Growing Up under Southern Apartheid (Part 1)

   The body of Rep. John Lewis crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. via horse-drawn carriage (photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

I grew up in small-town and rural Alabama. In 1978, I left the South to attend seminary in Mill Valley, California. One afternoon, in a casual conversation with a few classmates (we must have been going out to eat somewhere), I mentioned nostalgically that when I was a kid, our maid made the best cornbread – it was better than my mother’s recipe. One of my classmates who hailed from Arizona was astounded by my comment.

“Is your family rich?” he asked.

“Far from it,” I said. I then tried to explain to him how it was common in the South for even low-income families to hire maids from the Black community to help with housework. At that point, I realized that I was speaking of an era that had passed and I was trying to explain it to a person whose life experience gave him no frame of reference for what I was talking about.

The Long Shadow of Jim Crow

The Jim Crow South, in reaction to the Post-Civil War Reconstruction, set the legal stage for racial segregation and continued oppression of Blacks in a post-slavery society. When I was born in 1954 in Montgomery, Alabama, Jim Crow laws had been firmly established by the state’s 1901 Constitution and by local laws and ordinances throughout the state. Society was every bit as separated as South Africa’s apartheid government*.

My father was a pastor, and my mother a school teacher. Because of my father’s vocation, we moved about every five years, so my childhood was spent in Wedowee, Jackson’s Gap, and Dadeville. Since there were four of us kids and with my mother working as a high school English teacher, my parents often employed a maid to help with the cleaning and cooking. It was the expectation that respectable white women were able to find help as they managed the household. “Help,” of course, was the term used for maid service, always a woman from the Black community. The Black community was referred to in those days  as  “the colored quarters,” or simply, “the quarters.” Looking back, I am sure that term, quarters, harked back to the days of slave quarters on the plantation.

Often the maid would have to be picked up from her house and returned at the end of her workday. My father was usually the one to pick up the maid. Sometimes he would ask if I wanted to ride with him to take the maid home, which I always did if asked. It was the same as, "Do you want to ride with me while I run to the store?" (or to the post office, etc.). Those trips to take the maid home were a part of my social education. I witnessed the difference in living conditions. Some roads were unpaved, houses were unpainted shacks. The poverty was apparent. Children were often barefoot and in torn clothing. Dogs ran loose and were often thin and hungry-looking (I remember feeling sorry for the children and the dogs). 

As children, we would naturally ask why these people lived the way they did. Usually, the answer would be something along the lines of, “They are poor, uneducated, they don’t know how to do any better.” Sometimes there would be the implication that we were helping them out by offering them employment.

Unease about the Future

There is one thing I remember about those trips into the quarters, and I remember it in my gut – it was the uncomfortable feeling that when I grew up, it would be my job to go into the Black community to pick up the maid. As a child, I envisioned that life would go on as is, and I was not sure how I would manage that particular adult role. I tried not to think about it too much and I would return to my childhood activities once we came back home. Growing up would come another day.

As our nation mourns the loss of Congressman John Lewis who did so much to remove those Jim Crow laws that kept Blacks oppressed, I am taking some time on my blog to recall what those days were like in Alabama before this son of sharecroppers from Troy, Alabama helped to bring about a new era.

                                                                                                         Part 2: What's in a Name?>

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* (Apartheid: an Afrikaans term meaning "apartness") South Africa’s apartheid government was established in 1948 and was brought to an end in 1993. For a brief article by Morgan Winsor comparing Apartheid & Jim Crow, go here.

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