I was inspired by RichardHayward2‘s Diary “Racism Through My Eyes“ which I read on August 22, 2016. My experience is similar yet different in subtle ways.
Richard remembered all but universal grief at John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Not me.
Perhaps one major difference which explains that is I am a Southerner, a Texan. I presently live near the geographical center of the Lower 48 states, but except for my time in the Navy, I was a resident of Texas from my birth to 1999.
Texas is complex state. The chattering classes dismiss it but it contains some of what is most beautiful and some of what is most horrible about this nation of ours. Because of its sheer size and breadth — Interstate 10, running through Texas from El Paso to Orange on the Louisiana border, is over 800 miles long. Likewise, Interstate 35, running from Laredo to Gainesville on the Oklahoma line, is similarly an almost impossibly long drive for one full day — it is most often divided into regions. In some ways these are similar to those found in Joel Garreau’s book, “The Nine Nations of North America,” Garreau divided the continent into nine subdivisions. Three of these include parts of Texas. One of course is Mexamerica, which runs from Central California to the Rio Grande Valley, the area around the mouth of the river which springs up in Colorado and empties into the Gulf of Mexico and forms the U.S.-Mexico border’s Texas segment. In Garreau's estimation, my home town, San Antonio, is part of Mexamerica, as is Houston.
Another of Garreau’s “nine nations” is “The Breadbasket” which consists of the Central States’ and Provinces’ farmlands from Northwest Texas, up into Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba below the northern terminus of grain fields. This is of course the mythical Heartland, immortalized in such works as L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz which celebrate Midwestern earnestness as well as the agricultural economy. Garreau named Kansas City, Missouri, as its "cultural capital" in large part because the creative shop for Hallmark Cards is there. While such a characterization was certainly melodramatic rather than scientific, having read Garreau I pronounced the "Culture War" won when Hallmark began to publicly support its substantial percentage of staff who are LGBT publicly, as did Disney. The southern terminus of this Garreau “nation" appears to be somewhere between Midland and Lubbock, extending eastward almost but not quite to I-35. Interestingly, Garreau put Fort Worth in “The Breadbasket," but not Dallas.
Dallas, perhaps to the chagrin of its Chamber of Commerce, was included in the Texas portion of “Dixie,” about which little explanation is necessary. Garreau’s version includes all of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana as well as portions of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. As one who has sojourned in rural East Texas and West Louisiana, I can tell you this is a place out of time. It is no accident that many deaths of African-Americans in police custody occur here.
Garreau purposefully left his lines blurry. His was an exercise in journalistic impressionism, not a scientific analysis. But it stuck with me because the town where we lived in between when I was two and ten years old is somehow right on the line between Dixie and Mexamaerica. Indeed, as a childhood racist, I recall discussing with peers which minority we hated most, Blacks of Hispanics. Results were mixed.
People forget that John F. Kennedy carried Texas in the 1960 election in no small part due to the influence of Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s running mate, and the Latino vote. Despite Johnson being a President to whom history has been unkind largely due to Vietnam, people also forget such things as how he and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, were themselves victims of a hate crime of sorts in the early 1960s in which they were pushed and shoved by a Republican Congressman, Bruce Alger, and an entourage of Republican women, in a Dallas hotel lobby. Full accounts of the entire incident are hard to locate, but it appears the Republican agitators had come to the hotel for the express purpose of harassing LBJ and Lady Bird. No doubt some of this same band were among those distributing the “Wanted for Treason" JFK handbills on the day he was assassinated in the City Rev. Ivan Stang nicknamed "The City Where We Shoot Presidents And People Who Shoot Presidents.”
Right-wing activism was very common in the 1960s. I remember our local Woolworth’s store sold copies of a book by a right-wing crank, J. Evetts Haley, critical of Johnson which veered into conspiracy theory. San Antonio had an activist base supporting Barry Goldwater in 1964 consisting primarily of retired Air Force personnel and their families. The John Birch Society operated their “American Opinion Bookstore" on West Avenue in which the storefront was an organizing nexus like “Christian Science Reading Rooms” were for that denomination.
I had a friend (I’ll call him "R.J." here) in fifth grade who parroted his father’s racist and right-wing views well, though he was not ‘book-smart” as they say. In one of our suburban “gang wars” this friend enlisted the aid of an Hispanic 14-year-old from the Westside (San Antonio’s primary Hispanic section) who accompanied his carpenter father to work building suburban crackerboxes, against two rather smarmy brothers who attended the nearby Catholic parochial school dressed in uniforms made to resemble Air Force dress blues. This exotic older boy shocked us and the brothers with his willingness to taunt them with the sort of threats the gangs of ancient Sodom supposedly used against The Lord's messengers in Genesis 19:5.
R.J., whom I last saw in 1971 and who I’ve since learned died a few years ago, was not insofar as I know the son of a Klansman, but that was where the family's sympathies lied. His father owned a major automobile services franchise and was retired or semi-retired. His mother was a stay-at-home-mom and he had two older brothers who had been in the Marines, as their father had. R.J. was slight of stature and sickly - perhaps this was an element in his racism - and he himself never served in uniform and likely would never have met physical requirements to do so. One time I saw him uncontrollably crying was in Vacation Bible School when some other students on the basketball court took to calling him "The 'Rimp," from a scene in the cartoon show The Jetsons in which the future era paterfamilias George Jetson is crushed and reduced to a bruised face and feet and the family Great Dane, Astro, derides his shortness with “Rimp, Rimp, look at the Rimp!" (It's a slurred version of saying "shrimp." Miraculously, like Bugs Bunny and other cartoon characters of the era, in the next scene Jetson is back at his full height and sound in health; such is the miracle of cartooning.)
I remember being surprised he was so emotional about a schoolyard taunt, but, I’ve never been a short male either. One coworker recently described a 4’10” colleague as being afflicted with “short man syndrome” and there definitely is such a thing. Being the youngest of three brothers (no sisters) R.J. was definitely “the runt of the litter,” to borrow right-wing commentator Pat Buchanan’s designation of the height-challenged Chicago Seven defendant Tom Hayden (who earned the ire of the right especially because he was Jane Fonda’s second husband).
The old man was an odd duck and they didn’t stay in our subdivision all that long before moving up to a better one. I never much talked to him. He tended his garden in shorts and an undershirt and loved the old country crooner Ernest Tubb’s syndicated TV show. They got a dachshund which the old man abused by whipping him with a belt. Occasionally the Marine brothers would visit with their wives and babies from Camp Lejune or wherever. The mom was older than most people’s in our ‘hood and she sang along with pop tunes on the radio and didn’t wear makeup. They didn’t go to church (I pressured R.J. to go to our Methodist church’s Vacation Bible School where the “Rimp” incident occurred).
Mostly me and R.J. and sometimes other peers would go “out in the woods” which was really just undeveloped land — today apartments, strip centers, Wal-Mart, and Red Lobster adorn where a small post oak forest hugged Martinez Creek and a few acres of prickly pear cacti we dubbed “Cactus City” once existed. There he would regale us with tales of “The Creature,” a seeming alien fellow with green splotches on his skin and one ear on top of his head, who talked in mumbles because half of his mouth had been burned shut. He also claimed to have over 100 “spies” in the woods, led by a sixth grader who resembled Jackie Earle Hailey’s juvenile delinquent character in The Bad News Bears except this guy was missing one eye and had a glass prosthesis. He claimed in another wooded area nearby there was a house that moved, which may or may not have been the base of operations of “The Creature.”
Besides these tall tales, most of which I most remember about R.J. was his racism, against all nonwhite races, but especially African-Americans and Hispanics. R.J.’s family supported Barry Goldwater primarily due to his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He also said LBJ “is spending too much money.” About the who-is-worse-Hispanics-or-Blacks argument he came down squarely on the side of “Meskins” who he said “would stab you with a switchblade as soon as look at you.” (That may have led to his recruiting of Hector, the Hispanic teenager working with his father on the houses, into our internecine suburban rock-throwing wars — respect for his race's prowess.)
Goldwater made a campaign appearance at Alamo Stadium the last week of the 1964 campaign. I was for Goldwater, too, but my parents weren’t rally-going types. R.J. went and shook Goldwater’s hand, which he said he would never wash again. Unlike the height-shaming though he seemed to take Goldwater’s massive defeat well. This was also the time of the Civil War Centennial and R.J. claimed slavery was not bad and that indeed “there are some white people who ought to be slaves, too,” but he never was able to articulate exactly how or why.
R.J.’s family only lived near us a couple of years. My father talked a few times with R.J.’s Dad and was never much impressed. R.J.’s Dad bragged he wanted to pay cash for his house but his lawyer wouldn't let him. I saw R.J. a few times after they moved into a more upscale neighborhood a few miles away in a different school district, but we didn't stay in touch, R.J. had begun some juvenile delinquency of his own and began smoking cigarettes which he colorfully called "squares," a term culled from beatnik slang -because tobacco cigarettes were for the “squares" while hep cats smoked marijuana cigarettes - ironically, the last time I saw him when we were 19 he still had his fifth grade crew cut but wore a bandana around his head and begged another friend of mine for a "square." After he explained what he meant the other friend said "I don't understand this hippie slang."
R.J. also told me of some sexual acting out he had engaged in with a female cousin a year or two older. Like anyone with little, like he had with height, he was prone to brag, but by the time I saw him some seven or eight years later he seemed to be one of the casualties of the dopehead generation. I think I had heard he had quit school but I couldn’t swear.
Besides his racism, hereditarily obtained, what I most remember though was his nudging me in the hallway as school let out on November 22, 1963. My parents had been 1960 Nixon voters but didn’t have much animus toward JFK after he was elected. But R.J.'s apparently did. When he poked me he said sotto voce, ”Kennedy's dead!" He was obviously happy about it but knew it was socially unacceptable to say so out loud. A few girls had cried. I cringed at his touch and remark, knowing delight in an assassination was wrong per my Methodist sensibilities, but….ah, well, life went on.
My family was a mixed bag. we were racist, but we adjusted to civil rights. As a liberal, I like to think I’ve become better. In 1968, I became liberal primarily over the Vietnam War. I also changed my position on domestic issues to be a somewhat moderate liberal. Education for confirmation as a United Methodist exposed me to the Methodist Social Creed which aligns these positions with the official view of the UMC.
My father initially opposed civil rights on an individual rights basis. He said, “If I want to open a restaurant and serve only red-headed Jews, that’s my right.” I came to wonder what that would look like. I concluded it would be one table with Woody Allen and Natasha Lyonne as the only customers and a lot of empty tables.
My paternal grandfather and step-grandmother had been big supporters of Kennedy in 1960. But in 1968 they voted for Nixon because they determined Humphrey was “for the ,,,”. My step-grandmother cried when she learned her high school had elected a black homecoming queen. In the late 190s and early 1990s, we helped care for an elderly great aunt. She was racist and opposed interracial marriages, but not long before she died, she said, “The poor ….we treated them so bad.” I like to think she grew with the times, as I did. In 1992, I took her to vote early at a courthouse substation. She cast her vote for Bill Clinton, as I did,
I often wondered if I failed R.J. as a friend by not trying to change his views, and probably should have, but I doubt it would have had any effect. I wonder what the rest of his life was like. I imagine it was over full with bitterness, like that of many Trump supporters today.