Q: What was it like to be African American in the late thirties?
A: Well, I was rather young in the late thirties, and I never even thought in terms of integration. I was consumed in one day having an opportunity to vote. And I was always aware of the possibility, living in the South, that I could irritate certain white people and could get lynched. It was almost a defensive syndrome where you were always protecting yourself and at the same time trying to advance as best you could. If someone had told me, in the thirties, that one day you will be on a white TV station (of course, TV was out; we weren't even thinking about it), but that one day you would be an editorial board member of a major white newspaper in Chicago, I would have thought they were ridiculous, trying to pull my leg or tease. It didn't even come across my mind.
Q: When you were growing up, you really thought, if you put a foot wrong, you could get lynched?
A: I can remember reading consistently about lynch mobs. Every year, Tuskegee Institute kept a record of the number of black people being lynched. And it was up and down. I don't recall a single year that at least from 20 back down to the lowest, I think, happened during World War II, when it was down to six.
Now, when I say "lynching", I don't mean somebody just shooting a black person, or two or three men grabbing somebody and taking him off somewhere like you see in the cowboy movies, and hanging persons. I mean mutilations, burning people alive, white people dressing up to go to the lynching, a lynching as a testimony of one's Americanness, one's being a Christian. After all, the Ku Klux Klan's symbol is the cross on fire, the way they had burned black people.
And now I can understand how my father used to sit in church very silently and weep, and the tears would run down his eyes when that certain song they would sing, that Harry Belafonte recorded years, years later, called "Calvary", being on the cross, being always threatened with an execution. And "Were you there when they crucified my Lord," my father used to just sit there with his eyes closed in church when somebody would sing that. The idea of imminent crucifixion was there, almost a part of your subconscious makeup.
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