A Never Ending Pandemic, Systemic Racism

by Hank Silverberg 

 August 19, 1967 was a hot day. As evening came, the heat and humidity lingered and the windows were wide open in my parent's home in West Haven, Connecticut. We had no air conditioning.  At age 13, I was watching TV, wearing nothing but cut-off jeans when I decided to take a few minutes away from summer repeats and get myself some milk and cookies. 

 That one decision influenced the way I have viewed the world ever since. 

(The bottle looked like this)

 I opened the refrigerator and the   glass milk bottle, soaked with       condensation, fell out of my hands  and shattered into dozens of sharp  pieces on the floor. The price for  trying to satisfy my sweet tooth   included one very big puncture wound on my right foot.  

My parents helped me to the car with my foot wrapped in an old towel and off we went to Yale New Haven Hospital, where my mother worked.  

Ten minutes into the trip, when we reached the Kimberly Avenue Bridge, it was clear something was wrong. The white-bread world of the working class suburbs that I lived in would never be the same.  

A police officer stopped my Dad from driving onto Howard Avenue in New Haven where we were told a riot was underway. 

https://www.nhregister.com/new-haven/article/1967-riots-4-tense-days-that-began-11813921.php

 Like many other cities that infamous summer, the Civil Rights movement, which had looked so promising, had morphed into anger and frustration brought on by continuing poverty, poor housing, unemployment and police abuse of force. An unfair draft system that put a disproportionate number of black men in uniform fighting the unpopular war in Vietnam had added to it. 

At the ER, I was shuffled into a side room where a medical intern stitched up my wound, but not before I saw my first gunshot victim, a black man wounded in the chest, being escorted in by the police. 

Haight Asbury Free clinic, began in 1967
(Courtesy UCSF) 

Ironically, 1967 has also  gone down in history as the "Summer of Love" because of some memorable rock concerts, like a huge one in San Francisco. It featured legendary rock artists such as Jimmy Hendrix and a largely white audience.  

 

The 60's changed America. The media was bringing the summer of outrage into our living rooms along with increasing body counts from Southeast Asia. 

The assassinations of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 and the riots associated with those events, just piled it on. Much of white America woke up from the slumber of the post-World War Two baby boom. 

The term "white privilege" hadn't been coined yet, but some of us were beginning to catch on.

I remember as a teenager immediately paying more attention after that New Haven riot. I got into a fist fight with an acquaintance who used the "N" word on April 4th, 1968, after I expressed sorrow over Dr. King's murder. It sounds hard to believe now, when the world and the media is so different, but that was the first time I had ever heard that word used in context.   

  

(LBJ signs Civil Rights Act
Courtesy of LBJ Library).

The 1960's brought us   The Civil Rights Act,     The Voting Rights Act,   and laws against       discrimination in   housing and hiring. By   the late 70's or early 80's, many of us thought race was no longer an issue. We had black friends at school and in many of our neighborhoods. When we took jobs we found them working right beside us and often didn't make the distinction. As our children grew up and became adults, race was even less of an issue. After all, we elected Barack Obama as President. When the term "white privilege" entered the country's lexicon, we thought "well, that doesn't apply to me".    

 

 We were so wrong. It is really hard for anyone with a white face to imagine what it is like to be black or brown or red. Those of us in other minorities, in my case Jewish, have some idea, but my experiences with antisemitism are for another story.

Like 1968, America is now at a crossroads. What we are witnessing today is not just about the murder of George Floyd. It is not just about the deaths of Eric Garner or Travon Martin or Michael Brown, or the long list of other such killings. 

It is about the systemic racism that seems to make its way around all those well-intended laws passed in the 60's and 70's. It's about the original sin in America's creation where the U.S.  Constitution counted black slaves as only three-fifths of  a human being, and how long it took to be corrected.  It is something we are reminded about almost every day when we see monuments of confederate generals and military bases named after them (see below).  If you feel pride about those generals, please re-read a history book, written outside the southern states. 

   

For those of us who lived through the Civil Rights movement and the violence of the 1960's, it is a clear example of our failure to learn from history. We stopped after a few progressive steps, and our journey of a thousand miles is far from complete. 

Instead, we have run into a roadblock of resistance from those who yearn for what they call the "good old days". They use terms like "law and order," or "make America great again," as if they are a part of a magic spell to fix the racial inequity or make it go away. Frankly, the "good old days" were not so good, unless you were white, Protestant, straight and male.  

There are some people who have even suggested it might be better if the United States split into several countries (we have heard that nonsense before), so that regional differences do not tear us apart.  But that is not what America is all about. 

America is much like one of it's Founding Fathers--Thomas Jefferson. He was a political revolutionary who wanted to dump the repressive systems of the Old World while at the same time owning slaves and perpetuating the aristocracy with the inequality of his own time.  He was a radical who wanted to put an end to slavery in the Declaration of Independence, though it was edited out. But he also refused to free his own slaves while he was alive. Jefferson opposed the creation of a standing army as the Republic began, yet he was the first President to send U.S. Marines overseas to dethrone a foreign entity (Tripoli pirates).  

I have no golden solution to racism. Any politician or pundit who says they do is lying. The United States still offers more freedom and equality than many other places on Earth. Yet we allow minorities and immigrants to be abused and kept away from our country's full promise. We have let the racists crawl back under their rocks and into their caves a few times before. That can't happen again. We must try to reach deep into people's souls and convince them that it is better for all of us if racism in America ends--now.  If not,  I fear what our Founding Fathers called an "experiment" in government, will fail in the not too distant future.     

 

 Update:

I live about 30 miles from Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia.A few weeks ago I wrote about military bases named after confederate generals and why those names should be changed.  

Such bases serve a vital function in our national defense. But A.P. Hill, Braxton Bragg, John Bell Hood and others led armies in revolt against the United States and technically are traitors to this country. The bases were named after confederate generals during the Jim Crow era as a concession to local southern populations, and in perpetuation of the "Lost Cause Myth". It is much more than ironic that thousands of black soldiers, many who died in defense of the United States, were trained at those bases for over a hundred years.    

 Now, the U.S. Army has finally indicated name changes will be considered, and there are moves in Congress to make it so. But in the current climate, even finding an untarnished name might be difficult. 

My top suggestion would be to name one of those forts, particularly one in the deep south, after General Benjamin O. Davis, who lead the Tuskeegee Airmen in World War Two. It actually would also honor his father, General Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., who was the first African American General in the U.S. Army. Both men had to overcome racism in the military during their long careers, yet they both served with distinction.

 Davis, Jr., graduated from West Point in 1936 after getting the silent treatment from the other cadets. He once said the only two people who talked to him in the entire four years were the two Jewish cadets. 

Or the Army can bring back Fort Shaw, originally the name of a frontier outpost in Montana that no longer exists. It had been named after Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who led the famed 54th Massachusetts, the first all-volunteer black U.S. Army unit in the Civil War.   

Someone else has suggested renaming one of the forts after General John Pershing. As a young officer, Black Jack Pershing earned his nickname by leading the famed 10th Calvary, Buffalo Soldiers up San Juan Hill on the left flank of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders during the Spanish American War. But that may be problematic. Nineteen years later, during World War One, Pershing transferred all black American troops to French and British control so that they couldn't  fight along side white American units. 

There are clearly more candidates and I am sure they will be found. Either way, Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Fort Benning and Fort Hill need new names.  

Sad to say though, even if the forts were renamed, the communities around those bases would probably still bear the names of Hood and Bragg. 

(Your comments and suggestions are welcome)

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