I sent this as an op-ed piece to The Charleston Gazette-Mail. They said they would run it, but couldn't say when. It's why we need to teach about the history of racial and religious prejudice.
When people ask where I'm from, I say "The South, Maryland." Usually the response is "That's not The South. They didn't have segregation." I patiently explain that I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, and everything was segregated. Black people couldn't sit at the lunch counter at Read's drugstore, couldn't watch a movie at The Ambassador, couldn't bowl at Northwest Lanes. In northwestern Baltimore County, where I lived, Gwynn Oak Amusement Park, Milford Mill Swim Club and Price's Dairy (all gone now) were not open to Black people.
My parents were New Yorkers, and my mother moved to Baltimore when she married my father in 1947. She was nineteen, polite and stylish and got a job selling women's hats at Hutzler's Department Store downtown. She told me she was once chewed out by a manager for allowing a Black woman to try on a hat.
Most of the neighborhood where I grew up was built in the 1950s, by two different builders. The difference was that one sold houses to Jews (and advertised in The Baltimore Jewish Times) and one builder would not sell houses to Jews. Black folk couldn't live anywhere in the neighborhood, except for one street that was there before the suburban boom. And the children from that street (only one girl in my year) went to a separate school until 1959, when I started fifth grade.
The John Waters movie "Hairspray," the stage play that came later and the movie of the stage play, portray realistically how things were. If you were a child or a teen in Baltimore in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as I was, you would immediately recognize "The Corney Collins Show" as a take-off on "The Buddy Deane Show." When I saw the first movie in 1987 in Los Angeles, friends thought it was a fantasy. I had to correct them. They said there could not possibly have been separate days for Black teens to be on the show. "That's crazy," they said. Maybe it was, but that's how it was.
We Jews, as well as Blacks, were not permitted to join the neighborhood swim club in Lochearn, the religiously segregated neighborhood immediately adjacent to our development. I was probably ten or eleven when that club opened, and I was disappointed to learn that we would not be able to swim there. The summer I was ten, we stayed with my grandparents in Long Beach, New York. I was surprised, but secretly pleased, to see Black children in the pool.
I admit that I did go to racially segregated places as a teen. They were what there was for us, and I wanted the best time possible for myself in those years.
I'm telling this story because politicians want to scare people into erasing history, and at 72, I want to make sure there is a record before my time runs out. The blather about making kids uncomfortable is pointless. High school students aren't children and they already see a lot more than politicians give them credit for. They are old enough to know the truth.
