old countings

[gurdonark]

I heard a radio show cover the photographic exhibition which has been touring museums about lynching in the American South. The commentator commented on the carnival-like nature of some of the photos.
As a product of a small southern town, I wanted to
try to understand what it meant in terms I could put my arms around. I decided to try and find out whether my own small town, Gurdon, Arkansas, had ever had a lynching of an African-American prior to trial. I learned of three--Nat Hadley in 1891, a man named Bowles (first name unknown) in 1892, and Alexander Thompson in 1903. Then I looked up the census figures for Gurdon, Arkansas in that era. In 1890, the census recorded a *total* population for Gurdon, Arkansas of
802 people. In 1900, the figure was 1,045 people.

By coincidence (or synchronicity), my wife had borrowed Sidney Poitier's Lilies of the Field from the library. This is a wonderful film--a quiet almost parable-like piece in which an itinerant workman helps a small group of impoverished nuns in the middle of the desert build a chapel. The movie really put me in a good mood. The Oscar Sidney Poiter won for that film was well-deserved.

The movie was first released in 1963. By 1963, no more lynchings were being conducted in Arkansas. I doubt that Lilies of the Field was shown at the Hoo Hoo Theater in Gurdon, Arkansas. If it had been, though, African Americans would have had to enter through a side doorway. The doorway led straight to the balcony of the theater. A small hole was cut in the back of the concession stand wall to permit purchases of
concessions on the way up the stairs to the balcony.

By the time I was a teen, this had changed.
The segregation whose last vestiges were a part of my early childhood slowly faded away.
I remember, though, playing on segregated baseball teams, going to segregated boy scouts,
and going to schools in which integration, being "purely voluntary", essentially was limited to minimal levels.
Now, the town is largely integrated, except for the churches.

We have far to go. There is much damage to undo.

Comments

[scott-m.livejournal.com]

Meditations on Integration (with apologies to the Mingus song of the same name)

The year I entered kindergarten was 1970, which was also the year the schools
integrated in my own small, southern town. My mother worried about the inevitable
campus fights and riots, and chose to send me to a private school where my aunt
was teaching kindergarten. I went there through third grade-- after that the school
went under and I entered public school.

I don't remember de jure segregation as such, but like you I remember the theater
balcony where the blacks sat, continuing to segregate themselves because of ... I
don't know-- not wanting to deal with dirty looks or worse from bigoted white
moviegoers? Force of habit?

My grandmother used to tell me a gruesome tale of a lynching that happened when
she was a little girl-- I've never taken the time to look up the details for myself.

I was probably in 4th or 5th grade when the Klan set up their regional headquarters
next to an elementary school in town. Great big red, black, and white sign "Invisible
Empire" sign on the roof and everything. It's been only as an adult that I thought
about what it must have been like for a black kid going to elementary school to have
to see that sign every day.

You had mentioned church as the last holdout of de facto segregation-- when my wife
and I were looking for a church a few years ago, we walked in to the door of a Baptist
church where we where the only white people in the place (well, my wife's actually
Asian, but you know what I mean). We weren't prepared for the experience-- the
way the offering is collected (everybody stands up, then row by row the people walk
to the front and drop envelopes into the offering plate), the preacher saying "no matter
if you're black " ... stopping and staring at us ... "or white". After the service, we
discussed whether we wanted to go back. I liked the music, but I didn't want us to
be the couple who integrated that church.

But I digress. On the subject of integrated churches, there's a church in north Garland,
Texas, that was created to be racially integrated. My wife and I have visited there
as well. We didn't join there either, but I really liked the concept.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

You and I grew up on places that probably had pretty similar experiences. Nowadays, I'm not sure that the church in my parents' town is entirely segregated. OTOH, in the U/U church, a great deal of diversity talk happens, but not that much actual diversity occurs. So it's more than saying "open, sesame, all come together", I suppose.