A Whole New Meaning: Step 135

Growing up in a city known for breweries, motorcycles and Friday fish fries it was never surprising when piles of snow melted away and people sprayed insect repellent on their skin so they could barbeque in their backyards the mood of the whole city came alive with the excitement of summer. But not that summer. Tension was in the air.

For the past four or five years I had become a regular fan of the news. In our house it was Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on channel 4, the NBC affiliate. Besides the war in Vietnam the other topic filling their reports were stories of Negroes organizing marches in the South. As far as I was concerned what was going on in the South was just as far away as Vietnam.

No doubt I was quite naïve. My parents along with all their open-minded liberal friends insisted they had nothing against people with different skin colors, but felt it best to stick to our own kind. With Bill Cosby the only black face on television and Sidney Poitier more than four months away from “…Coming to Dinner,” the only role models of success I knew were Henry Aaron and the Braves who had deserted the city.

One day after our summer school class I went with Jeff P to his father’s store on North Avenue near Third Street in an area known as the inner city. One of the employees was a large friendly man with a big smile whose name I think was John. When I told him I lived on Lancaster Avenue he told me he had gone to an open house a few blocks away. John said the real estate agent walked away whenever he wanted to ask a question. He said his own real estate agent wouldn’t even take him to the neighborhood because it was a waste of time. Like I said I was naïve. Up until then I bought the myth that Negroes were either too lazy or chose to live in impoverished neighborhoods.

A few days after Huntley and Brinkley reported on confrontations between Negroes and police in Detroit, Dad came home with his boots, helmet and rubberized coat stuffed in the trunk of the car. As we watched the film of firefighters in Detroit putting out huge fires, Dad told Mom she shouldn’t worry because if anyone started firing at them he would be the first one under the fire engine. It was the first time I did worry for my father’s safety, but I also realized his view of what was happening was different than mine.

Although he had watched the same news reports with me that showed the peaceful march on Selma and the great oration in Washington by Reverend King, he regarded him as a rabble rouser who stirred up trouble wherever he went. His views of Father Groppi, the white priest who had grown up in an all white neighborhood on the south side of Milwaukee and led Negro protests from his parish, St. Boniface, in the inner city were even less flattering.

Shortly after Dad was called into work the announcement came from Mayor Maier that the city was under curfew and no one was to leave their house. When he lifted it a couple days later Jeff P and Hector came to my house to see if I could go with them to Jeff’s father’s store. Apparently there had been some damage and they were planning on helping clean up. I wasn’t allowed to go with them, but as they pulled away I heard Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions singing People Get Ready, and it had a whole new meaning for me.

Do you remember any civil rights demonstrations? Or, Do you remember the first time you saw things differently than your parents? Share with us in the comment section.

It May Not Be Enough: Step 129

“Young people speaking their minds, getting so much resistance from behind,” are lyrics written by Stephen Stills and recorded by Buffalo Springfield in a song aptly titled “For What It’s Worth.” We were definitely different than our parents’ generation who weathered the great depression and said not a word when asked to fight. A lot of us were seen “Singing songs and carrying signs,” as my shortened junior year of high school came to a close.

Besides running around in my Rambler decorating our friends yards, something I’m sure Donna left out of her campaign materials when she ran for mayor of Milwaukee nearly two decades later, we would often have long conversations about withdrawing from Vietnam, civil rights, and a topic about which she was extremely passionate and I had no clue, women’s liberation.

At the time I didn’t have a clear understanding of why people were protesting the war. My father, who insisted all he ever did was tap out radio signals in a B-24 liberator as it flew over Germany and dropped some bombs, disapproved of young people protesting but thought it was a good idea to get a student deferment to avoid the draft. In one of our discussions Donna pointed out it was the rich and middle class who received student deferments, leaving the poor and minorities to be drafted and fight the war.

She even pointed out how Martin Luther King Jr. and Father James Groppi, a local priest active in the civil rights movement, had drawn a parallel between the struggle of Negroes, as African Americans were referred to during the time, to receive equal rights in education, employment, and elections with the disproportionate number of young male Negroes drafted into service and killed in Vietnam. At the same time, she listened as I told her how one of Miss Steiger’s former students, a Negro officer in the army, came back to our Latin class to tell us about the war, but also how the military offered opportunities to minorities civilian society failed to provide.

Even more confusing to me was the idea that something a group known as hippies had started was somehow related to the liberation of women. She said the commune formed by these people in California was like the kibbutz in Israel with everyone sharing the work and the fruits of their labor. Of course where the whole sharing concept broke down for me was when it came to sexual relations.

As a life long subscriber to the double standard perpetuated by everything from multiple wives in biblical times to Bond girls in novels and film the myth that it was all right for a man to have sex with multiple partners but a woman who followed a similar pattern was a whore had been totally ingrained in my psyche. Worse still was the nagging notion the fair skinned bright-eyed beauty with a voracious appetite for sweat inducing embraces might actually think she would like multiple partners. Here I had finally moved beyond the single encounter or distant flirtation to an actual relationship with a girl, and she has the nerve to point out it may not be enough.

Certainly there were advantages in growing up during a time of great change, but there were also great challenges. We were after all only a few years removed from the Disney stories where the prince rescued the fairest in the land and they lived happily ever after. Imagining Sleeping Beauty telling the prince the kiss was fine but she’d rather hang with Dopey and the boys required a whole new set of glasses, and “For What It’s Worth,” they weren’t always rose colored.

Do you have a story about dealing with change? Please share it in the comment section.