By Kenneth Kowald
The death in October of Rosa Parks, cited as an intrepid pioneer in the civil rights movement, gives rise to a great many thoughts about discrimination, in our country and in our county. All of us have faced some form of discrimination in our lives, for whatever reasons. Most of us manage to live with it, when necessary, and push on. For others, it is not so easy. That is the story of Rosa Park and what her actions meant. I have known little or no discrimination in my life. I was born on the Lower East Side and was a small child when the family moved to Borough Park in Brooklyn and not yet a teenager when we bought a home in Elmhurst. The communities we lived in were diverse-to a point-but none had blacks living in them, that I can remember. Yes, you heard ethnic slurs, about the Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Germans, you name it. We all knew the words. Many of us used them. But the slurs against blacks were at a distance-we didn't really know any blacks. We lived in white ghettoes. There were prejudices among the whites, many based on religion. Roman Catholics were not supposed to marry Protestants, but they did. Neither were supposed to marry Jews, but they did. In fact, a comedy, “Abie's Irish Rose” was a bit hit in the 1920s. Relations between whites and blacks were something else. Edna Ferber's novel, “Show Boat,” made into a memorable musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, contained what was then a “shocking” subplot of the love of a white man for a mulatto singer. Nevertheless, the show, which premiered in 1927, was a huge hit and still packs a punch today. But the reality was something else. My schools in Elmhurst and Maspeth, as I remember, had no blacks in them. Newtown High School had a very few and all Newtownites were proud of Reggie Pearman, an outstanding track star, who went on to fame at New York University and in the Olympics. But, few of us white students really knew the black students. In the Army it was the same. The blacks were apart from the rest of the troops in those days, although they were there at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. And, it was at Aberdeen that this naive teenager learned his first lesson in discrimination against those whose skin was a different color. Following basic training at Aberdeen, I was named editor of the Proving Ground weekly newspaper, “The Flaming Bomb” (the symbol of the Ordnance Department), which was written and edited on the base but published in a private printing establishment in Havre de Grace, north of Aberdeen. I didn't drive in those days, so I usually got a lift to and from the plant where I put the paper to bed. One day, I got a ride to the printing plant, but had to take public transportation back to Aberdeen. I got on the bus. There were many seats available. I headed to the back. I like sitting in the back of a bus. Suddenly, I heard the bus driver call out to me: “Soldier!” I turned back and he informed me that white people sat up front, not in the back. He was polite but firm. I complied with his request. I sat in the “privileged” area the law had set aside for me. I helped maintain segregation that afternoon and I have never forgotten it. It was my first real brush with the discrimination which was rampant against blacks in our country, not just in the states below the Mason-Dixon Line. When I returned to civilian life and college I learned more about what it means to be “the other” in our society. The next columns will continue this account of discrimination, in Queens and elsewhere.
