My Confession

I thought about my response to the demonstrations and the "Black Lives Matter" movement. But leaders of the movement said we should listen, not talk. An opinion piece in last Sunday's Washington Post said that white people, when confronted with racism, form book clubs. I don't do book clubs, but I do read. I lately finished Ta-Nehisi Coates' We Had Eight Years In Power,  with essays he wrote during the Obama presidency, with new commentary. I also read Matthew Desmond's Evicted, a non-fiction study of housing issues in Milwaukee, and a Pulitzer-prize winner.

I used to feel not guilty about race issues because my family didn't live in the United States during slavery, and although I grew up in racist Maryland in the 1950s and 1960s, my parents were from New York, and therefore removed from all that. Still, my parents got a good deal on a small suburban house in 1953. If you were a veteran, you could buy a house for just over $11,000, one hundred dollars down and seventy-five dollars a month for twenty-five years. The only other condition was that you had to be White. Black people didn't live on our street until 1968, by which time I was in college. The builder of our house was a "liberal." He would sell houses to Jews, when others building in that area would not. We had all new schools where we lived; people I knew in Baltimore City, just a few blocks from where we lived in Baltimore County, went to older schools. Jewish people fled the City as the schools integrated and eventually became all Black. My class at Woodlawn High  had six Black students out of 450. Forest Park High, just as close to our house as Woodlawn, but in Baltimore City, had twenty-two White students in my graduation year. My girlfriend at the time, Seema, went to Forest Park. Her single mother had to move from their rental apartment in Lower Park Heights when the building was sold, and they ended up in a new apartment building near where I lived. Seema would have gone to Woodlawn with me senior year, but chose to pay tuition to finish at Forest Park. I went to her prom, and we had a great time. She was friends with everyone in her class.

I did well on standardized tests, but I was never a good student. If I had been Black at Woodlawn, I might have had a problem. While in college, I took a test for a summer job at the post office. Two of us, both Jewish students from my neighborhood, scored best on the test and got work. The test was hard, like an SAT. People who worked at the post office could not have passed it. If you could do basic alphabetization and filing and had a good back, you could do that job. I was grateful for the work, but even then I knew some poor kid, Black or White, needed that job more than I did. A few years earlier, the post office had moved from a point in the city near the end of several bus lines, to the county, where bus service was scarce at best. I didn't have a car, but I had to drop off my mom somewhere before work, or she had to drop me. The other kid and I were able to carpool sometimes.

Two stories I remember from my mother. She moved to Baltimore at nineteen as a new bride. She took a job selling womens' hats at Hutzler's department store downtown. One day a Black woman came in and asked to try on a hat. My mother helped her with the hat, but after the woman left, her boss came over and told her that Black people were not allowed to try on clothes in the store. My mother was surprised, but she was new in town and didn't question it. In our new house, my mother got a job teaching school, and after a few years, started teaching at the school my sister and I attended. Never one for housework, or staying home, she hired someone to clean the house and watch us kids. Mom told me that she explained to one of these "colored girls" that. she could open a can of tuna or bring something for her lunch. The woman said "Where's my plate and fork?," and my mother said "Just take a plate and fork." The woman said "That's not how we do here. I have to have my own plate and fork." My mother didn't understand at first.

Many of the places we went as kids did not serve Black people. I was fifteen before I saw a Black person in a restaurant, at the bowling alley, or a movie theater. There were businesses on Pennsylvania Avenue and Gay Street in Baltimore for Black people. Price's Dairy, Gwynn Oak Amusement Park and Milford Mill Pool were near us; Black people could not go to these places. Our synagogue used to sponsor special days at Gwynn Oak, where you could get a sticker to go on most of the rides for a dollar. That ended when a five-year-old asked to bring his friend. The friend was Black and the Dad argued with the staff at Gwynn Oak about what harm would come from a five-year old being admitted to the park. The synagogue never went back. Milford Mill was a stone quarry that had filled with water when the workers hit an underground spring. An entrepreneur from Florida created a beach and eventually built an indoor and outdoor pool, and a snack bar with a killer juke box. There were dances on weekend nights. We weren't allowed to go to the dances because it attracted a rough crowd of White kids from the city. School dances in the city were for Black kids by that time. After 1964, Milford Mill said it was a private club. You could get a guest membership for five dollars, and pay a buck every time you went, only you had to be White. Baltimore County didn't have public pools. Druid Hill Park in Baltimore City at one time had a White and a Black pool, but, in integrating the pools, they closed the Black pool, and the White pool became all Black. Lochearn, which was the neighborhood immediately next to ours, opened a swim club, and we thought we would go there, until our parents found out that they would not accept Jews as members. Eventually, there were private Jewish swim clubs, and that's where my parents went. At fourteen and fifteen, I went to Milford Mill, because those were the only two years I could go with friends before I started working in the summer at sixteen.

I understand that I have privilege, and I've used that throughout my life, sometimes unknowingly, other times fully understanding that I could do what Black people couldn't. Even today, I travel around to different, overwhelmingly White counties in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. I dress down, travel alone, leave the jewelry on my dresser and put on a local accent (not that. different from Baltimore). People have looked at me funny, but when they ask where I'm from, I smile and say "West Virginia," and that's usually enough to put people at ease.

I'm in a position to hold Morgantown's police accountable about racism. We are not like Baltimore, where the police have always been awful. I try to treat everyone equally and I am willing to listen to anyone about the limited power I have.

If you have a Google account, you can comment here, or on Twitter, where I am BarryLeeWendell. My City Council page on Facebook, Barry. Wendell for Morgantown Councilor, Ward Seven, is open. If you are a Facebook friend, we can talk there.