DEFEAT FASCISM

 Read Rebuke Resist

This morning, our statewide newspaper ran the headline "Lawmakers to weigh end to hiring laws." In short they will prevent state agencies from considering affirmative action. It will pass without a hitch.

Some of you may say, "It's about time."

Some may say, "It's the end of the world."

I just say it's a sign of the era upon which we have embarked.

Here are couple of my memories.

The first professional job I had was in a small consulting firm head by three bosses, two not bad and one a blinking asshole. We'll call him "BA."

Our secretary quit. As we began to look, a friend told me of a young woman on the look for a job after a restructuring ended her department. She came highly recommended, and I mentioned her to my bosses. They invited her in. She was poised, erudite, highly qualified, and anxious. After the interview, BA walked into my office, frowned and said, "You didn't tell us she was a n****er."

Yeah. I did that.

As my career developed, I assisted cities in obtaining HUD grants for municipal improvements. The department began seriously requiring affirmative action efforts as a step to receive grants. I informed a local mayor of this, and the conversation went like this.

"You mean we have to put a black in charge of something?

"If you want this grant."

"We don't have anyone."

"No one at all?"

"Not a qualified black."

"You are telling me that in your entire city government there is not one black worker qualified for promotion?"

"Not unless you consider John in the Sewer Department."

"Been with the city for a while?"

"Some 15 years or so."

"Knowledgeable?"

"I guess so. We rely on him when Fred, the supervisor is ill. Fred's in bad health now and ready to retire."

One can see how it went. In more recent times, a city with an African American population of some 19 percent welcomed its first black city employee. Progress? I guess. It was when he was elected mayor.

Don't let them kid you. It's going to get worse.

Share at will.

Growing Up Southern: August 20, 2017

There are stories in the Arkansas Delta that would make a person cry to think about. Here is one. My late father-in-law related it to me, as he did so many others.

It concerns what is known as a “shotgun shack.” Most folks agree they called them that because they consisted of three rooms, one leading to the next, with no hallways. A shot fired through the front door would go straight through and out the back door. Some scholars assign the source of the name to an African word. That seem a bit of a stretch to me.

It really doesn’t matter. The truth is that they housed the poorest segments of the rural South, sharecroppers and others who couldn’t afford better. They dotted the cotton fields when I was a young boy. With no shade about them and with uninsulated tine roofs, one can only imagine their discomfort. Only a few remain today.

A solitary man occupied the one in question. My father-in-law, Julius Cole never furnished much information about him. He was, as so many occupants of this type housing were, an African-American who worked picking and chopping cotton in season, and doing odd jobs at other times. Seems to have minded his own business and interacted with others as little as possible.

He died, and the shotgun shack that had been his home, sat unoccupied. Eventually, so it seems, some folks entered it and were amazed at what they saw, utterly amazed and astounded. Word spread, and soon everyone in the neighborhood had come to see.

Drawing covered the walls, elaborate and detailed drawings of churches and other buildings. A veteran of the 79^th Infantry Division in the European Theater in World War Two, Julius always described the drawings as “like the building we saw in France and Italy.” The man in question had obviously produced them.

What an amazing story. There is a concept in economics called “location quotient” that postulates a given geographic area will account for a quotient of goods produced. Some social scholars have expanded that to include individuals of specific talent or genius.

It doesn’t account for those whose talent and genius were lost to poverty, prejudice, or deprivation of opportunity.

Who can imagine what must have passed through the mind of this remarkable man on lonely nights filled with the sounds of Delta insects just beyond the thin walls of his home? What motivates a man to produce beauty he thinks will never be seen, by the light of a kerosene lamp in the middle of nowhere? Did he ever wonder what might have been, or curse his fate for denying what should have been?

We read about people born to wealth and who build upon that wealth and, somehow, we assign them great talents and abilities. What name could we assign to smothered talent and deprived ability? All we can do is wonder what about the insensitivity of fate. Oh, and in weaker moments we might find ourselves abhorring the smirking faces of those born into unlimited opportunity, who blame the poor for their failures.

A made up a short story once using this legend as a source of inspiration. I called it, The Last Cotton Boll and one may click here to open a copy of it. I dedicate it to all those whose talents lie buried with them in their graves.

  

High living, Arkansas syle.
 One of the few remaining to remind.

Growing Up Southern: August 4,

Did I ever tell you how I got my first real job? Would you believe I did it solely on merit? Good.

It was like this. I had just, by more or less mutual agreement, ended my relationship with the United States Navy. Oh, that’s not true. They wanted me to stay in. Even promised to send me to OCS. But, I was free, white, and over 21, so I wanted more.

Don’t forget about the “white” part.

I intended to go back to San Francisco. That’s where I had begun my four years of a hate-love relationship with the world of John Paul Jones. When I stopped off in my home town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, though, my mother begged me to stick around and see if I might find employment. “You’ve been gone away from us long enough,” she said.

Here’s hoping you understand a thing or two about Southern boys and their mamas.

So, I looked around. I never expected to find anything. The draft-dodgers already had all the good jobs, and, like a carnival ride turning upside down, public sentiment had reversed itself in its attitude toward honorable discharges. Potential employers sort of looked at me as if to say, “You were too dumb to think of a way out of the draft?”

I was packing to head West when my mother told me that one of my favorite cousins ran the sanitation department at City Hall and knew everyone in the county. I went up and talked to him. Turns out he knew somebody who knew somebody in Little Rock who might know somebody.

I went to Little Rock, and within a few minutes was talking to two young men who had just started an urban planning consulting firm. They agreed to hire me if I would work for pretty much minimum wage at first. Gosh, that was an area I had hoped to get into, and I had no expenses. Why not? I found out later that one of the motivating factors in my getting hired was because they mistakenly thought I was related to the somebody my cousin knew and they were working on a big contract with his department. They kept me on anyway.

Within five years, I was a partner in the firm, all this success due to my merit. Oh, a little bit of it was due to the fact that I was a white male of European descent. Why, any young African-American man with my credentials could have walked in and received the same deal.

Maybe not. I’d been with the firm about a year when I referred a secretarial applicant to one of the partners. A friend introduced her to me. She was a highly skilled worker with glowing recommendations and an immaculate appearance. She even fit the “cute and perky” part, which was a, more or less, universal requirement for secretarial work in those days. But, I neglected to mention her race. I barely kept my job because of that one small sin of omission.

I’ve been thinking for two days, and that is the only time in 46 years that my job was imperiled because a human being was offered a bit of human decency and a chance at success in life.

I got my first job more because
of this beloved cousin than
my uniform or good looks.
(That's me on the left).