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The block of time in which I grew up in New Orleans was a period of vast transition. There was so much hope and anticipation that the city would grow and sprawl as so many other cities across the South seemed to be doing. I remember constant comparisons between New Orleans and Houston, for example.
But for some reason, New Orleans never got the juice.
The grids for the planned growth were optimistically drawn out in the form of highways that let to nowhere much. The city fizzled.
Black New Orleans proudly advanced the cause of civil rights and the recognition of the importance of black culture in the city. But it was slow going...involving demonstrators being hosed down by firemen at city hall...demonstrations in front of businesses down town.
As I was growing up, most blacks had jobs as maids, doormen, custodians. restaurant help, sanitation workers...mostly subserviant roles. Even during Mardi Gras, the black flambeau carriers lit the way for parades they had no real part in....except for Zulu and the Mardi Gras Indians.
The machine of segregation was in full throttle...and this was a rather harsh reality to a white kid born in Phildelphia...a kid who stole his first kiss in kindergarten from a little black girl.
I rode the city transit system quite a bit...there were no school busses. Every morning the busses, trollies, and street cars carried white business men into the center city, the maids and yardmen out to homes in Lakeview, and kids like me to a variety of private and public schools all over the city.
For seven cents a person could travel the whole city. But for blacks, it wasn't the price of public transit, it was the indignity.
There were two holes on the back of every seat...there were also wooden signs that read "No Colored Beyond This Point". There were two pegs on the sign that made it possible for the sign to be mounted on the back of the bus seats.
When a white person entered a bus and there were no seats available except those occupied by black, he could move one of the signs in back of a seat...causing the black(s) occupying that seat to get up and stand so the white could sit.
If a white was already sitting in a seat, and there was still a seat available next to him, no black person could occupy that seat. This made for a very interesting "game" among white kids going or coming from school. When they got on the bus or trolly, each white kid would take a seat all to himself...meaning that the seats available to black passengers were very limited.
Although I didn't participate in this cruel game...some of my friends did. My attitude adjustment toward the whole rotten thing came one afternoon when a heavy, older black lady got on the bus with bags of groceries. No seats were open to her in spite of seats next to white kids.
The lady stood trying to manage her bags and keep her balance at the same time as the bus stopped and started. In short order, she fell with her purchases rolling all over the floow. I immediately thought of my grandmother, Emma. I saw Emma on the floow...I saw Emma's purhases rolling all over the bus.
What was happening here was wrong...very wrong.
I helped her pick up her stuff. This was not some noble gesture to somehow salvage race relations in the South...but shame. Biting, head-hanging shame. This was not some stranger...this was my grandmother...somebody's grandmother.
I was changing...more aware.
The separate water fountains, bathrooms, entrances to movie theaters...separate shcools, housing projects, waiting rooms at doctors' offices....
And our churches....?
When civil rights legislation got serious, lovely public swimming pools were filled with concrete to avoid integrating them.
I wonder if it's coinccidence that New Orleans fizzled when respect and tolerance fizzled? ...Did it all happen when the "city that care forgot" forgot to care?
The racial intolerance I observed was at least one of the things that disillusioned me with "Bible Belt" Chrisitanity...and into a life style that promised love and acceptance...and a mind-opening drug experience.