I was born white in 1946. In all reality I had nothing to do with it but had to play along. I grew [View all]

[wasupaloopa]

up in Dayton Ohio. It was then a pretty segregated city. Main Street was the dividing line. The black side of town was west of Main St. The white side of town was east of Main St.

It hadn't always been that way. The Wright Brothers grew up on Hawthorne Ave. which was west of Main St. Their bicycle shop was on West Third.

There were good reasons for my family to go to the black side of town. My dad knew a good black mechanic who could keep our 1948 Plymouth running. Every Saturday we went to a farmers market on West Third. My guess is that the market had been going on since before the area became segregated. The prices were right for a poor family like us. When ever us kids encountered black kids we just stood there staring at each other.

The High Schools on the west side were Roosevelt and Dunbar. Paul Laurence Dunbar was a black poet, novelist and playwright born in Dayton and died in 1909 two years before my parents were born. My guess is Roosevelt High School was there before segregation also.

My dad was the type of person that people here describe as wypipo. He was a factory worker at NCR. NCR built a recreation park for it's white employees called Old River. It had ball fields, picnic grounds, a lagoon and swimming pool. Black families were denied entrance to Old River even though they were NCR employees. White male factory workers like my dad were on the low end of the economic totem pole but they saw themselves above the blacks who could not get the kind of jobs the whites had. My dad taught me that we were better than the "n word".

When I was very young I never gave it a thought that black folks lived on the west side and didn't go to Old River. That is until I started to question what I was being taught in Catholic School about the mysteries of faith.

My dad was not raised Catholic and my mom was. My dad taught me to question what I was being taught in school but my mom told him not to do it. So I began to also question what my dad taught me about black folks. I never saw black people on our side of town. And I never went to the black side of town without my parents.

I decided to ride my bike to the west side and see for myself what was going on there. My mom had lived in a boarding house on the west side before she met my dad. She lived with other single women both black and white. My mom never became racist like my dad. I believe my mom was the reason I never bought into the racist things my dad tried to teach me. And yes I realized that white males like me had privileges that others didn't it was very easy to see.

Also I loved Motown Music. We had a radio station WONE that played Motown along with rock and roll. Johnathon Winters was a DJ for WONE in the 40's and that was where he invented people like Maud Frickert to talk to. His family owned Winters Bank on the corner of Third and Main.

I went to sleep listening to Motown every night.

I went to an all boys Catholic High School were we were taught by a very socially aware order of priests and brothers. We were always on the integration side of civil rights. My friends and I hung out at Antioch College in Yellow Springs mostly because we got along well with the hippie type girls. They were older than us but we like hanging with them and they liked having us around. One time we accidentally ended up in a civil rights march in Yellow Springs. A white barber there refused to cut the hair of black people. We rode into town on my motor scooter and pulled up to the end of the march and followed it through town. After the march no store owner would sell us anything to eat or drink.

So after the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, the year after my high school graduation a bunch of us went to Georgia with Antioch students to help with voter registration. We could help people sign up to vote without their having to go through the questioning that took place at court house. I did not occur to us at the time that we could be killed for what we were doing.

By this time I had a job at a grocery store and had many black co workers who invited me to their house parties. I went to James Brown concerts with a black female co worker because she convinced me that it was better then my going alone. We weren't too popular with the black guys at the concert.


So why am I writing all this. Because I really dislike the wypipo thing going on here and I don't think I am a racist even that term is to be used for racists as I was told.

Some of us old farts have a history that younger people don't I think. To me wypipo is divisive and I can't buy into the justifications for using it.

I think there are others like me but seems we are poo pooed and out numbered. So my guess is I just need to ignore the wypipo threads from now on because it has become the cause celeb.