Negroes

I wish I could remember the precise date when I and everybody else I knew stopped using the word Negro. I am pretty sure it was after Ted and I graduated from high school in 1966, though it’s hard to know for sure because there were no Negroes in Forty Fort, Pennsylvania. It’s hard now to even reconstruct for myself that world where the word Negro was commonly used.

I didn’t really meet my first Negro until 1961, when I started attending Neptune Junior High School in Ocean Grove, New Jersey. We lived in Shark River Hills and before that in Hamilton Gardens, and there were no Negroes in either neighborhood. All neighborhoods were racially segregated back then. It was illegal, but the neighborhoods were red-lined, which meant that whites simply did not sell their houses to Negroes. Neptune Township was divided
right down the center by Route 33, and that was the de facto racial boundary. Negroes lived on Ridge Avenue and in Whitesville, which we only knew about because Dad was the principal there. Whitesville Elementary School had one white student, Don Erwin, who went to school there because his family was very poor.

I’m sure Dad took that job because becoming a principal of any school was a good career opportunity for a young phys ed teacher, but I think he was afraid of Negroes. I can’t recall him ever saying anything overtly racist, but I think he was struggling to overcome the deep-seated prejudices he had grown up with. He actually made a point of saying how smart and kind Negroes were, but it’s almost like he said it too often and in a way that made you think he was constantly surprised by this fact. I remember Dad telling me once that Negroes got sunburned just like us. He found this interesting, and I think amusing.

Dad’s favorite Negro was Ernest Jones. Ernest Jones was smart and successful. He was a physicist. I believe he worked at Camp Evans, over in Wall Township. He had a daughter our age, Geneva Jones, who we heard about long before actually meeting her. We heard that she was beautiful and light-skinned and very smart, and all of this turned out to be true. But we knew about her mostly because Ernest and his wife had broken the real estate red-lining barrier. They lived in The Gables, which was on the other side of Route 33 but white, until the Joneses moved in. I recall that they experienced some harassment, but nothing that we would call a hate crime today. At least I don’t think so.

Upon entering 7th grade, all students in the Neptune Township elementary schools, white and Negro, went to the same junior high school, so that is where many of us white kids actually met our first Negroes. Although the school was officially integrated, students were “tracked” academically, and there were very few Negroes in the best classes. Geneva was in our class, and so was Bob Silva. Dad liked Bob Silva, I guess because he was smart and middle-class. I remember later, when Dad was principal of the junior high school, he would take us to the school on holidays and snow days and let us play basketball in the gym while he worked. Sometime Bob Silva would be there. I’m not sure why he was there, but we became fairly friendly with him.

There was a lot of racial tension at the junior high school and later at the high school. Every so often word would spread in the corridors that there was to be a fight after school, and it was almost always between a Negro boy and an Italian boy. Negroes and Italians hated each other, most likely because their fathers were competing for the same jobs. I rarely saw these fights, but I heard of them. It was the first I heard of brass knuckles, and I remember trying to imagine what it would be like to get hit in the face with brass knuckles. One that I did witness took place in the school itself, which was uncommon. It was in the boy’s lavatory, and it was between Bobby Jones, a shy Negro boy I knew a little, and an Italian boy whose name I can’t recall now. It was rough and bloody but didn’t last long. Someone had tipped off Mr. Altschuler, the 7th grade English teacher, who broke it up. Bobby Jones was suspended for a week, and the Italian boy went unpunished. It was an awakening for me, realizing that Mr. Altshuler was a racist. He would later be fired for embezzling money from the school coffers.

When we got to high school, whites and Negroes were still segregated academically, but the most perplexing segregation was in the cafeteria. This we did ourselves. In biology class I would sit next to Geneva Jones and in English class I would joke with Bob Silva, but every day at noon we divided up and ate with our own. Then we would integrate again for history class. We also played on the same sports teams, though there were not a lot of Negro wrestlers, only Dennis White at 95 pounds and Dennis Wilson at heavyweight. Bob Silva played on the basketball team, and was quite good. I guess he had honed his skills on those snow days at the junior high school gym. Bob would eventually go to Moravian College at the same time I was at Lehigh, and we ran into each other on the streets of Bethlehem a couple times. Then we lost touch.

A few years ago, I took Ian, Brendan and Morgan to Neptune for a visit. The junior high school in Ocean Grove was boarded up. I took them by my old house on Prospect Avenue in Shark River Hills, and there was a Black family living there. Being at the house reminded me of an early encounter with a Negro, way before junior high school. Although no Negroes were allowed to live in the neighborhood back then, we would occasionally see Negroes working there. I remember vividly this Negro man, probably in his 20s, who came by our house to haul some debris away. My memory is vivid because this Negro had red hair, and I remember Mom commenting on that after he left. She also told me that he had to be very careful working in a wooded area like ours, because he was highly allergic to poison ivy and especially to bee stings. If he got a bee sting he could die.