Ex-Cal U professor recalls time in South Carolina
The recent shootings at the black church in Charleston, S.C., appalled me and brought me strikingly back to my early 20s when I was a graduate student at the University of South Carolina.
I had finished college in Allentown, Pa., (Muhlenberg College) and wanted to pursue post-graduate education in biology. I was accepted at USC and received a teaching assistantship to support my education. Being ignorant of politics, I was surprised when a friend at Muhlenberg told me, “you’re going to South Carolina…you know they’re still fighting the Civil War.” I smiled, not realizing how prophetic his words were. It was the last half of the 1960s.
It wasn’t long before many of my new found friends started calling me a Yankee. I accepted it as sort of a badge of courage and moved on. While there, I had numerous interactions with black South Carolinians, all of which were positive. The blacks I met and interacted with were largely non-students from the fellow who washed dishes at the beanery where I ate most of my evening meals to the group I drank with at a garage/bar in “dry” St. Matthew (when we ran out of beer on a weekend).
Fred, the dishwasher at the restaurant doubled as the pool-room attendant in this mom n’ pop corner bistro and swept floors. He was a hard-worker and valued employee of his immigrant Greek bosses.
I once did Fred a favor for which he was eternally grateful. It was a trifle to me, but to him it was important because he had a white friend. In South Carolina in the 1960s, there was a subtle agreement of apartheid. Signs for separate bathrooms, drinking fountains and lunch counters had recently been discarded but the unwritten signs were still there. Some of my southern colleagues, including faculty, often spoke in hushed racial tones and told stories that spoke volumes of their latent racism.
Fred valued our friendship to the point that he wanted me, as his friend, to meet his friends at a posh night club in nearby Camden, S.C. I asked Fred if there would be any other white men in the club and he responded, just one…you. It was a turbulent times, with Stokely Carmichael becoming a nightly news item. In addition, Martin Luther King was recently assassinated and it left Columbia in a state of lockdown.
I had to, I admit, fearfully decline his offer. Fred was downtrodden for it was his chance to show his friends, from his side of the racial divide that there was some chance at integrating the races.
Frankly, I couldn’t wait to finish my education and return to my northern roots of Pennsylvania. I grew up in Allentown in a non-political, non-racist family in what I perceived as a fully integrated society. Of course, I only came to that conclusion because I had never met a black person, let alone lived near one or for that matter even went to school with one, except for Jim who was the only black in my 3,500 student-body high school. Racism was there but below the surface.
My first (and only) job after finishing my Ph. D. was at California University of Pa. (then California State College). My colleagues were diverse and from all over the U.S. and a variety of other countries. They were intellectually and politically diverse but one feature was absent and that was a sense of racism. I sensed it in some of the staff at the college but not the faculty. I made many friends at the university and in the community, both in California and later in Uniontown. Very few of my friends expressed racial animus but I sensed it while mingling in the community…still a minority but often a vocal minority. The South gets the bad reputation as racist, but it is everywhere and it must be rooted out. Greet the next person you see who doesn’t share your complexion with a cheery good morning. You’ll not only feel better yourself, but I’ll bet you’ll make someone else’s day.
Dr. Tom Buckelew, a resident of Uniontown, is a professor emeritus at California University of Pennsylvania.