Earle M. Holland

Science Writing/Science Communications/Research Risk Communications

WHAT DOES A WHITE BOY KNOW ABOUT GROWING UP BLACK IN THE SOUTH?

That's what a voice was asking me as I listened to Gloria Campbell's story.

It's the same voice that I've heard for the last 40-plus years. The one that gives a running play-by-play of daily life. The one that comments on the events of the day. The one that offers the next question during my interviews.

And it was asking . . .

What does a white boy know about growing up Black in the South?

I remembered the first time my best friend yelled "nigger" on the playground of our all-white public school in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama. A third-grader at the time, I still remember the shock and shame that rushed over me.

There were no Blacks around to receive the insult. It was just a schoolboy's taunt hurled without thinking, and there I stood on the dusty red clay playground wondering how my best friend could say that word.

Better to say "damn" or "hell" in my family than to say "nigger." He had stepped over the line, broken the code, and things were never the same between us.

What does a white boy know about growing up Black in the South?

I remembered the separate water fountains and restrooms for "whites" and "coloreds" and the separation on the city buses. There were painted lines on the seat backs and on the floor of the buses separating the rows assigned to the two races.

I had forgotten the painted lines for all these years.

I remembered the summer I was nine when I visited the old family farm in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Cocksure, I had challenged a seven-year-old Black boy, the youngest son of one of the hired hands, to a wrestling match, and I was confident of victory because I was nine and I was white.

I can still taste the dust of the barn floor as he taught me a simple truth -- age and race have nothing to do with ability. I also remember the gentle words of his father as he struggled to make us both presentable before suppertime.

What does a white boy know about growing up Black in the South?

I remembered the telephone ringing one Sunday morning and Dad hurrying off to work. All I heard him say to Mom as he rushed through the kitchen was "They've bombed a church. They've killed some kids."

It was the 16th Street Baptist Church where four little girls, dressed in their Sunday finest, had died because they were Black. There had been demonstrations and protests and boycotts in Birmingham before, but nothing had galvanized the outrage of both races as did the murder of those children.

Dad wrote editorials for The Birmingham News. It was his job to speak with the voice of the newspaper. The voice he had raised for some time had been one of reason, one of moderation, one of racial respect and liberalism to the extent that such notions could exist in the old South.

I remembered the threatening phone calls to our home that followed the scathing editorials aimed at the Klan, its sympathizers, and those who were unconcerned because the dead children had only been Black.

What does a white boy know about growing up Black in the South?

And I remembered the armed guards.

After the church bombing, and after the Mother's Day riots in Woodrow Wilson Park with Bull Conner's police dogs and firehoses, and after the burning of the Freedom Riders' bus in nearby Anniston and the Klan attacks on demonstrators in Birmingham, there were the armed guards.

They said the Klan had planned attacks on senior editors of the newspaper in response to its editorial stance. The publisher summoned Pinkerton guards to stand watch at the editors' homes.

Our house sat on a steep hill, its backyard bordering miles of wooded hillsides owned by Republic Steel that had been my private playground for years. Now that playground seemed a likely path for robed racists in the night.

The first time, there were three guards. Big men with big guns who stayed for weeks on end.

As I brought them coffee and sandwiches each night, we became friends. The shotguns, they said, would discourage any intruders. But I worried about them and about our cats that hunted by night through the overgrown brush nearby.

The third time the guards came, they almost killed my brother when he drove his car a bit too fast into the driveway. One grabbed me and ran for cover while the other leveled both barrels straight at the windshield.

What does a white boy know about growing up Black in the South?

And I remembered when Alabama Governor George Corley Wallace called my father to ask what the newspaper's reaction would be if he took this course or that, trying to anticipate the response by an increasingly hostile media.

There were calls from others as well -- from local federal officials and from some up North. I remember a strange summons one night that preceded a sudden flight to Washington and the thank-you note in a White House envelope that followed a week later. We framed the note and hung it on a wall near the kitchen.

Only later did I learn that Dad had joined a handful of Southern newspaper editors at Blair House for a private meeting with the president to discuss federal plans to deal with racial problems.

What does a white boy know about growing up Black in the South?

I remembered years later as a reporter covering the police beat, riding with detectives through the Black housing projects on weekends listening to the sound of gunfire.

I remember the fear in the eyes of the young Black men they questioned and often arrested. It mirrored the fear that was also in the detectives' eyes.

What does a white boy know about growing up Black in the South?

Nothing at all.

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