Growing Up under Southern Apartheid (Part 2)

Downtown Wedowee as it looks today (photo by Courthouselover at Flickr)

What's in a Name?

When I was a year old, my family moved to Wedowee, Alabama when my father became pastor of the First Baptist Church. We lived there until I was six, so many of my first-experiences happened in Wedowee. It was where I had my first best friend, my first explorations of the Five & Ten Cent store, my first time to attend Sunday School and kindergarten. My understanding of family and community was honed during that time. I was happy and protected as any toddler or preschooler’s life should be.

Naturally, my first awareness of race emerged in those young years in Wedowee. One early encounter that I recall was when I was playing alone out in the front yard of the pastorium where we lived. It was a quiet neighborhood, and I was rolling about in the leaves near the street. As I sat there on the ground, I saw a Black man walking by. I was a shy, quiet kid, so I said nothing, but I watched the man as he walked by. He looked down at me as he walked and said, “I ain’t gonna hurt ya.” As he kept walking by he repeated, “I ain’t gonna hurt ya.”

I had no fear of being hurt, and I remember wondering why he was saying that. Later I went to my mother and I mentioned the Black man walking by and I asked her he kept saying he wouldn't hurt me.  As I recall, my mother said something like, he probably wanted to make sure I wasn’t afraid of him, that I need not worry.

In our small town, there was never any sense of danger that I can recall. My older brother has said that on any given Saturday when he went off to play with friends, the only direction he got from our mother was, “Just be back by suppertime.” Everyone knew that everyone else would be looking out for the kids.

Careful with the N-Word

It would have been in the late 1950s when my brother was riding his bike to meet friends and I was at play in my yard. Having contact with Black people was common, whether it was a worker walking to a job, or a maid in a household. In those days, the word we used to refer to Blacks was negro. It was the accepted term that even Martin Luther King used in his speeches in the early 1960s. When we used the term, however, with our southern dialect it was pronounced “negra.”

One day when I was playing with one of my friends, I'll call her “Jane,” who lived just up the street, a Black man was walking by. In those days there was a lot more walking, especially since there were so many who could not afford a car and also given the fact that Wedowee was too small a town to support any kind of public transportation system. I said to my friend, “There goes a negra,” simply commenting on the man I saw walking by.

“Uh-oh!” she exclaimed, “You’re not s’posed to say that word! I’m tellin’ ” With that she went skipping off into her house to report to her mother. Her mother came straight out to inform me that I was never to use that n-word, that I should say “colored” instead. My bashful self tried to explain that I didn’t say “that word,” but all I could do was to swallow my words and say, “Yes ma’am.”

Jane’s parents were always kind and generous. On that day, they wanted to make absolutely certain that I did not use any derogatory term when talking about Blacks. Even though I was not using “the n-word” that they thought I was using, the conversation was not lost on me. By the time I started school as a first-grader, I had decided that it was easier to avoid any confusion by saying “colored people*” instead of “negro” (or negra) so that my dialect did not communicate something unintended, to show I meant no disrespect.

Jane’s father was an Alabama State Trooper. He went on to become part of Gov. George Wallace’s private security detail. Serving as his primary bodyguard, he was injured by gunfire during the assassination attempt on Wallace's life. He was then appointed by the Governor to be the director of the Alabama Department of Public Safety. Years later when he died by suicide while being treated for terminal cancer, the AP news story ran in The New York Times and The Washington Post. George Wallace personally lamented the loss saying, “He was almost like a member of my family.”

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< Part 1, The Long Shadow of Jim Crow                           Part 3, A Matter of Complexion >
 

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* As the Civil Rights Movement unfolded in the 1960s, finding the proper terminology to use when referring to Black people began to evolve with some terms falling in and out of favor. While "negro" was used in official writing and discourse, "colored" was seen by many as the polite term for everyday use in the 1950s and early 60s. Soon "Black" became the accepted term ("colored" and "negro" were out), and then the term "Afro-American" was in vogue for a while. In recent years, "African-American" and "Black" have both been in use. It was just last week that the Associated Press announced new writing style guidelines to capitalize Black "when referring to people in a racial, ethnic, or cultural context." The New York Times has followed suit, and I have chosen to follow those guidelines in my writing about segregation here.

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