Welcome to my life. I was born in Pasadena, CA in 1955. My parents were strategic about where I, and any subsequent children they would have, would be born. This was because my dad was Black, and my mom was White (they’re both deceased of natural causes now). California was one of the few states that legally recognized my parent’s marriage about seventeen years before SCOTUS struck down interracial marriage prohibitions in Loving vs. Virginia (my parents married in 1950). But legal marriage recognition, I was to later learn was only one aspect, and a subordinate aspect, of their deeper concern.
It would seem that notwithstanding Loving, my parents feared what Southerners might do to us if they were to appear together publicly, so they avoided the South. My mother was born in Ohio and was raised in Texas, she had seen firsthand plenty of racism. My dad was born and raised in Missouri, and he understandably saw much more. Although he never spoke of it to any of his children, he witnessed the lynching of a young Blackman in St. Joseph. Unfortunately, lynchings were and had been a fact of American life since emancipation (under slavery the effect may have been the same, but it was called something else); and lynchings, while more prevalent in the South also happened in the Midwest and the North.
In 1960 we moved from Pasadena to Granada Hills, CA. My mom selected a real estate agent and bought the house without an appearance of my dad. This again was a strategic move on my parents’ part as they were certain they would not be sold the house even in California as integrated neighborhoods were yet a future condition, not a present one in 1960.
The fun started when members of the neighborhood found out that Niggers were moving into the neighborhood. Someone spun-up a community action committee to investigate the problem, find a solution, and put the solution (no Niggers in our backyard) into effect. The solution the committee came up with was the same solution conveyed in the 1961 movie, “A Raisin in the Sun;” the neighborhood would buy us out and give us a profit for not moving into the neighborhood. My parents did the same thing as the protagonists in the film. I wonder if the movie concept was based on my family’s experience (if you haven’t seen the film, do so for your own sake, the theme and acting are superb; I especially like the Danny Glover / Ester Rolle rendition—powerful!).
