Whiter Shade of Unreal

I am white and my first brush with overt American racism didn't occur until 1960 when I was twelve years old and visiting cousins who had relocated from the Northeast to a small town in North Carolina.

First, a little context . . . I grew up in a small, steel manufacturing town in the Northeast. That town was pretty diverse, for the 1950s, because steel foundries were pretty diverse.  The men in every new wave of immigration could grab a lower rung on the ladder at the steelworks if they were willing to work long, hard, dangerous hours, six days a week.  Those who couldn't hack it, usually moved on.  The men who remained were proud of themselves and their company and that pride blurred the lines between them.

The Negroes in our town -- which was what polite people called African-Americans back then -- lived in their own part of town.  But so did the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, Hungarians, Poles and Jews who made up our demographic.  To a child like me, social divisions in our town appeared to be drawn along ethnic, rather than racial lines.  New immigrants, and there were a lot of them right after WWII, tended to hunker down together in homogeneous neighborhoods from which they could help each other acclimate.  At one time, our little town of under 10,000 souls had eight different churches in about a 3-mile square center.

But, getting back to North Carolina . . . one evening, during our visit, the grownups decided to take us kids into town to see a movie.  There were two theaters within about a block of each other, each screening a different movie [no multiplexes in 1960].  When I expressed a desire to see one of them, I was told we couldn't go to that theater.  Asking why just got me shushed and we all wound up enjoying the other movie.

More below . . .