Selma I don't know why I never wrote this up or posted it before but this is what happened the night of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, March 7th 1965

Listening to Congressman John Lewis on a repeat of the Colbert Report one June morning in 2012, reminded me of an incident that I participated in. Lewis has just written about the first march across the bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, AKA “Bloody Sunday.” ("Across that Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change"). I was home on weekend liberty from the Navy. I paid attention to the news and absorbed what had happened, but in those days I never knew how to argue anything or express myself very clearly. However, I had paid attention to the civil rights movement from the days of the freedom riders. Though I held the standard view among ignorant, white suburban teenagers at the time, I think there was an element of curiosity that I harbored and a sense of courage that I may have perceived but couldn’t give voice to, certainly never to my Irish friends and hardly to my family.

But first just a note about my family: Racial epithets were not something that was said very much at home. Maybe sometimes they were but there wasn’t a litany of racism. My parents had friends who were not all white and Catholic. My Mother in particular had a black friend from work and she brought her home for dinner once to our white, suburban neighborhood. That was in the mid 1950's. I was about 11 years old and very nervous about meeting her. No doubt she must have been nervous and probably worse scared. My father, who generally kept silent about such things, actually about most things, had Jewish band mates that he traveled and hung around with. His hero beyond sports heroes was Benny Goodman and he also had an uncle who eloped with a black woman. His best friend growing up was a Cuban who I was named after even though the first born son should be named after his grandfather. Both parents were FDR, Kennedy type democrats and members of unions. My grandmother, my Mother’s Mother, who I was very close to and lived with us tended to be the one who uttered the most racist comments though she spoke fluent Yiddish and was friends with the Jewish elderly woman next door and they played bingo together.

We lived in a fairly liberal school district even though it was a Republican run town and most teachers expressed what we would call today “liberal” views. As working class people, though, my parents didn't exactly fit the mold of Ozzie and Harriet, the Cleavers or any other TV family. As a child I was probably fearful of the "otherness" of Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Asians, Jews but I don't recall having ill will or hatred towards any others because they were different from me. In the 1950’s there were a lot of public service announcements. I recall animated cartoons about race and religion and how we should treat everyone as equals. While sitting there watching TV and not really paying full attention it still sunk in. For example I still remember this ditty:

“Don’t be a schmo, Joe.
Be in the know, Joe.
Religion and race just don’t count in this place!
So don’t be a schmo, Joe.
Be in the know, Joe.
Remember that and you won’t fall on your face!”

Yet the first time I recall feeling simpatico for real (or some kind of human feeling of recognition) with a black person was when I was on a train trip returning from Hollywood, FL and going to NY in the summer of 1960. I encountered segregation the whole time we traveled south and back and especially I remember the segregated bathrooms and water fountains at a stopover in Jacksonville and recall feeling very odd about it at the time, that there was something really weird. That this was what I had seen on TV or had heard about in social studies, but here it was for real. I was 15. There were also all those small ramshackle buildings that I saw from the train as we passed. Barely fifteen feet or so from the passing train you could see dozens of small black children poorly dressed in rags playing or milling about in the dust though some would wave at the train. And there were the chain gangs just about everywhere working highways when my uncle drove us around south Florida. Most prisoners were black.

On one leg of the return trip from Florida, the only vacant seat that I could find for part of the trip was next to an elderly black woman. There didn't seem to be segregated seating areas on the train. I was extremely anxious about sitting next to a black person. Plus I was sure everyone else who was white was looking at me. My father just ushered me over to the seat. The lady looked very old, older than my Sicilian grandparents who were pretty old at the time. But for the first time I could see the face of a black person who reminded me of my Sicilian grandmother, only darker. She had a lined, crinkly face and tired eyes that were more golden than brown, short knotted gray hair and she looked up at me without a smile or any kind of acknowledgement and seemed to sigh and then looked away out of the window. She wore an old washed out printed house dress and some kind of worn out looking shoes, and she hugged a small satchel to her breast. She was very small as her feet hardly touched the floor of the train. I'm not the type to talk to strangers even to this day and so I sat there quietly trying to read a magazine that I had though I couldn't concentrate and I was fascinated by this tiny woman and I kept stealing glances at her the whole time she was on the train. It probably was from that time on that I realized that there was just one human race and that everyone deserved to be treated as such.

Today I marvel at the thought of that woman. Why was she on the train? Was she traveling alone? Where was she going? Obviously she had lived through the worst excesses of Jim Crow and was probably a descendant of a slave once removed. Did I frighten her as a white person, a hulking white pimply faced white teenager? If only I could have had a conversation with her, would I have been automatically enlightened? Still whatever the facts are of my life these days and how it evolved to the world view that I possess, it all probably started to change at that encounter when I recognized that "the other" was exactly the same as me and mine.

So back to that weekend in March-- That Sunday evening's news that I watched in a Blarney Stone (or maybe it was "Smiths") or one of those types of bars at the time across the street from Port Authority was filled with TV reports from Selma and showed clips of the fighting and the police brutality. And those clips were shown a few times. Every time they were shown the drunks at the bar, the white drunks would hoot and yell epithets not at the police but at the marchers. And since there were a couple of hours yet for me to get on the bus, I drank and drank by myself and I eventually got pretty drunk, but was still able to walk. I got on one of the buses that were reserved for servicemen, mainly sailors. I knew no one on the bus. Usually I traveled with sailors from my ship who lived in NY but this time I was solo. We left Port Authority and headed into the Lincoln tunnel. I guess the Selma story and what I saw on TV haunted me, and in my drunken state I got up and started making a speech.

What I said I don't really remember. Truth is I remember none of the events as they were told to me when I was finally sober, but it was purportedly a drunken rambling speech about how we are all brothers and whatnot. And as I looked around I saw a black sailor and I singled him out and cried to the heavens that he is just like us. The black sailor tried to shrink away, obviously not wanting the attention. There were shouts of anger at me but I didn't care. Right in the middle of the Lincoln tunnel, it was around midnight after all, the bus driver halted the bus, got out of his seat, grabbed hold of me and made the sailor sitting in the first seat get up and change seats with me. He told me to shut up and sleep it off which I guess I did. I awoke to daylight as we stopped at Little Creek, VA to let the bulk of us off. A sailor said to me as were getting off. "You know you almost caused a riot last night." And then he proceeded to tell me what I did and what transpired as I didn't recall any of it.

Today as I reflect on his words; "You know you almost caused a riot last night," I wish I had.