War And Chutzpah Broke Color Barrier
What was it to be a liberal in the 40s? In 1945 I was 21 and didn't know any liberals, although I was one. There didn't seem to be titles, it seems to me as I reflect on those times, for people who thought negroes (not blacks) had been given a bad deal and that that bad deal could be changed. There were no black firemen or policemen (or if there were, surely not in my Irish neighborhood). There were no black street car conductors or bus drivers, no black typists in the big offices downtown (or offices anywhere for that matter). Black men worked with shovels, not in the bulldozers; they loaded the trucks but didn't drive them. Black women worked with scrubbing buckets, not behind desks; they bought in the 5 and 10s but they didn't work there. If there were black teachers, I'd never heard of one. My teachers had all been nuns - surely no blacks there. Where were they all?
There was civil rights agitation in those days. Agitators were stirring people up trying to get them registered to vote. They were getting people talking about whether segregated schools were really equal; it was clear they were not. There was also a manpower shortage because so many men were in the service: it was after all, in World War II. Who knows what got black people visible in non-servile jobs. It was probably everything coming together at the right time: the shortage of workers, the agitation, the chutzpah of a few groundbreakers among black people.
Job ghettos had been there and then suddenly they were gone. It was wonderful to see how quickly people stopped noticing the color of these new workers.
The southern state's reluctance to move on eliminating segregation in the schools made the South seem so backward and so cruel (at least to my young conscience) that I felt it hard to believe that Americans could be such people.
Well, as I grew into my 60s, I found that Americans can, indeed be such people. Not southern Americans for I am one now myself (if a Philadelphia born person can ever be!), but Americans in general. I still feel that liberalism is a matter of basic fairness, a simple "do unto others as you would be done unto" principle of living. Liberalism says "Let's be kind to each other. Let's trust each other and see how it goes."
Is there more to it than that?
Katie Brown
Lutz, Florida