January 8, 2020
If you want the URL for this report, contact me at davidz...@gmail.com
Picture of my family about 1951. Front row from left, my father, Richard Zarembka; sister, Arlene; sister, Elaine; mother Helen Jane. Back row from left, my brother, Paul, and me.
Note: I suggest that, as part of reading this Report from Kenya, you listen to all four of the songs that I have linked.
I get annoyed and upset, when Americans assume that because I was raised in the United States during the racist 1950s (I was born in 1943), I somehow imbibed a conscious and subconscious racist white superiority complex that I now need to admit, feel guilty about, and expunge from my spirit. As I will detail in this Report from Kenya, this did not happen to me as I had what would now be called an anti-racist upbringing.
Let me start with the fact that, as soldiers of Ulysses Grant’s Army of the West, three of my great-great-uncles on the Colvin side of my family were killed during the Civil War. Three more great-great-uncles from Vermont on my Scott side of the family were wounded fighting for the Union fighting on the eastern front. Both my great-grandfathers were too young to fight in the US Civil War.
The second family story concerns how terrified my grandmother, Flora Scott Colvin, was during the July 1917 East St. Louis race riot. Actually calling it a “riot” is whitewashing. Rather it was a “massacre” as white vigilantes shot, beat, killed, and drove all Negros (as they were called then and as I will use to get you in to the historical context of that time) out of East St. Louis. So why was my grandmother concerned? My grandfather, Ernest Elmer Colvin, was the St. Louis correspondent for Associated Press and covered the massacre. I grew up knowing all about this.
I have always wondered what my grandfather wrote about the massacre. Recently as I was researching about the massacre, I ordered (from Amazon for 99 cents) the kindle edition of Ida B. Wells’ 61 page report The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century (1917). See here for the revolting details of the massacre. Ida B. Wells herself is one of the neglected and forgotten heroes of the anti-lynching movement in the twentieth century. On page 36 to 37 of her report I read what must have been written by my grandfather.
An Associated Press dispatch of July 10th, 1917, from East St. Louis had the following:
“A man arrested by Capt. O. C. Smith, F Company, 4th Illinois Infantry, was released by the police, ostensibly “on order of the state’s attorney. Captain Smith asserted that he heard the man say:
“I’ve killed my share of Negroes today. I have killed so many I am tired and somebody else can finish them.”
When Capt. Smith went to the police station yesterday to press a formal charge he found that the prisoner had been released.”
As I am doing this story in chronological order, the next incident was one my Mother, Helen Jane Colvin Zarembka, told me in my youth. She was always proud of the fact that St. Louis never had segregated buses and street cars. During the 1920s when she was in high school, she sat next to a Negro woman on the streetcar. One of her white friends chastised her for doing this. My Mom responded by telling me that “she dropped that girl as a friend.”
My parents were both classical music enthusiasts. My Mom told me this story: On Eastern Sunday, April 9, 1939, contralto Marian Anderson presented a concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, attended by an integrated audience of 75,000 people. The issue was that Marian Anderson had requested to hold the concert at Constitution Hall, the largest hall in DC seating 4,000 people. It was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and they had a segregation policy and refused. Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s wife (bless her soul), had previously invited Marian Anderson to sing at the White House and was aghast at the rejection. She publicly withdrew her membership in the DAR. She then obtained permission for the concert to be held on federal public land at the Lincoln Memorial. As you can see from the picture above, this gave a tremendous symbolic message to her concert with the statue of President Abraham Lincoln, who freed the American slaves, solemnly watching over the scene. Marian Anderson began the concert singing America the Beautiful. You can watch it here.
I suspect that my Mom, then 25 years old, listened to the concert on the radio. More importantly, although by ancestry she was eligible to be a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, she told me that she could never become a member of such a racist organization.
As early as I can remember, my parents took me and my siblings to the outdoor Muny Opera in Forest Park, St. Louis. I don’t think we ever missed a summer show and we were rewarded at intermission with an ice cream bar. I saw the light opera, Show Boat, (1927 with music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and P. G. Wodehouse), a number of times. Its best piece is the song, Ole Man River. I distinctly remember my Mom being so excited to hear Paul Robeson (another neglected and forget hero of the resistance to segregation) sing this song. Since I don’t think he could have sung it at the Muny Opera when I was young, we must have seen Robeson singing Ole Man River in the 1936 movie. You can watch him singing the song here. I knew the words of the song quite well and played it on my violin so I well understood the conditions that Negroes faced.
Here is the Wikipedia description of one of the scenes in the first act of Show Boat:
During the rehearsal for that evening, Julie and Steve learn that the town sheriff is coming to arrest them. Steve takes out a large pocket knife and makes a cut on the back of her hand, sucking the blood and swallowing it. Pete returns with the sheriff, who insists the show cannot proceed because Julie is a mulatto who has been passing as white and local law prohibits mixed marriages. Julie admits that her mother was black, but Steve tells the sheriff that he also has "black blood" in him, so their marriage is legal in Mississippi. The troupe backs him up, boosted by the ship's pilot Windy McClain, a longtime friend of the sheriff. The couple have escaped the charge of miscegenation, but they still have to leave the show boat; identified as black, they can no longer perform for the segregated white audience. Cap'n Andy fires Pete, but in spite of his sympathy for Julie and Steve, he cannot violate the law for them.
My Mom had to explain this scene, the most dramatic one in the opera when Steve cuts Julie’s hand, to my siblings and me. The whole point of this incident in the musical is to display the absurdity of “black blood” and the racism behind it. There is no way my Mom could have explained this to us except to emphasis how absurd the racial classifications were.
Another opera I saw a number of times at the Muny was South Pacific (1949 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II). One of the very many excellent songs in that opera is You've Got To Be Carefully Taught. You can listen to it here. Here are the words:
You've got to be taught to hate and fear.
You've got to be taught from year to year.
Its got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid of people
Who's eyes are oddly made
And people who's skin is a different shade.
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate.
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be carefully taught.
I was not being carefully taught. Here are some examples.
I went to the Clayton Public Schools, segregated until 1954 when I entered the sixth grade. The school system’s Negro school, called Crispus Attucks Elementary School, was about two blocks from our house. So as a child I knew who Crispis Attucks was. Do you? If not, you can find out here. The school district ran a summer camp for six weeks each summer and, in the infinite wisdom of segregation, the summer camp was not segregated. So I knew all the Negro kids in town. One, named Arthur, was my age, and there were softball games between the different school camps. A few parents came to watch the games and the white parents sat on the bleachers on the third base side of the field. Arthur’s Dad, who was a teacher in the St. Louis public schools at the Negro Soldan High School, usually came to his son’s games, but sat alone on the bleachers along the first base side. I used to always say “hi” to him, but I wondered why he was so anti-social to sit by himself and not with the other parents. In short, I did not even know what segregation was even as it was right in front of me.
Many Saturdays we went to visit my Father’s Polish parents in the Polish enclave in St. Louis. To get there and back we had to pass through the Negro section of town. During one trip my parents indicated a young man standing on a corner and said he was “half white and half Negro.” I had seen the man and, if he were half white/half Negro, I assumed that the right half of him would be white and the left half of him would be Negro. But he didn’t look that way so I decided, in my naïve wisdom, that the top half of his body must be white and the bottom half from the waist down would be dark.
There was another lesson in our trips to my grandparents’ house. As we drove back and forth over the weeks, months, and years, we could not help to miss the block busting that was occurring along Delmar Boulevard. Block busting was the detrimental practice of some real estate firms to scare white home owners next to the expanding Negro community to panic and sell their homes for half a prayer. The real estate companies would then divide up the nicely build brick houses into as many apartments as they could and then rent them at as high a price as they could to Negro immigrants from the South who were fleeing the horrible conditions there during the great Negro migration north. They would not maintain the building as they milked them for whatever they could. In time the houses would be uninhabitable and the companies would stop paying their real estate taxes on the buildings and they would become vacant and abandoned. This destroyed large sections of St. Louis. When the real estate companies finished block busting one block, as we could observe in our trips to my grandparents’ house, they moved to the next one.
This was not an academic exercise for me. I knew the names of the firms which were most prominent in this block busting business. There is no doubt that my parents, siblings, and I thought this practice to be reprehensible. The problem I had was that the son of the major block busting real estate firm attended Clayton High School with me. How should I interact with him? Could I blame him for the bad things his father’s company was doing? I didn’t really resolve this issue as I just avoided him as he was not in any of my classes and didn’t play any of the sports that I played.
I well remember the sit-ins at eating establishments during the 1950s civil rights movement. At that time most whites would not eat alongside Negros, particularly in the South, but also in most of the rest of the country. The St. Louis Post Dispatch, where my grandfather Colvin was the copy editor until he retired, and which we read every day, covered this drama extensively. We did not own a TV at that time to watch the one available channel. I thought this was because we were too poor to afford a TV, but the real reason is that my parents thought we were much better off playing outside or, (heaven forbid these days), reading books. My Mom made it a point to always eat lunch together with the Negro household help that came once per week to help with washing clothes and cleaning the house. Moreover my Mon told me that, when she was a child in the 1920s, she and her parents always ate together with the Negro woman that they employed, whose name I think was Elizabeth. What were all those sit-ins about? Allowing Negroes to eat in the same establishments as whites which my family had already been doing for generations.
When I was about ten, my Mom was driving my friends and me home from some activity. I was sitting in the back seat of the car with Louis and I asked him if he were Jewish. When we got home, my Mom bawled me out, telling me that I should never ask a person if they were Jewish. OK. But could I ask a person if they were Catholic or Episcopalian or any religion? Could I ask him or her if he or she were Greek, Irish, or of other national origin? I concluded that I could not ask anyone an identity question. So I learned never to do this. Wouldn’t the world be a wonderful place in no one could ask or assume identity questions, useful only in stereotyping people, of anyone they met?
Here is another incident where I was not properly taught. In the 1950s there seems to have been a new Tarzan film every year. One year there was a new Tarzan movie out and I begged to go see it. I asked my parents, and in this case, as I remember it, my Dad firmly told me I could not go because the Tarzan movies were derogatory to Africans. I was in a huff for the next few days about this rejection. But in the long run as I became interested in Africa, I did not need to overcome any negative images of Africa that I might have picked up from watching a Tarzan movie.
Joan Fontaine and Harry Belafonte, one of the two interracial love-interest couples in Island in the Sun.
My parents did take me to another movie. In 1957 when I was fourteen years old, we saw Island in the Sun which addressed interracial relationships. The movie was placed in a mythical British-controlled Caribbean island so as not to imply that this was happening in the United States. Nonetheless the leading actress, Joan Fontaine, received hate mail and death threats from the Klu Klux Klan. It was not shown in the US south and, when it was shown in Minneapolis, it produced a riot. I remember as a kid, that I did not understanding why the white woman left her boyfriend. It seemed a phony ending to me which of course was necessary since interracial marriage was still illegal in many parts of the US.
Since the movie made such an impression on me, I decided to watch it again. I was surprised when I found it on YouTube. By far the best part of the film was the opening theme song, Island in the Sun, partially composed and sung by Harry Belafonte, who spent eight years of his childhood in Jamaica. You can watch it here. If you look at this clip you can see at the end where the white woman turns against him and walks away. Look at the picture above of Fontaine and Belafonte. Although they were supposed to be “lovers”, not once in the movie was Harry Belafonte allowed to even touch Fontaine, for example, kissing or even holding hands. The picture above is the closest, most romantic scene between these two in the movie.
It was clear to me later from seeing Island in the Sun and the discussions we had about the movie, that my parents would have no objection to my marrying a Kenyan, Rodah Wayua, as I did in 1969, only 12 years later.
On May 17, 1954, the US Supreme Court in the case, Brown versus Board of Education, outlawed segregated schools in the United States. The Clayton Public School immediately closed the Crispus Attucks Elementary School and integrated its schools. I well remember that my parents whole-heartedly approved of this and my Mom, if I remember correctly, called segregated schools “silly.”
In sixth grade, there were two Negro boys in my class, Arthur, mentioned above, and Ike. The class had 31 students. There were five rows of six desks each with the 31st desk at the front next to the window. If you can envision this, you can see that the extra seat in the front had only one “neighbor” rather than two, three, or four as all the other seats had. Arthur was assigned to this 31st seat and therefore isolated. I was assigned the seat right behind him as his only neighbor. At the end of the year, Arthur did not feel comfortable in a white Meramec School environment and moved to an all-Negro public school in St. Louis where his parents taught. Can you blame him after this isolation?
Unlike Arthur who was a good student, Ike was not a particularly good student and the next year the school had him repeat the sixth grade. I was therefore back in an all-white classroom. But my interactions with Ike didn’t end. When I was in eighth grade and Ike was in the seventh grade, Meramac School where we attended won the district soft ball championship. I remember the title game against our rival school, Glenridge, where as the catcher, I threw out two out of the three players trying to steal second base and also the one who tried to steal third base. I realized, though, that I was able to do this because Ike, who was the pitcher, threw extremely fast, allowing me enough time to throw out the Glenridge runners. I don’t know how I can convey how exciting all this was to me as an eighth grader.
This then repeated itself in high school. In my junior year, Clayton High School had a very good baseball team. Here again I was the catcher and Ike was the main pitcher, although to save his arm he could not pitch every game. He was extremely good and the main reason our team did well. He was difficult to catch. His fast ball hurt so much that I put a sponge in my catcher’s mitt to soften the blow from catching his hard pitches. Our coach thought he was good enough to play for a minor league baseball team. We won our St. Louis County league, but lost out during the state championship when Ike was not pitching. The next year Ike quit high school and joined the military. I never saw him again.
Here is a story about Ike’s sister, Beatrice. She was in my sister, Elaine’s, class. My Dad was a photographer in those old days when it was hard to take good pictures. We have a picture of my sister’s birthday party from 1954 or 1955 and Beatrice attended. Since all the girls in her class were invited to the birthday party, I am sure that my Mom or Elaine would not have considered not inviting Beatrice because she was a Negro.
The incident occurred some years later when Elaine was in ninth grade. My Mom didn’t believe that girls were inferior to boys. For example, contrary to the conventional wisdom of that era, girls could be just as good in math and science as boys as my Mom majored in Math and minored in Astronomy at the University of Missouri and she told me that she frequently was the only female in her classes. It is not surprising then that Elaine became a doctor and Arlene became a lawyer.
When my brother went to 9th grade at Wydown School, he walked the mile or so to and from school. The following year when I was in the 9th grade, I did the same. Two years later it was Elaine’s turn. The custom then was that girls did not walk that long distance to school. Either their parents drove them or they paid to take the bus. Mom would have none of this, “If the boys can walk, so can the girls.” So Elaine also walked to school only with Beatrice. Beatrice’s father was the custodian on one of the office building in downtown Clayton and was given a basement apartment as part of his position. I doubt he had a car and the family didn’t have the money for Beatrice to ride the bus every day. So Elaine and Beatrice walked to and from school together.
At the end of the school year, Wydown School had a talent show. Beatrice and Elaine decided that Beatrice would sing a song and Elaine would accompany her on the piano. Although I did not attend the concert, I do remember, since we had a piano in our house, Beatrice coming over to our house to practice with Elaine. This interracial performance was not completely well received by some members of the school community. A few years after this, one summer evening when I was taking a stroll in town, I ran in to Arthur, who I hadn’t seen for many years. When I talked to him, I am not certain that he knew exactly who I was, but when I told him my name, he remembered “Zarembka” and the accompaniment Elaine had performed with Beatrice. I could see him relax with me and we had a pleasant conversation.
When I was in the 9th grade, I was required to take a one semester civic education class. The topic of Africa was covered for one week. The exam at the end of the week was to place the names of the countries of Africa in the appropriate place on a map of the continent. I got 100 percent on this test and was the only one in the class who did. I have always wondered, “Did I do well on this exam because I was already interested in Africa or did I become interested in Africa because I did well on this exam?” I still don’t know the answer to this dilemma.
To end my anti-racist upbringing, let me tell a last story. During the summer of 1961 after I graduated from high school and was on my way to college, I got a job as the out-going mail clerk for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (see mast head above on the picture of the East St. Louis race massacre). I worked in downtown St. Louis from 10:00 AM until 6:00 PM, taking the bus to and from work. I remembered that my Mom had been so proud of St. Louis for not having segregated public transport. But I noticed in my daily ride home that most of the Negro riders sat in the back of the bus. One day on my trip home, I sat myself right in the middle of the bus. I then counted how many Negroes sat in the front half of the bus and how many in the back of the bus. I did likewise for the white riders. Here are the results: About 90 percent of the Negro riders sat in the back half of the bus and only 10 percent in the front of the bus. For whites, two-thirds sat in the front of the bus while one-third sat in the back half. My conclusion from my informal research was that those segregated against often promote their own segregation even when they don’t have to.
This was how I was raised by my parents. I still haven’t watched a Tarzan movie. As to asking people their identity, here today decades later in Kenya, even though Kenyans are proud of their tribal affiliation and would not be offended if I ask a Kenyan what tribe he or she is from, I still cannot do this. Lifelong habits are hard to break. I am eternally grateful and blessed for how my parents raised me to be anti-racist.
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David Zarembka
Email: davidz...@gmail.com
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