graynation: being white in the 1950s

I was saying a couple of Sundays ago that remembering the 1950s didn't make me feel particularly old, but remembering the 1940s sure did. I think that must be because the 1950s have a similarity to the world I live in now, whereas the '40s were truly the ancient times.

The '50s were the years when the world started to change from old – pre- 1950 – to new. In fact, the 1950s were tumultuous with change. The media and consumer driven world of the early 21st century can trace its roots directly to events of the 1950s. It's strange. To people with only a general attentiveness to history, the 1950s have receded into memory as a quiet time, a period of Eisenhower-era tranquility. The tumultuous 1960s by contrast certainly did what they could to enhance that memory. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author David Halberstam saw so much happening in the 1950s that he wrote a complete book, titled, simply, “The ‘50s.”

Cars, television, radio, music, suburbs, shopping centers, clothes, advertising, everything was changing. It is true that at the time, in Abilene, Texas, much of that change occurred with the force of a pebble dropping unheard into a distant pond, such as the unanimous Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954, that ended the “separate but equal” doctrine of educational facilities for whites and blacks. That ripple would not reach Abilene for another decade.

Which means that I, essentially, grew up in an exclusively white community. Of all the strange things about life on that planet, I believe that, today, for me, remains the strangest. In Abilene, Texas, in the 1950s, there were separate facilities, wherever they were required, for the black population. Water fountains, restrooms, waiting areas, a part of town, all identified by the same label: “Colored.” Downtown stores, restaurants and movie theaters were closed to blacks, to whom the Abilene media commonly referred as “Negroes.” If it were socially necessary, newspapers of that time would airbrush photos to remove black people from the image before publishing it in the paper.

The education codes, unlike the social (written and unwritten) codes, didn’t say anything about any of the other races: Hispanic, Asian, Indian. Not many of them did, but any of those could attend white high schools and play white high school football. There were black Abilene teenagers in those days who were very good football players, like Robert Kelley and Louis Kelley, who played for the Woodson Rams, the Colored high school down in Colored Town on the east side below the railroad tracks. Woodson and black high schools in the other cities played in their own league. The Rams, whose colors were green and white, did play some of their games at the white stadium, Fair Park Stadium, but that was as close as the Kelleys or any of those high school kids could come to wondering what it would be like to go to Abilene High School, be an Abilene Eagle. White kids liked to go to the Woodson games because it was good football and Woodson High had a small but joyous band.

Those games were the only social contact I ever had with black kids. Then, in 1961, I was graduated from Abilene High and in the fall began my freshman year at Stanford University. Total culture shock. The biggest shaping event of my life. In 1969, after school and three years in the Army, I came back to Abilene and got a job at The Abilene Reporter-News, covering high school sports. Something had happened while I was gone. Desegregation reached Abilene. On the teams were kids like Kelvin Ceasar, at Cooper High, and Don Brown at AHS. Today, in Abilene, it's like segregation never happened. But one thought stays with me, as I sit here in my skin, in this place on the planet that I have arrived this morning in my 66th year. To change all that, to change my life completely, you would only have to change one thing about me. Make my skin black.