|
|||||||||||||
Printer-Friendly
Email this Story
Post a Comment (0)
Segregation's message: 'Don't get too big, don't get too uppity'
A walk down Warrenton’s Main Street still gives Conway Porter the chills.
Forty -five years ago, Fauquier peacefully desegregated its restaurants, shops and other places of business and work.
But to this day, Porter cannot pass them without recalling the discriminatory practices that made him and other blacks feel inferior.
Before desegregation, blacks could purchase meals from restaurants, but "you had to go around the back door to pick it up," says the 62-year-old Porter, a tax representative with the Virginia Employment Commission in Culpeper. "You couldn’t sit at the [drug store] counter. You had to stand and order," then leave.
Relentless reminders that blacks didn’t count for much in white society took its toll, says Porter, who lives near Auburn, about a half-mile from where he was born.
"It sort of sinks into you, And you sort of see the world that way. And, ironically, you start thinking that way."
Blacks worked at jobs for which they were over-qualified and received smaller salaries than whites performing the same tasks, Porter says.
But desegregation unlocked many doors and opened many minds and eyes, giving blacks the chance to prove they could hold their own and then some with whites, he says.
It also benefited white merchants in unexpected ways.
"All of the stores that didn’t want you in there, socially, started saying, ‘Hey, these people have money!’" Porter recalls, a member and past president of the Fauquier branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "They could buy all the junk that anybody would sell them. That was a great boon to the economy."
Porter, who ran unsuccessfully for the Fauquier circuit clerk of the court in 1999, recently talked in his living room about segregation, its aftermath and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
On growing up in segregated Fauquier
? “It was suffocating. One thing you notice very, very early on is your world is a whole lot smaller. There are certain places you can’t go, certain things you can’t do,” Porter said.
? “One of the main things is there are certain people who seem to be deserving of honor and respect. You learn that, in the wider world, your parents, all the people you look up to, don’t rate any kind of honor titles. There’s no mister, misses.”
How Virginia differed from the "hard" South under segregation
? “Virginia wasn’t the hard South, where you had the terrible violence in Georgia and Alabama, the 'black belt,' where you had a high concentration of blacks. That was sort of scaring all the whites to death, because of the potential for political change. That’s what brought out the violence.”
? “In Virginia, it was subtler. It was like a soft, gentle hand holding you down. There wasn’t anything to fight against so much. Just a very subtle message that told you 'This is your place. As long as you stay in there, you’re all right. We want nothing but the best for you, but don’t get too big and don’t get too uppity, and you’re all right.'
On the idea of 'separate but equal' opportunities for blacks under desegregation
? “There was no equality. By the time you got the (school) books, old books, they were scribbled in. You got the old rickety buses that were cast off. Anything good or new that happened would fall into [the white] camp, and we’d get whatever was left. What you had was a situation where [black] people with master’s and bachelor’s degrees were working at the post office. And nobody was putting this talent to its highest degree.”
On racial, political conflict in the 1960s and 1970s
? “That was a time I had my doubts about whether the whole country would get knocked off of our foundation. Assassinations [Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy]. The [Vietnam] war. I was living in D.C. and working in D.C. when King was assassinated. The place was on fire. We’ve been able to recover from a lot of that, and we’re moving on.”
On forgotten civil rights lessons
? “All of the lessons that I thought we learned in a very hard way, we’re starting to relearn, all because of immigration issues. It may be about terrorism, it may be about jobs. But I think it’s much deeper. It’s race. We have this problem with people that don’t either look like us or don’t have our ways. It might be some kind of innate, genetic thing that’s programmed into us. But if we’re going to live and prosper as a nation, we’ve got to fight those feelings and do the right thing.
On immigration and overcoming racial and ethnic 'stereotypes'
? “Until you’ve either got some close, personal association with someone [who has experienced prejudice] and have been able to knock down walls and stereotypes, you don’t do it. You don’t teach your children. You just don’t model it. We’re all one species. And there’s no difference between [Americans and Hispanics] except that I don’t speak Spanish and they don’t speak English. But they’ve got the same desires. How we all got [to America] is sort of up in the air. But we want to close the gate. It’s always been that way.
On Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama
? “Obama has something I haven’t seen in Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. He was in it to win it from the first. He’s has more than just support, he’s got power behind him. He has captured our imagination.
On what makes Obama different from other presidential candidates
? “People want to feel good about America. And I don’t think that any of the others are really talking that way. It’s not what he can do for us, it’s what we can do for the country. I think it’s sort of a spin [on President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 inaugural address.]”
E-mail the reporter: ddelrosso@timespapers
You must be logged in to post a comment.