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Tuskegee

Bill Tope

    I remember when I was four years old and my mother was walking me down the sidewalk adjacent to Central Avenue, probably bound for Bramly’s Drug Store, just a block from the high school. There she would wield a dime and buy each of us a 5 cent soda from the Coke machine.
    Coming from the other direction was a middle-aged black man who, upon seeing us, hurriedly quitted the sidewalk and proceeded apace in the nearby grass. I thought this to be strange; there was clearly enough space for pedestrian traffic going both ways. Why did he have to move off the sidewalk? As though reading my thoughts, Mom remarked, “I don’t know why he got off the sidewalk; he didn’t need to. The sidewalk’s as much his as it is ours.”
    Several years later, as I was waiting for my haircut in the local barbershop, one of the barbers suddenly lowered his voice and mentioned to his customer that a negro family—that’s what black people were called a half-century ago, even in the most promising of circumstances—had moved into a nearby village and that their children would be attending our local schools that fall. The customer winced, said something like, “Ain’t there nothing anybody can do about it?” The barber made a wry face and sadly shook his head no.
    I recount these incidents from my youth to point out that since the fifties and sixties, in some respects, not much has changed in terms of people’s attitudes. This has been brought into sharp focus over the past several years, with the increased outrage over the murder of young black men—and women—and the laudable efforts of such groups as BLM and others to combat this miscarriage of justice.
    Because of the presence of ghoulish, opportunistic looters in the ranks of BLM protesters in Minneapolis and other cities, certain Republicans recently drew a false equivalence between the majority of the protesters on the one hand, and the miscreant seditionists who ransacked the nation’s Capitol, on the others.
    BLM was protesting imposition of the death penalty for being black in an urban setting; the insurrectionists were trying to feloniously overtake the government by manipulating free and fair elections. All rioters, regardless of their race or their politics, should be prosecuted.
    Now, morally bankrupt politicians around the country are enacting state legislation which would make it more difficult for more people to vote. They seek to do this by requiring additional voter identification, limiting the number of polling places, “cleansing” the rolls of apparently eligible voters, and other undemocratic devices. With the Republican base shrinking, that’s the only way they think they can win, I suppose.
    Now, with the government’s response to the pandemic, more controversy has arisen. Some doctors say that black people get more and worse cases of Covid than non-blacks, in part because blacks—being less wealthy—are generally less healthy; enjoy poorer health care, and other contributing factors. Still others contend that “vaccine segregation” is afoot, whereby black communities receive fewer or inferior vaccines. I don’t know if any of that is true, but remember these two words: Tuskegee Airmen.

Story previous publication attribution is to The Telegraph newspaper in Alton, Illinois.

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