Certain People (29 page)

Hollowell himself has been subjected to numerous indignities because of his race. A native of Wichita, Kansas, he was a high school dropout who later managed to earn his high school diploma through a correspondence course. He then completed three years at Lane College on a football scholarship and, in 1941, as a Regular Army
reservist, he was ordered to report for military service at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. At Fort Oglethorpe, he discovered that he was the only black at the induction center. Segregation was just as strict in the United States Army as it was elsewhere in the South, and Private Hollowell was ordered to eat in the kitchen. He refused. He was then told that he could eat with the prisoners and this, it turned out, had certain advantages. “I had a table to myself, with a whole pitcher of milk, and a whole pound of butter,” Hollowell recalls. “I was eating better than anyone else on the base.” Still, he was barred from the day room and the post movie theatre and, to his amusement, was told that he could not play Ping-Pong. The latrines were another problem. At Fort Oglethorpe, a white base, there was no provision for a “colored” toilet. When Holowell entered the latrine to shower and shave, he was confronted by a group of fifteen or twenty angry white recruits, brandishing razors and knives, who ordered him to leave. When Hollowell explained to the company commander that he would, if the commander wished, use the lawn in front of company headquarters as his toilet, he was given a private bathroom.

The idiocies and hatred of segregation went on and on, and yet Hollowell was able to emerge from the United States Army as a first lieutenant. He finished college on the G.I. Bill, and went on to Loyola University to obtain his law degree. He met and married an Atlanta girl, and decided to settle there. “There was culture and tradition among blacks of the South,” he says, “that had not had a chance to develop among blacks in the Northern cities. Blacks here had been forced to do for themselves, and those who had done it had done well. There was a kind of survivalist elite here. I decided that if a black lawyer could do a good job he could make it here. I've fared as well as any other lawyer around, and I've been here for twenty-four years. It wasn't all easy. There were state laws that ran contrary to federal laws, and that I've helped change. There were judges who were unfair. There were some setbacks, but there was also some cooperation. There could have been chaos. But, as bad as it was, there was a resolution in the end.”

While all this was going on, there were other Southern blacks among the “survivalist elite” who were quietly and purposefully working for reforms, and were doing so without slogans or marches or demonstrations—or much fanfare. When John Wesley Dobbs reorganized the socially, and politically, important Masonic Lodge, he made it a rule that no one could join the Masons of Atlanta unless he
was a registered voter. When the men of a nearby county begged to be excepted from this rule—since county laws, in defiance of federal law, denied blacks the vote—Mr. Dobbs agreed to make an exception in their case. Word of this reached the newspapers, much to the embarrassment and ire of the white worthies of the offending county, who preferred to have their attitudes and practices kept out of the press. A sheriff from the county in question appeared at Mr. Dobbs's door one night with a summons. Alone, and at great personal risk, Mr. Dobbs drove out to the county courthouse to defend charges of creating unpleasant publicity for the county. He was, fortunately, given a scolding and a reminder to “keep in your place,” and nothing more. Because he was aware that his life was in danger most of the time, Mr. Dobbs always carried a gun. At one point, he was arrested for carrying a weapon, even though he had a perfectly valid permit to do so. Similarly, Grace Hamilton's father, Mr. Towns, on his way to the Atlanta courthouse to pay the poll tax that was required in order to vote, spoke to each black person he met along the way and urged him to do the same. “Your ballot is your weapon,” he used to say. When this unwelcome activity was noticed by the whites, he too was threatened. Still, he persisted, and survived.

Public pronouncements had to be made with great care. Bishop Turner, Cornelius King's father-in-law, who used to preach in favor of blacks returning to Africa, once declared, “The United States flag is just a dirty dishrag to the Negro.” For this slur, he had to go into hiding for a while. In Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard was the local surgeon and president of the Mound Bayou Mutual Life Insurance Company. Though there was no chapter of N.A.A.C.P. in Mound Bayou, Dr. Howard often spoke to fellow blacks about the value of voting, of education, and of achieving economic advancement. By 1955, segregation had been outlawed by the United States Supreme Court, but Mississippi was dragging its Deep Southern heels in terms of doing anything about it. Mississippi's governor, Hugh White, called a group of one hundred black leaders in the state together, and the theme of the meeting was to be “Mutuality of Interest.” It was to the blacks' and the whites' mutual interest, the governor suggested, that the state proceed slowly toward compliance with the Supreme Court's directive. In fact, it might be to the mutual interest of all concerned if actual integration were to be postponed indefinitely. Some black leaders, more timorous about the effects of integration than others, tended to go along with
Governor White and to say “We don't think it's quite time to end segregation.” But the blacks elected Dr. Howard to be their spokesman, and Dr. Howard held a different view. In Jackson, Dr. Howard stood up before the governor and said, among other things, “Black boys are fighting and dying in Korea for liberty and democracy, but here in Mississippi we don't know what liberty and democracy mean.”

Gently, the governor reproved him, saying, “Now look here. You know, and I know, that if we asked all the Negroes in this state how they felt about integration, ninety percent would be opposed to it. Don't you believe that?” Dr. Howard replied, “Governor, if I told you that ninety percent of the blacks in Mississippi didn't want to go to Heaven, would you believe that?” The newspapers seized the story, with headlines that screamed: “BLACK SURGEON CALLS GOVERNOR A LIAR!” In Mississippi, a bounty of a thousand dollars was immediately offered for Dr. Howard's head. He and his family made it out of Mississippi as rapidly as possible, sold their property, and have never returned. Dr. Howard settled in Chicago, where he reestablished his practice and, three years later, opened his Friendship Clinic, a full-service clinic offering medical, dental, and even psychiatric service, which made Dr. Howard a multimillionaire. It made Dr. Howard able to afford to become an avid big-game hunter in Africa and, with his many trophies, he turned the reception room of Friendship Clinic into a taxidermal zoo, with the animals in natural poses surrounded by pools, waterfalls and a jungle of live tropical trees.

In retrospect—perhaps because he managed to become so successful elsewhere—he insisted that he was not bitter about the treatment he received in his former home, and that he harbored no hard feelings against white people in general. After all, he pointed out, his “salvation” came from the fact that his mother worked as a cook for a white Mississippi doctor named Robert Mason, after whom Dr. Howard was named. Dr. Mason took a paternal interest in his namesake, and put him through school, college, and medical school. As a result, he was the only member of his family since slavery to receive a higher education, and a half-brother in the South works as a manual laborer. “The whites of Mississippi and the blacks of the state were close,” Dr. Howard said. “The plantation owners were good to their people, and I was respected by the whites in the state—as long as nobody tried to rock the boat. But the whites in Mississippi don't like
to see things change. They take the attitude of ‘We're not gonna have anybody tell our niggers anything different from what we've
always
told 'em.' When somebody tries to do that, that's when the feathers fly.”

Donald Hollowell also maintains that he harbors no ill feelings toward whites, no bitterness because of the indignities he suffered during segregation days. “I've learned,” he says, “that if you let rancor and bitterness seep in, you lose your
perspective
and your
effectiveness
. I've absorbed enough negatives to rend one's soul. But I've tried to maintain the Christian principle, and to forgive them their debts. There is always a day of reckoning. I couldn't have achieved such success as I have if I'd had rancor eating away at me. Rancor is just not practical.”

Hollowell admits that many—and he goes so far as to say “most”—blacks bitterly resent (and
hate
would not be too strong a word) white people. But those, he insists, are from the poor and the uneducated lower classes.

Perhaps an ability to forgive, and a refusal to be consumed by bitter feelings, and an ability to absorb insults and rise above rancor are, in themselves, among the hallmarks of an upper class.

20

“Interpositionullification”

As more and more proud blacks of the south boycotted the segregated streetcars and buses, and refused to trade at stores where they could neither work nor use the rest rooms, segregation became, to all intents and purposes, no longer “practical.” When not working quietly and peacefully toward an integrated society, blacks comforted each other with their own special sense of humor and bits of doggerel such as the one—at the time of the famous 1938 reencounter between a black fighter and a Nazi white supremacist—that went:

White folks, white folks, don't get mad—

Joe Louis will whip Max Schmeling's ass!

Still, the daily humiliations were difficult to endure. Dr. and Mrs. Asa Yancey, for example, live in a sprawling California ranch-style house in the Collier Heights suburb of Atlanta. Dr. Yancey, a surgeon, is Medical Director of Grady Memorial Hospital, associate dean of Emory School of Medicine, and a member of the Atlanta Board of Education, and there have been Yanceys in Atlanta for over seventy years. His wife, however, was a Dunbar from Detroit, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer and manager of a housing project, and was brought up according to strict democratic principles. Neither Mrs. Dunbar nor any of her children ever called a servant by his or her first name. “If one of Mama's maids was a Mrs. Smith, that was what we all called her,” Marge Dunbar Yancey recalls. “No one was permitted to address her as ‘Mary.' Of course Mama often became
friends with some of the people who worked for her, and if that happened they
both
used first names, but the children never did. It wasn't because we were stiff and formal. It was because we respected human dignity.” When Marge Yancey married and moved to Atlanta and had her first taste of life in a segregated Southern city, she found the experience “incredibly distressing.” Like most young black mothers, she tried to protect her children from the more petty expressions of segregation. But neither Marge Yancey nor her husband will ever forget the time, nearly twenty years ago, when the children first felt segregation's effect.

The Yanceys and their four young children—the eldest was barely six years old—were returning from a family outing, and Asa Yancey pulled up to a Dairy Queen to buy ice cream for the children. He got out of the car, and went up to the window of the ice cream stand. The counter girl scrutinized him for a moment—Dr. Yancey was so fair that he, too, might pass for white—then motioned him away. When he returned to the car empty-handed, the children wanted to know what had happened. “The place wasn't clean,” he told them. “There were flies buzzing around.” Today he explains, “I didn't want to lie to them. But I felt that there probably
was
a fly or two in the place, and so it wasn't a real lie, just a half-truth.” The family drove homeward in silence for a while, and then the six-year-old said suddenly, “
I
know why we didn't get our ice cream there. It's that
seg-reg-ation
Mom is always talking about on the phone!” The Yanceys were astonished that a child of that age could already have become so sensitive to the situation.

Dr. Yancey's father, Arthur Henry Yancey—always called “Aytch” for his first two initials—had been a carpenter by trade. His first job in Atlanta had been to build a flight of steps, which took him ten hours and earned him $2.50—an amount, he realized, that was more than his father had ever earned in a day in his lifetime. His next job was bigger, and earned him more, and presently it began to seem to Aytch Yancey as though his future was secure. Presently, he was hired by a contractor to complete a house that another subcontractor had fallen through on, and the man was so pleased with Yancey's work that he subcontracted with him for a new house at rates that more experienced white builders were getting. Yancey took the job, finished it days ahead of schedule, and from then on was a general contractor, hiring subcontractors of his own. This was in the early 1900s, and Aytch Yancey was prospering—so much so that the white
community began to notice his prosperity, and this, perhaps, was the beginning of his trouble.

He had signed a contract with a white man to build a small house, and the price agreed upon had been $650. During the building, the white man's wife seemed unusually friendly, even flirtatious—Aytch Yancey was a slender and handsome young man—and she hung around the construction site, chatting, joking and making suggestions. Yancey tolerated her intrusions politely. When the job was completed, Yancey presented his bill, and the owner asked him about building a small servants' wing on the house. Yancey said that he would be delighted to do this, and the cost would be an additional $125. “Oh, no,” the man said. “I've paid you enough already. You just go ahead and build the wing.” Yancey refused, and the case went to court. When the hearing convened, the white judge—who already appeared to know a good deal about the case—opened the proceedings with “Yancey, why don't you go ahead and build the servants' room like a good boy, and stop causing us trouble.”