Not NASCAR

Not NASCAR

Race; it’s a word around my hometown that still draws whispers. I discovered the other day that according to disputed US Census data, Roanoke, Virginia-my hometown- is the 66^th most segregated city in America and the most segregated in my state.

Most of the time, I really don’t consider Race very much. It’s just too inconvenient and uncomfortable to think much about it. But when I read that stat about my hometown, I began to really analyze and question my own experiences. How has the racial divide affected me? How have I helped perpetuate it? What was and is my role in ending it?

Have you ever been in a group of White people when a Black person comes in to the room? Immediately eyes begin darting around as the White people try hard not to be noticed staring at the Black person. Sometimes they’ll even whisper quietly to each other about the group intruder. Other times when White people are having conversations with each other and no Black people are present and the name of a Black person comes up in normal conversation, they will reduce the volume of their voice when identifying the Black person. “My son plays on the Chess team. Coach Smith, he’s a Black man… says that ….”

Up until the year 2000, Virginia was the only state in the Union to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday alongside those great Virginia Civil War leaders, Robert E. lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Somehow, that holiday always struck me as odd, and by the year 2000 national pressure had boiled to the point that my least favorite Governor of all time, James “No Car Tax” Gilmore, wilted under pressure and segregated our holiday. Since then, Lee-Jackson day is celebrated the Friday before the Monday of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Friday for the Whites. Monday for the Blacks. Separate but equal.

Please don’t let me get off scot-free on this issue. I am the product of my hometown and the times in which I spent my youth. I never really understood the depths of the racial divide when I was a kid. Back when I was a child, Black people lived in certain areas and White people lived in other areas. That’s just the way it was. What I wasn’t really tuned in to was the fact that Black children could not attend White schools, Black people could not get served in many restaurants, Black people had their own water fountains, Black people were economically oppressed. I had no clue. It seemed just normal to me for us to have a Black lady bus over to our house once a week and clean up our home. I later learned that my mother felt that she really needed help in taking care of her four children, but she always felt very uncomfortable shuttling our maid to and from that bus stop. My parents didn’t use a maid for very long, and I suspect that they simply at some level couldn’t stomach having some person serve them in this manner. Plus, I don’t think the maid was very nice.

When I entered Mrs. Haith’s third grade classroom at Southview Elementary School in the fall of 1967, I was greeted by the usual 34 classmates and row upon row of student desks. However, one desk was set aside at the front of the room by the window beside the chalkboard. In it sat the first African American boy I had ever seen in my classes. His name was Eric Lewis, and it was obvious to the seven year old me that Mrs. Haith hated him. She resented his presence in her room and from the very first day, she pegged him as a troublemaker, placing him in that isolated corner. He couldn’t even see the board, but he was able to spend hours gazing out the window.

Eric was no troublemaker in my estimation. During recess, we actually became friends. We played on the swings and ran around together. I thought Eric was just a nice guy. Mrs. Haith, however, verbally abused him every day. How he managed to keep his cool, I’ll never know.

My contact with Black students was very slight over the years. Very simply put, I lived in a predominately White school district. The only Black people who attended our school were from a segregated community known as Kingstown. There, you could find the Lewis's, Brattons, Johnsons, Simpsons, and Sweetenburgs. Most of the kids from these families struggled in school, but excelled in athletics. Jinx Simpson was a great basketball player for our team, but the greatest of all was 6’9” Bernard “Super Nard” Harris. Nard ended up earning a basketball scholarship to VCU and then played his way to the NBA where he spent several seasons with the Buffalo Braves. Mrs. Haith would have hated Nard.

Throughout my high school career, I was great friends with Robert Parks. Parks played the trumpet and had the uncanny ability to mimic Dizzy Gillespie’s puffed cheek playing style. Robert, the only Black kid in the band, was an amazing trumpet player with an excellent high range. By the time he was a junior, he had taken the first trumpet position in our band. Parks lived in poverty at his grandmother’s house in Kingstown. Robert never told me much about his parents. I really have no clue why they weren’t a part of his life, but his grandmother was so very mean to him. She would ground him for nothing. She wouldn’t allow him to go anywhere with his friends. I can only imagine how difficult life was for him at his home.

We used to love to stay after school and shoot hoops. Robert would stay after just not long enough to get in trouble with his grandmother. Parks wasn’t much of a basketball player, but he enjoyed it nonetheless. He was an outstanding football player and was the main weapon on our band football team. He was faster and stronger than any other players on the team, running through arm tackles with power and speed. I should mention that band football was a brutal sport; full contact tackle football with no pads in all seasons and weather conditions. Robert was the most feared member of our team. One day, after we’d played all we could play, Robert and I were just messing around on the field trying field goals. Well more accurately, I was holding for Robert, and we were trying to see just how far he could kick the ball while wearing his worn Converse All-Star tennis shoes. It turns out that Robert could nail a field goal from 55 yards, no problem. He was simply amazing on the football field. This did not go unnoticed. Soon Coach Jim Hickam, brother of the famous Homer Hickam -author of the famous book that led to the Rocket Boys movie a few years’ back, began trying to convince Robert to come out for the football team. Coach would have no luck, however. Robert wanted to play, but his grandmother wouldn’t hear of it.

Something happened to Robert during his senior year; something that affected him very deeply. His grandmother, angry and resentful, tossed him out of her house and he was forced out onto the streets. He found a room at a local roach hotel not far from school and took a job busing tables to earn enough for his room, and he stopped coming to school. After being absent for a week, my band director did some sniffing around and found out that Robert was homeless. In a move that still amazes me to this day, Mr. Vail took Robert in to his home and allowed him to live there with his wife and young child for the rest of the year. After graduation, Robert dropped out of my social circles again. I heard that he had turned to drugs and then I learned that he had joined the Marines. The last I heard from Robert, he was playing in the President’s Marine honor band in Washington, DC.

Along the same time all of the turmoil was going on at school with Robert, my life had been radically changed, too. Beginning in the early 1970’s, my neighborhood began undergoing a metamorphosis. Gradually, over a period of a few years, our White neighbors began selling their homes. The rush or flight began when the house across the street from us was sold to a young Black couple. Immediately, whispers began. Soon “For Sale” signs appeared. Houses were sold to more Black families. Fear gripped our neighborhood.

For my family, we were not interested in moving away. We really liked our house and enjoyed being next to a swimming pool and golf course, but that changed when the City of Roanoke decided to snatch us away from the County of Roanoke. Back then, cities in Virginia had the right to annex land from other communities. We were caught in the annexation trap of 1976. The city got our taxes and in return we were promised city services and sidewalks! We never got the sidewalks, and they still haven’t gotten them to this day. The services certainly weren’t as good as what we had with the county. Because of this annexation in 1976, my sister and I, the two youngest children, were in danger of being forced to change schools. The county and city, however, struck a deal that would allow my friends and me to finish at my high school, but my sister would be forced to transfer to William Ruffner Junior High. Frankly, that idea terrified my parents. Ruffner was a predominately Black school and it had a reputation as being very rough. Very simply put, my parents were willing to do about anything to keep her from attending that school.

Home prices in our neighborhood, already declining due to the arrival of Black homeowners now plummeted with annexation. People couldn’t even give away their homes. We knew that we were stuck in a bad situation with little hope for escape. One day, completely out of the blue, a man knocked on our door and asked my parents if they wanted to sell their home. It seems he was driving around with clients who saw our house and wanted to buy it. The real estate agent was a known agent in the area, so when his excellent and timely offer came, my parents snatched it. We flew and got out of that trap.

These days, Roanoke is the 66^th most segregated city in America. Many people in the city proper are economically oppressed. Whites and Blacks in general do not share neighborhoods. There is a vast racial, economic, and cultural divide in my hometown; one that gnaws on us all like a cancer, yet is so subtle that it draws only whispers from us.