Note: This is a nearly finished, but unsent, letter to my childhood home town paper in Indianola. September, 2007
After returning from a class reunion in Iowa, I cried on a bench in Central Park in New York, my home for the last twenty years. I was taken back to my eighth grade civics class in Indianola, Iowa.
I was reading a column in Sunday's NY Times about an interview the famous trumpet player Louis Armstrong had given to a part-time cub reporter in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
The Little Rock school integration crisis of fifty years ago was in its early days. The Arkansas governor had deployed the state National Guard to block nine Black children from Central High. President Eisenhower had been indecisive so far. Who would prevail? An order from a Federal Court or a governor pandering to a mob of adults, apparently driven berserk by hatred and fear.
In the interview Armstrong responded with a sometimes obscene fury. Previously he had declared himself “not involved in politics”. Ebony magazine had suggested he was an “uncle Tom”. He was one of the State Department’s most effective goodwill ambassadors. [retaliation, solidarity, tears]
The Des Moines Register and Tribune, for whom I was a delivery boy, had very good coverage.
Perhaps the events themselves would have imprinted on my thirteen year old brain. But what I remember most clearly is my silver haired civics teacher in a second floor classroom on our Junior High's east side. Every day of that crisis, he walked our class through its lessons. He knew a real civics lesson when it happened. As far as I knew. Indianola was all white. The few Catholics had to go to nearby St. Marys for the sacraments. I hope my civics teacher felt no fear. If he did, it didn't slow him down. I have forgotten his name[James Kennedy], but I will never forget him or those autumn days. I had learned that from time to time common people, even children, can do things they never dreamed of. My life would never be the same.
I loved growing up in Indianola - riding our bikes out to the muddy pond on Mr. Buxton's farm, finding the fossil sea shell that said the earth beneath my feet had once been very different. Delivering my papers to the stores and apartments around the square, sitting in a stairway baked by the afternoon sun, eagerly reading of Dr. Salk's discovering the Polio vaccine. Stopping at Truman’s Drug Store to compare the labels on the then modest selection of pain relievers. Since they then all had the same active ingredient (aspirin), I wondered what all those commercials with hammers in peoples’ heads were trying to tell me. Going in the record store off the square's southeast corner to buy Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel with my buddy Bruce Wilson. At Bruce's house he played the newest albums by strange Black men with slicked down hair. Only later would I learn, through The Autobiography of Malcolm X, that many Blacks of that time put their hair under hot irons to hide the curly hair of their ancestors. I also remember a “Minstrel Show” put on by my Cub Scout troop. My den was assigned to sign a Negro spiritual. Since we had no idea what that was, we sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic. It’s an inspiring song and we sang it with fervor. When an adult in the audience prompted us to “slap your knees like darkies” none of us did.
Added to the revolt by the common people of distant Hungary against tyranny the year before, I learned good and evil were more complicated than on my favorite TV show, I Lead Three Lives, about Herbert Philbrik, an undercover FBI agent fighting the danger of the tiny and isolated American Communist Party. It helped me see through the claims by southern sheriffs and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that Blacks would be happy but for outside agitators.
