Black Power

Oh that’s always the scene isn’t it, from the WW II movies, the Czech, the Italian, the Mexican, etc. Except no blacks, not at that time, maybe a little later, maybe by the Korean war.

I read a lot of books about Chicago, and early on the various ethnic groups did not mix, they had their own newspapers, their own churches, and their own turf. But Gage Park was a relatively new part of the city. The property had been owned by Hetty Green, The Witch of Wall Street. If you haven’t heard of her she is well worth looking up, and she didn’t sell it until sometime in the twenties and it all got built up real quickly and that is why it is so full of bungalows, the predominate style of the time. And probably why in our neighborhood the whites mixed so freely, everybody was moving into the neighborhood at the same time, so they dropped those ethnic things and were a real melting pot. I’ve heard it said, and I have noticed from what little experience that I have, that as you move west from east in the US, you get less and less racial prejudice.

But we didn’t quite abandon those ethnic things. I remember telling my mother the last names of my classmates, and she would say, oh she’s Irish, he’s Polish, she’s German, and I wondered how she did that. And we even remember these odd things, like I am half Czech, and a quarter German, and an eighth English, and an eighth French. What does it mean to be an eighth French? And if I had kids with somebody who had no French in her, our kids would be one sixteenth French, what would that mean.

Oh it’s all kind of a game, like astrology, if you don’t take it seriously it can be kind of fun. I used to consider myself German because of my last name. But then studying German in college they sounded kind of stupid and sentimental, so I decided that I would consider myself a Bohemian. If you have a hat, you can be a cowboy too.

I am thinking back to your army group, and as a good liberal, I was ready to point the finger of shame at you because there were no blacks in your group. But it’s not really like that.

Twenty years before a group of white guys would have had nothing to do with black guys. Probably there were some white guys who had nothing against black people, but I imagine they would go along with the majority of the other white guys just to get along. I think things got better, at least among northerners during the early days of the civil rights movement. Then came Black Power.

It was a shocking thing, that chant and those raised fists, what did it mean, they wouldn’t say. I’ll admit I have always been a bit afraid of black people, from the days of my mother telling me they all carried knives, to my hippie days, riding the Illinois Central up from Champaign and through that vast southside ghetto. Block after block after block, and all so shabby, I had to think that if I were a black person I would be pissed off.

The blacks really had no power at all until the civil rights movement, and even then they had to mostly rely on the kindness of certain white people, but then they finally got a little power, and said what the hell, why do we have to be begging, why don’t we just demand what we should have?

So they united, mostly the young people I think, and now all white people, crackers, liberals, middle-of-the-roaders, looked alike, and they didn’t want to have much to do with them, and even if they didn’t feel that strongly about it, they didn’t want their brothers and sisters to see them hanging with white people.

So that’s probably why there were no black guys in your group at Stephanie's. But it’s a bit of an odd thing that all those guys in the army, of different ethnicities were hanging together because of the army, the army that is there to fight the enemy, even if at that time you weren’t actually fighting, and it was a little unclear who the enemy was. And those young black people of the time were united because they were all against the white enemy.

A little overblown much of this, but it’s good to get pulses racing over the weekend.