You might ask how a guy born, bred and educated in Brooklyn would ever know how it felt to be an immigrant in the great US of A.
To find out you would have had to travel with him deep into the heart of the South to tiny Winnsboro, Louisiana located in the northeast of the State.
Winnsboro, with 4,200 residents, was so small that most Louisianians had never heard of it unless they drove through it to be able to buy a bottle of liquor in the neighboring town.
What the guy was doing there was becoming a disc jockey on an FM radio station managed by a former New Yorker who was a little homesick and gave a New Yorker his first job.
There was only one main street in town. It had a wooden boardwalk on one side and a dirt road on the other.
He’d rented a room in a huge old house with a bedroom larger than most New York studio apartments. His landlady had two kids away at college and was glad to have some company in the house.
The only restaurant in town soon had a customer who ate at least two meals a day there and learned all about hominy grits and chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes and all kinds of fruit pies. The folks who ran the restaurant and their patrons got accustomed to his Brooklyn accent as he got accustomed to their deep Southern drawl.
A local car dealer drove up to the station two weeks after he arrived and left him a small car to drive and when he had a flat tire the very first morning he had it…they replaced all four tires. No charge for anything.
The leading townspeople – business and social leaders – who all purchased commercials at the station – invited him to a dinner weeks after listening to him on the radio. They wanted to talk about race and education.
It made him nervous.
The year was 1959.
Five years earlier in Brown vs the US Board of Education the Supreme Court voted to end segregated schools – separate but equal – by declaring that what was separate was not equal at all.
Little had changed since…separate but not equal still existed throughout the country and certainly in the South.
He watched his landlady pay a young man to mow her large lawn. It took him two hours with a non-electric mower. She gave him fifty cents. But weeks later he came down on a Saturday morning to see her give him money to pay a doctor for his sick child and to buy medicine.
One morning as he walked to open the station at 4 am he saw two farmers in their overalls and big hats walking toward him. They were black. Ten yards before they reached him they stepped off the boardwalk into the road never looking at him.
Was all this real? Was he actually living in his history book in a chapter about how the South behaved? Was all this really America in the middle of the 20th Century or had he drifted back to the 1800’s?
Who were these people? He found out at the dinner.
Six couples sat around the table. They began right away while sipping pre-dinner drinks. Their point was simple and deeply earnest: mixing their children with black children in school will pull the whole level of education way down because the black children were not smart enough to learn the way the white children learned. It wasn’t fair or just to do that to their children…or to the black children. Separation was good because all children would learn but mixing them would delay and destroy learning for all.
All of this was explained as dinner was served by black help.
When each had said what they wanted to say in tones meant to simply explain their plight they waited for a response from him.
He answered simply that where he came from many felt as they felt – even if more than 1,500 miles away. But he believed that every child deserved an equal chance to do the best they could no matter what color they were. And that the Supreme Court simply wanted things to be equal for America’s children.
Upon leaving some were warm and appreciated his understanding even if they didn’t agree…others left just nodding to him, faces stern.
These memories came back as we watched the delightful disbelief in the activities of the thousands of visitors to America for soccer’s World Cup.
The food – Texas barbeque, hot dogs, pizza – the stores like Walmart, the Pacific Ocean – all seemed marvelous to people experiencing them for the first time.
The marvels of America elude those of us who simply live here and are used to them without ever thinking about them.
This piece could have been about the 1800s when those political people who mattered challenged the idea of a country of equals questioning whether people of color should ever be given the same rights as white Americans…or whether the founders of America in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were simply rich men who were only talking about themselves and not anyone else.
We accept the reality that America is a country of immigrants because America needed them to accomplish what we have become over time.
And the history of immigration – of who came and how they got here – is one that most older Americans understand while younger Americans have no clue.
Our angst today seems to be about political estrangement and changes in the values of our political parties.
We have had problems before and solved them. The difference was America was an educated public and is not the same as today’s America where education is missing with no solutions in sight.
It will take us longer to pull out of the present into a better future.
But if America remains the World’s place for opportunity – and it is – we are also the World’s most determined people ready and able to take on any problem – from the top down or from the bottom up.
So bottoms up America. The Statue remains standing. We salute the flag as it continues to wave and with a couple of new Constitutional amendments and some educational focus – so will we all.
Here’s to the years ahead and to a happy 250th anniversary.