Road to Nowhere. Ch2. The Taller Boy.
A phone call from a Black small businessman to the ACORN office in Pine Bluff, Arkansas brings up a childhood memory of the first Black kids in Madeline’s fourth-grade class.
The front page of United States of ACORN newsletter in 1979.
1975-1976
When I got the call from Mr. Walker in Pine Bluff, an old memory tried to break through the surface.
Halfway through my fourth-grade year, something momentous happened. The school principal visited our classroom and introduced us to three Negro children, our new classmates.
There must have been Negro kids on the military bases where we lived in the fifties, mustn’t there? I didn’t know any. I was an officer’s kid, so probably all the officers were white? We always went to the Catholic schools in town; for sure they were very white. So we missed Black kids, up until that fourth grade.
We stared at the new kids. They wore layers of obviously handed-down garments because they didn’t yet have the school uniform. They had hair that was…well, different. I sat further back in the classroom than they did, the better to watch them. One boy, taller than the other two, seemed to be in charge. A smaller girl and boy sat in front of him and next to him. They looked terrified. It was completely outside of our experience that children from the same family would be put in the same classroom. I wondered why. Maybe for mutual support? They looked like they needed some support. But why?
Our teacher ignored the new kids, and never called on them, which seemed like a rare blessing to the rest of us because she was flat-out brutal. But there was something about her demeanor that told us she was not being kind.
I was not being kind either. They huddled together. It wouldn’t have been easy to break-in, I told myself. I never tried.
A few weeks later–or was it a few days?–the principal returned to the classroom on a day when the new kids were absent.
“I am very disappointed in you,” she scolded. “Some of you have been calling the new children names, terrible names. Some have been starting fights with them. I want it to stop, and stop right now!”
I was stunned. I knew nothing about those attacks but I felt immediately implicated. At some level, I knew these kids needed friends, and I had done nothing. Now, what would I do?
I was still trying to figure that out when our teacher reported soon after that the new kids had left the school. She said it very neutrally. That was that.
I remember to this day the look on the taller boy’s face: I sensed that he was charged with protecting the little ones. What a set-up. There was no way for him to win. I could see that he tried so hard, and I knew something about trying hard, never winning. I never forgot him.
When I first got the call from Mr. Walker in 1975 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, something reminded me of the taller boy.
**
I was the lone staff person holding down the ACORN community group office in a town of 50,000. I was 25 years old, had only been there for a couple of weeks, sent to Pine Bluff from my six-week training assignment in Dallas, with the goal of building power for lower-income families.
I didn’t know much about Pine Bluff. Arkansas’ third-largest city, the home of the historic Black teachers’ college, with a big paper mill employer, a population more white than Black, but not by a lot, an all-white power structure. It seemed like a pretty sleepy town to me.
So when the phone rang that November afternoon, I was surprised. No one ever called here. ACORN had a good reputation in Arkansas as a group that fought for the little guy, but it didn’t seem to be a critical feature of Pine Bluff’s political life or anyone’s life.
I answered the phone. “ACORN, can I help you?” I had no idea how I would help anyone.
“I hope so, ACORN. I hope you can help me. My name’s Walker. We got a dadgummed letter from the city today, all of us over here on Ohio Street. These suckers claimin’ they gonna take our property, knock down part of my gas station, so they can build some kind of four lanes down through here. Don’t make a lick of sense, none of it. Ain’t no place for no highway to go to. Can you get down here so I can show you the letter?”
Wow. He sounded like a Black man, in Pine Bluff, calling me. I couldn’t build a majority here without organizing most of the Black neighborhoods along with some of the white. Here was a Black small businessman calling me. I could feel the energy over the phone.
And the issue—the loss of land, businesses, maybe homes—that could galvanize the Black community of this town. I grabbed my bag and membership cards and headed out.
The image of the taller boy from fourth grade was locating itself somewhere just below consciousness. Someone, some white somebodies, had probably hurt Mr. Walker and someone he loved, someone he was supposed to protect. I knew that much about America. Walker could be my ticket to a huge exciting campaign in this town, and too much faster growth of our organization than I had imagined. He was already speaking to me over the phone almost like I was an employee of his. I loved that and almost everything it meant about where we might be headed together, but at some deep level, I felt a bit uneasy. This was going to be one hell of a ride. No way the taller boy was going to let me off this time. I made it to his gas station in less than ten minutes.
To Be Continued:
This piece is the second of 15 short chapters and will be continued in the next organizing story.