My 1950s Awakening

“What do you think of the Black problem?” (only he didn’t say Black), the taxi driver asks. As a nineteen-year-old Apprentice Seaman fresh out of boot camp San Diego, I am hard-pressed to answer. The year is 1956, and before joining the Navy, a small farming town in the mountains of Northeast Oregon had been my universe. People of color did not exist in that universe. My only contact with people of color had been with a few Negro recruits in boot camp.

The driver had picked me up at the New Orleans airport for a ride to the bus station. Noting my navy blues and sea bag, he had already quizzed me enough to know that I was from the West Coast and bound for Pensacola, Florida. In my naiveté, the only answer to his question I could think of was that I didn’t know there was a problem. This gave the driver his opening. For the rest of the ride, he regaled me with his version of the history of the South’s racial problems and how the rest of the country had better take notice because big trouble was brewing. I was relieved to escape his tutelage and board the bus.

For me, the 200-mile ride along the Gulf Coast was enlightening. The bus stopped at seemingly endless towns, villages, and crossroads. Watching the cross-section of humanity exiting and entering the bus was fascinating. Seeing the mansions along the route, shaded by leafy trees above sloping lawns, was like seeing something out of the movie Gone with the Wind. I had joined the Navy to see the world, and this was my first real taste.

My fellow passengers seemed well-disciplined and accepting of their way of life. The colored people automatically moved to the back of the bus, and the white people took the front seats. All bus stations had three bathrooms. One was marked men, one was marked women, and one was marked colored. Apparently, gender separation was not considered important for the colored population. And there were always two drinking fountains, one marked white and one marked colored. If there was a lunch counter or waiting room, these were also segregated. For a lad from the West, there seemed to be a lot of wasted duplication in the South. But my short stint in the Navy had taught me that “mine was not the reason why.” The racial tension the taxi driver had warned of did not seem to exist.

I reported to Naval Air Station Pensacola and was quickly inducted into the preflight regimen. As anyone who has undergone military flight training knows, the next year and a half allowed little time for pondering society’s problems. And after graduation, my lifestyle was mainly apolitical while serving as a fleet Naval Aviator. The warrior’s job is to keep the country safe so the folks at home can deal with such matters.

In the 1960s, I returned to civilian life and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. I enrolled in college, first at Foothill College and then at San Jose State, and went to work at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale. Perhaps brought on by my academic endeavors or maybe simply because I had acquired a television set of my own, I found myself taking a greater interest in the news. The civil rights movement was gaining momentum. In 1963, images of Governor Wallace standing in a doorway at the University of Alabama blocking two black students from registering, and the National Guard breaking up the standoff, filled the news and airways. The March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech followed shortly thereafter. Right after that, a bomb at the 16^th Street Baptist Church of Birmingham killed four young girls.

The taxi driver’s warning from days gone by took on new meaning!