Growing up racist in the shadow of Dr. King

“We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Racism was as integral a part of our lives in the 1960s as baseball, Mickey Mouse, TV westerns and vacations at the lake.

I grew up in a white south suburban middle class neighborhood in Evergreen Park, which was just like the town where Dick and Jane lived in our elementary school readers: No African Americans.

The only Black people I knew about were major league baseball players whom my uncles mocked at family parties and backyard barbecues. So I grew up thinking that Larry Doby was a terrible player. When one of my brothers dropped a ball, we called him Larry Doby. The same Doby who is in baseball’s Hall of Fame.

Before I ever met an African American, I repeated n-word jokes I heard from my friends who heard them from their elders. So that when I finally encountered Black people on a CTA bus or at the Evergreen Park Shopping Plaza, I viewed them with a mix of pity and caution.

At St. Bernadette’s grammar school, no one disabused me of these notions. Not the Dominican nuns. Not the priests.

What we learned in our religion class or in our paperback catechism about loving thy neighbor and thy enemy constituted my first lesson in critical thinking: Comparing what was written in those texts and in the Bible to the talk and behavior of everyone I knew, told me that the books were fiction. The church, I inferred, promised you heaven if you donated on Sunday and paid lip service to its doctrines without having to abide by them.

The lone African American in my high school freshman class was Wendel Winslow. An above-average student, he was short and bespectacled, strong and fast, and won the rope climbing event in our P.E. “Olympics.” He was an exception to the stereotypes I had learned, and that was the reason, I assumed, he attended our school.

At 15, reading John Steinbeck, Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, I learned that adults were flawed and oftentimes fools. At 16, reading J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wright, I learned we were supposed to call out hypocrisy where we found it.

College classes in philosophy, history, literature, sociology and political science did what they were supposed to do, opening my eyes to the injustice, cruelty and oppression of racism. Not just a relic of the Deep South before the Civil War, racism was happening right in front of our faces. There were redlining practices to isolate African American neighborhoods on the South Side, segregated beaches along Lake Michigan and hiring biases in the police and fire departments.

Nonetheless, many of my white peers exposed to the same truths retained the bigotry they were raised with. It’s as if the lessons from school and the great books were like those I had learned in catechism: material to be studied but then forgotten, once you’ve passed the exam. They went to Mass, took communion, lit a cigarette on the way out and still told n-word jokes, while checking who was in earshot and keeping their voices down.

Had they not paid close enough attention in school? Did they have a different learning style? Were they born without the synapse in their brain that enabled empathy?

No to all three questions.

What was different for me was taking a job alongside African American teachers at Chicago Vocational High School. And though it was initially culture shock for an Irish Catholic Evergreen Parker, you can’t help unlearning stereotypes and forming friendships with people you live and work with every day.

Because my school colleagues had endured myriad social and economic obstacles all their lives, from which I had been spared, I benefited more from them than they did from me.

Friends like Willa Carr, Rich Cook, Rev. Malcolm Walton, Delores Greyer, Gwen Abston, Chris Randolph, Jimmy Grisset and Pam Cox, among others, shared hard-earned lessons in judging character, motivating youth, overcoming tragedy and withstanding daily slings and arrows, while still maintaining optimism with humor, faith and love. And they treasured family values all the more because of the greater struggle required to preserve them.

Later, I would think about my friends from Vocational when I read about the strength and forgiveness shown by the elderly African American survivors of the horrible shooting massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. They also had to survive that most debilitating obstacle imaginable, racial hatred, all their lives.

And that’s why I subscribe to Dr. King’s belief, then and now, in the importance of integration, as inspirational as it was for me.

Busing back in the 1970s is often said to have been a failed experiment. But the reasons behind it — enlightenment, transformation and racial harmony — remain valid.

As President Joe Biden’s administration begins to carry out its racial equity agenda, it must find new ways of bringing blacks and whites together to allow the better parts of our human nature to breathe free.

David McGrath, emeritus professor of English at the College of DuPage, is the author of “South Siders,” a new collection of essays. He can reached at mcgrathd@dupage.edu.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.