A few days ago, I saw the movie version. I enjoyed it, but I was also annoyed--even angry--about the caricaatures. I thought there was no NEED to create such villains. Racism is more subtle—and therefore more dangerous—than that.
I lived in the South between 1956 and 1964, an even after segregation was outlawed by the Brown vs. The Board of Education in Topeka, I graduated from high school in 1964 without ever having a single non-white classmate. After Rosa Park took her stand (by taking and keeping her seat), the "colored people" in Columbia still stood at the back of the bus.
I knew the separate water fountains, back of the bus for “colored people,” and “Negroes” standing at the back of Woolworth’s (McCrory’s?) was wrong, but I didn’t discuss it with my friends. The meanest comment I ever heard was from someone who saw a picture of my best friend and her maid and said with disbelief and horror, “Sara had a picture taken with her colored girl!” This was a girl whose "Swiss" father I suspected of being an escaped Nazi.
During this era my dad (according to what they told us at his memorial service) was integrating USC by having his white graduate students meet with the black interns at the “colored” section of the State Hospital (?). In a birthday tribute to my dad, a black psychologist had the followig to say:
Thank you for recruiting and hiring me to your staff in 1960. By doing so, you not only fullfilled a lifelong dream but enabled me to become one of the early black psychologists in the state. (This happened just as I was about to become a high school teacher/coach). I remember the training seminars that we had where us guys from State park (now called Crafts Farrow) with our black college degrees had the opportunity to match skill, wit, intelligence and common sense with the people from the other wolrld (S.C. State Hospital, USC and other white school graduates). You were not only aware of all of the underlying issues but stayed on top of them and made sure that we learned from each other what living together was all about."
But I, I believed a classmate who said he’d seen the result of a child born of mixed races, and its skin wasn’t exactly polka dot, but the pigmentation was all weird! A close friend, who usually crossed the school yard only to tell me of things like the Elizabeth Taylor-Eddie Fisher-Debbie Reynolds scandal, came up to me in the school yard and said, “Last night on the Perry Como Show, he kissed Eartha Kitt right on the mouth!” I think I really thought that inter-racial was “unnatural.” So I had racist notions without even knowing it.
But even among the racists, I think there was a pride in being sensitive to the needs of those they considered inferior to them. (Yes, I'm afraid their notion was inferiority rather than the less privileged or those held back by racist policies.) I don’t know of ANY southerners—not even the ones I thought were really escaped Nazis—who would have sent their old servant and her daughter away as is done in The Help. I think they’d have said things like, “Oh, she’s a jewel. I don’t know what we’d do without her. “ (I heard my seventh grade teacher describe her new maid that way.) I met a graduate of Old Miss when I was in Kansas briefly, and she was NOT Skeeter, the journalist-heroine of The Help; she actually thought integration was the best policy. But when a black man (Negro in those days) came to our campus to speak during our coffee hour, it was Scottie the Southern Belle who asked him, “Could I get you a cup of coffee?” She put Southern Hospitality before segregation, at least for that hour.
At our church (St. John’s Episcopal) we had a discussion about integration with our new social director, and a really nice Southern girl named Molly (I think) said, “If a colored person ever came to our church, I’d just leave.” The social director (a Yankee import?) said, “But that’s not the Christian thing to do.” Molly said, “Well, then, I’m not that good of a Christian.”
A substitute teacher told us, when Martin Luther King was on the cover of Time, that if colored students ever came to her class, she’d take their papers and just let them pile up. And she’d keep white kids’ papers in another pile to look at and correct. She’d never call on the coloreds. When Miss Pearlstine came back, the kids wanted to report on this. “You know what Miss X said she’d do if there were colored students in her class?” Miss Pearlstine said, “Well, I hope that everybody would be civilized and treat them like human beings.”
Once a student reported on another student: “Her dad teaches at a colored college. When she told me, she burst in to tears. She’s so ashamed. Don’t tell a soul.”
But I also remember that we had a debate in Miss Spears’ class in fifth grade Schneider, and those opposing slavery won. In seventh grade, the Civil War in our textbook was called “The War between the States: The South’s Fight for Independence.” Our teacher Miss Langdon (later Mrs. Hayes) said, “I hope it won’t upset you for me to say this, but slavery was wrong.” All the kids nodded an “of course!” sort of nod and said, “We know that!” Miss Langdon said that was the first class she’d ever had where people weren’t defending slavery.
But kids loved to joke, so when we had a page of our kitchen help in our yearbook, they’d sign things like, “I sure enjoyed my date with you” and “I’m so proud of you, son.” To tell you the truth, I’m just guessing what they wrote, but I know they wrote pretending that the owner of the yearbook was in some way connected to the “colored help” on the page. From one picture I have, it looks as if the cafeteria workers were privy to this.
I remember our maid Arlene’s apt response when my brother David asked her about her son Willie, “Would you like Willie to go to school with white kids?” She said, “Some white kids.”
A final note: I heard that in 1965, the year after I graduated from Columbia High School, there was finally some integration. But in 2001 I went to a reunion of all the students who'd graduated from CHS in the 1960s. There were about 700 or 800 people. Not one was black.
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