Every man has a family. Every family has a story. My story is not my wife’s story. In the 1960s, my wife lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Private schools were de rigueur. The Comus Club was part of life. As was Alpha Phi Alpha, Delta Sigma Theta, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Jack and Jill, and the country place in Sag Harbor. Lena Horne was an old friend of Grandma. Grandma knew the Guiniers (as in Ewart Guinier) and Earl Graves, Jr. and the Raineys and anyone else who mattered in black society in Brooklyn. This world co-existed with the social space of Malcolm X whose children were no strangers to Jack and Jill and Black Panthers of whom one or two were friends.
In the 1960s, I was a little kid who was still eight years old as of December 31, 1969. My people worried about annexation and the public school system. The City of Richmond, Virginia City Council feared a majority-black city and takeover of city council. Richmond was already 42% black and more racial change was dead ahead. The trends were clear as more whites were leaving the city for the surrounding counties. What to do? What to do?
In an audacious move, the white city council annexed a bushel of white voters from eastern Chesterfield County. The Annexed Area The 98% white annexed area delivered enough white voters to stave off a black majority in Richmond. The Politics of Annexation History is full of ironies, of course. The 2% black suburban population brought into Richmond city — these were my people on Twyman Road and in Hickory Hill. The adults in my world were worried about what to do? What to do? Should the parents remain put, become part of the city, and have children bused across town to majority black inner-city schools? Or, should parents leave all they had known for generations and find new homes further out in the county beyond the reach of the city? A Map of the Annexed Area (In Green)
This American Dilemma tormented my parents, uncles and aunts, and cousins in 1969. I remember the anxious adults, the black and white news stories about impending school consolidation on the television. My parents chose to leave the neighborhood for Chester and a new beginning for me and my sister.
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“And so, the clock was ticking as control of my elementary school, Greene, would be turned over to the city in the fall of 1970. I remember frantic drives to visit homes with my dad behind the steering wheel. My mom was on a mission, and her mission was to move to the county before school started that fall. It was all a blur to me, house after house after house. I was eight years old, and my mom would say ‘The taxes are lower in the county’ and ‘The schools are better in the county.’ The direction of my life was going to change. Would I attend city schools or county schools in the fall?”…
On July 21, 1970, my parents signed a deed on a red brick home in the suburbs. All of the neighbors were two-parent households who wanted the suburban experience for their children. And we all got it.” Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America by Winkfield Twyman, Jr. and Jennifer Richmond, p. 276.
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The following is a video of middle-class black parents facing the prospect of a massive influx of black people from the South into Los Angeles in the 1960s. I recognize the values and attitudes from conversations over our dinner table and at Grandma’s house on Terminal Avenue and Uncle Robert Daniel’s place on Twyman Road in 1969. When any people are faced with unwelcomed social change, the masks are dropped and people reveal themselves.
People will choose what is best for their children, regardless of race. In the video below, the snobby lady is channeling my grandmother-in-law/smile See 23:10:10 to 23:39:00. The woman who doesn’t look in the mirror and see a negro who must live life in a certain way, that would be the way my Mom viewed life in the 1960s. See 25:08:15 to 25:23:05.