Chapter One: Parents

My father grew up in Plentywood, Montana during the 1930s and early '40s. Plentywood is a tiny town on the northeast corner of Montana. Interestingly, it is the place where Sitting Bull surrendered to the U.S. Army. In 1940, the population was around 1600.

The current racial composition in Plentywood, taken from the 2020 census:
White: 89.78%
Two or more races: 7.19%
Native American: About 2.36%
Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander: 0.39%
Other race: 0.28%
Black: 0%
Asian: 0%

Given that the population in Plentywood only grew by 100 people in 85 years, it’s probably fair to say that my father's exposure to Black people was little to none. Sadly, he had a lot of animosity toward Native Americans so it would make sense that my father would have an aversion to any person of color.

My parents met in Atlanta, Georgia, sometime in the late 1940s. My father was stationed in the Army there. My mother, and her mother, had moved to Atlanta from Alabama in order to get away from my violent grandfather. My parents married after knowing each other for only about 6 weeks. They were both 16 years old. Apparently my father had lied about his age so he could join the army. My mother was furious when she learned that he wasn't 19 like he said he was. Three years later my father left the Army and they moved to Florida. There, he trained to be a longshoreman, working along the St. Johns river in Jacksonville, Florida, a major trading port. 

Although my parents moved around a lot, they always came back to Florida. Over a decade had passed, and my father was now a full stevedore superintendent. When the cargo ships came into port, he hired local workers called “day gangs.” All of them were Black men. My father often complained, calling them useless, stinking, lazy N...s. 

“All they care about is booze and sex,” he'd say. He would pay for their lunches, not because he worried about them going hungry, but because he said he couldn’t trust them to come back from a lunch break. “They’d be looking for a bottle or some woman to lay up with,” he’d say.

When I was much older and visited my parents, my father’s warped white superiority was still on full display. I would challenge him but he would laugh at my “ignorance.” He would try to explain it to me.

“They’re not fully human you know. They have to be trained.” 

“They can’t be trusted, they’ll rob you blind.” 

“There’s more going on in those Black churches than you know. See, the white men left them alone in their own churches, thinking it was good for them. The blacks figured out the white men weren’t paying attention while they were in church. That’s how the civil rights movement started. We took our eyes off them and now they're trying to take over our country.”

I hated the way he bowed up while on one of his racial rants. He’d strut around like a showy gamecock and crow his staunch pronouncements with frightening conviction. 

His antics disturbed my mother but not enough for her to put her foot down. She had her own problems with racial ignorance. I have a vivid memory of her cackling gleefully while watching an old rerun of a minstrel show.* “They’re so funny! That’s exactly how N..s act,” she declared. “I know ‘cause I grew up around them.”

She told me that she knew it was wrong to talk that way about Black people and that I shouldn’t do it. She said, “I don’t hate them, that wouldn’t be right. I like some of them. They can be sweet, and they’re funny.” But she also said, “I just don’t want them in my house. They’re dirty and have bugs. And I don’t like the ones that act all smart either.” She cautioned me, “You can't talk about them around your daddy, though. I've tried to talk to him but he gets so upset, and it makes him mean.” That was an old familiar story to her.

My mother grew up in Gadsden, Alabama in the 1930s. There was a large Ku Klux Klan presence there, thousands of members strong. They frequently held public rallies and cross burnings. At the time, the population in Gadsden was around 27,000, almost a third of whom were Black. During this period, the Black population faced extreme racial segregation and violence. My mother remembered the clan marches and rallies with vivid clarity. She hid with her sisters to watch robed and hooded men march with torches. Their unified chant sent terror through the streets and chills down the spines of children.

She said she sometimes played with black children when she was a little girl. She had to be careful, though, because her father was a member of the KKK. I was shocked to realize that my grandfather was a klansman. 

My mother told me a story about a group of klansmen who came to her house once and beat the tar out of her father because they found out that he regularly beat her mother. They told my grandfather that the Ku Klux Klan was an honorable organization, and that a man beating his wife was not Christian-like. Let that sink in for a moment. 

Sadly, my grandmother, whom I never met, died of an aneurysm at 51. She had taken one too many blows to the head.  

As a young child I absorbed these indelible stories. I had no idea I was being groomed to be a racist. It was normal life to me, to call black people the N word. It was normal to assume that they would always steal because they were poor; that if they drove nice cars they must be drug dealers; that if they wore nice clothes, they must have stolen them; and that every black man was a rapist. That’s what I was taught. It was simply how things were. 

To this day, those remnant thoughts, like technical glitches, still appear in my mind. It troubles me to think that I didn't really notice them until I took the time to educate myself on the actual history of the United States.  How by using slavery (free labor), we became the richest country in the world. How our early congressional leaders sanctioned slavery, even using the “Good Book” to justify it. And how after slavery was outlawed, these same leaders continued the practice dressed up in Jim Crow laws.** Those facts are the foundation of an entire system that, in many ways, is still chugging along largely invisible to white people. 

If I wasn’t working so hard to free myself from those automatic thoughts, I’d despise myself for still having them. At least I now have a better understanding that these thoughts are a consequence of my upbringing, and not only mine, but my parents’ upbringing, and their parents’, and so on.

I admit that I sometimes feel envious when I see the kinship among Black folk. I feel a sense of longing for validity among my own people, whoever “they” are. What an odd notion, coming from a privileged white person. Let that sink in for a moment.

AI inquiry: 

*A minstrel show was a form of American entertainment popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These shows featured white performers in blackface makeup portraying stereotypical and demeaning caricatures of Black people. The performances typically included comedy skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, often appropriating and distorting elements of African American culture. Minstrel shows played a significant role in perpetuating harmful racial stereotypes and are now widely recognized as deeply racist and offensive.

**Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes enacted in the Southern United States between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries. These laws enforced racial segregation and discrimination against African Americans. Key aspects of Jim Crow laws included:

Segregation: Mandating separate public facilities for whites and blacks, including schools, restaurants, theaters, public transportation, and even drinking fountains.

Voting restrictions: Implementing various measures like literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses to disenfranchise African American voters.

Interracial relationships: Prohibiting interracial marriage and intimate relationships between whites and blacks.

Economic oppression: Limiting job opportunities and economic advancement for African Americans.

Social etiquette: Enforcing rules that required African Americans to show deference to whites in public spaces.

These laws created a system of legal discrimination that supported white supremacy and relegated African Americans to second-class citizenship. The Jim Crow era lasted from the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s until the 1960s when the Civil Rights Movement led to the passage of federal laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed racial discrimination and segregation.

The effects of Jim Crow laws continue to impact American society today, contributing to ongoing racial disparities in areas such as education, wealth, and criminal justice.