Also as a senior he began to drive a Ford wagon to school with a Confederate flag license rim and other Confederate flag stickers. He and Deke posed for their senior portraits wearing Confederate flag pins on their lapels.Allen grew up not in the south, but in Palos Verdes, California, a wealthy suburb near Los Angeles. I grew up in a similar suburb and I'm of a similar age (less than a decade younger). I should understand this guy -- but I don't.
In his senior year of high school (1969/70), George Allen spray-painted "Die Whitey" on a wall of his school in order to smear a visiting basketball team from a black neighborhood, the Morningside Monarchs.
Because the Morningside team name "Monarchs" was misspelled, and because of Allen's well-known bigotry, he was fingered almost immediately. He was forced to publically apologize over the school PA and was suspended for a time.Who taught Allen to think this way?
Allen began high school in 1966, the year of the Watts riots. Although the riots did not touch Palos Verdes, the imagery on television may have affected him. Perhaps he heard racist commentary from the adults in his life.
I still recall my first grade teacher using the word "nigger" in open classroom as she "explained" the riots to us. Her name was Miss Thilmony and she was, in all other respects, a superb educator who gave her very young charges a thorough understanding of phonics. (For example, we learned seven diacritical marks for the vowel A.) I loved her. Nevertheless, the school fired her, and was right to do so.
In 1966, a black family -- the first blacks I'd ever seen outside television -- drove through our Titanium White middle-class enclave. I was playing with some other kids on a neighbor's front lawn. One of the other kids shouted "Look at the niggers!" Soon, we all hopped up and down like methed-up meerkats, screaming "Look at the niggers!" in voices pitched to shatter crystal. The black family turned around and drove off.
I told my mother about the incident, and for some reason expected her to be pleased. When the word "nigger" exited my mouth, she walloped me across the face, for the first and only time. Not a slap: A punch. Not punishment: Rage. Her sputtered reaction now strikes me as rather amusing: "Don't you know that negroes are the best JAZZ MUSICIANS?" She divided the human race into two categories: Jazz Musicians, who were semi-divine, and Everyone Else, who were just...people.
I know full well that racism persisted into the 1960s in Southern California. It's still here, although we have -- thank God -- much less of the stuff.
But something happened between the years 1966 and 1970. The grosser displays of hatred became socially unacceptable. Although hatred did not heal overnight (if only decency could take command in an instant!), I doubt that any group of Southern California tykes would have yelled slurs at visiting blacks in 1970.
George Allen's "Die Whitey" incident (which occurred in that year) was not just unusual, it was weird. Nobody -- not even the most demented young bigot -- tried to get away with that sort of crap.
The emblems of the Confederacy never appealed to anyone in the Los Angeles area, except, perhaps, to immigrants from the southern states. One simply did not see that flag anywhere. Kids in white enclaves such as Palos Verdes (or my home town) viewed the stars and bars as something alien and silly.
So what got into George Allen? He had befriended a kid from Texas; did Allen try to emulate him?
His father, as you no doubt know, gained fame as a coach for the Los Angeles Rams. Perhaps, in the privacy of his home, George Allen the elder said things about black players that he never would have repeated elsewhere. Even if he didn't, he bears no small measure of responsibility.
6 comments:
growing up mostly in the south, i have a similar story that predates yours.
my grandparents were dirt farmers in the backwoods of mississippi, about fifteen miles from a little town about thirty miles from tupelo. red dirt country. they grew cotton, had their own garden and some chickens, and until i was in high school, they didn't have indoor plumbing. there was a well and an outhouse and an old bird dog. pat.
my grandparents were very simple people, neither had finished school, and my grandfather - papa - often had to take on extra work at a plant making butter churns. he played mandolin and my grandmother - mama - played piano, and they were always happy and pleasant and kind-hearted, and there was always food on the table. he died of a heart attack with all his musician buddies playing bluegrass on his front porch. she lived for years there alone without him, and died just weeks after their children decided she had to leave the home she'd known for well over fifty years.
i miss them both.
now, my mother, their daughter, was a seething beauty who fell for a pilot from birmingham who happened to be a racist. he was a very domineering sort, with occasional displays of exquisite sweetness, but i have no doubt his prejudice was overt and loud at home, though i have no specific early memories of it.
once as a tyke, while visiting my mama and papa, they took my younger brother and me to town in their old car. papa went inside some building to do whatever he needed, and when he came out, i saw an old black man crossing the road up a ways.
i did what i suppose my father did, what i'd seen. i leaned out the window and yelled at the top of my four year old lungs, hey n*****!
my papa spun around in the front seat faster than i'd ever seen him move. he didn't strike me; he didn't even raise his hand to. he simply delivered the most intense gaze he'd ever given me, spilling over with shock and disappointment and shame, and said - in no uncertain terms - that i was never EVER to utter that word again. EVER.
and i haven't.
that was the deep south in the fifties. it was not long before i started noticing the 'whites only' signs over restrooms and drinking fountains, and the fact that these dark-skinned people were never around any of us. where did they live? where did they work? where did they shop and go to school?
george allen clearly did not have a mother like joe's or a grandfather like mine. i think joe's hunch that coach allen modeled this behavior for his son is likely correct. clearly, he didn't work very hard to reverse it.
pbs just showed a documentary about the early civil right movement that showed the hoses and dogs being unleashed on blacks in birmingham, and then the church bombing.
consider the hatred required for such open brutality. this is just another level of the self-loathing we see in all our closeted gay republicans, not to mention the lust for torture and genocide we see in their leadership.
What a great personal story, Joe!
About a dozen years ago I was in Palos Verdes visiting friends. I stopped at a corner grocery just as a boy about ten or eleven years old came out. He got on his bicycle, but before riding away he took a handful of loose change and dropped it in the gutter.
Curious, I inquired of him if this was some sort of local custom. "Oh," he said to me, "it falls out of my pocket anyway, while I'm riding home."
How rich do you have to be before your kids throw away anything less than a dollar?
She divided the human race into two categories: Jazz Musicians, who were semi-divine, and Everyone Else, who were just...people.
Truer words of wisdom are seldom spoken.
I think it was especially true back then, when Miles and Trane reigned supreme.
Listen to your mother!
Speculation only, of course, but something about Allen gives me a weird vibe. He strikes me as someone who may have been sexually abused as a youngster.
Thus the "who taught" question might be answered "He was taught by a bigoted abuser, whose influence he's been trying to spite / emulate / escape all his life since."
That might explain the episodic, almost spastic outbursts of cockeyed, pointless racism he cannot seem to control.
Like you doc, I was taught tolerance by a grandparent. Not my Paw Paw, God knows, he was a died in the wool racist. Why Maw Maw married him, I can only speculate. I did love him nevertheless.
But Maw Maw, now there was a an extraordinary woman. A teacher and school principle with a masters degree, she was an FDR liberal in the best, most altruistic sense of the word. Having grown up poor, picking cotten and looking after her 6 younger siblings, her accomplishments and tolerance seem doubly inspiring.
As was the case with most Southerners of even moderate affluence, she employed African American maids throughout her adult life to look after things, as she was a working woman after all. My mother divorced my father when I was still a baby, so I grew up in Maw Maw's house, thank the Lord. I saw the respect with which she treated the various ladies who worked for her, and it was certainly reciprocated.
The most telling episode of her life, imo, came after she retired from teaching. In her classroom, she had hung portraits of various American heroes, including Dr. Martin Luther King. None of the parents ever complained, however, as she had probably taught 100% of them, starting in the late '20's. At her retirement, she gave away all of the portraits, except for one-of MLK. That one, she brought home and hung it right in the foyer. Paw Paw had a fit! "Folks who come to visit won't even come in the door when they see that @#%! rabble rousers picture!"
"Well," replied Maw Maw, "if they won't come in the door becuase of that, I don't want them here."
The picture stayed. I have it now, myself. It hangs in my foyer.
I miss Maw Maw.
I, too, grew up in So. Calif. San Diego, to be precise. I went to a Seventh Day Adventist school for the first three years, and the fifth. Our 'readers' were about children in other lands. My best friend in 5th grade was black. That was the year we learned about the civil war and I remember her crying because she felt we would all hate her. We didn't. This was WWII. By the Korean "conflict" I was in HS and spent a year and a half in Imperial Valley. Half my school mates were from Mexico. There was one black boy. In this environment, I could be friends with the black boy, because one was no threat to the whites. (BTW, I'm white.) But I also befriended a Mexican boy and that cost me the friendship of my locker-mate and (supposed) best friend who was a Baptist. Racism is frequently arbitrary. I was in first grade when Pearl Harbor happened. One day I announced to my playmates in my front yard that we should not hate the Japanese people because the war was caused by their leaders (having just heard that from my teacher). I cannot convey to you how fast my mother yanked me into the house. Of course, I did not know until I was in HS about the camps for the Japanese-Americans, such was the secrecy.
My mother was born in Arkansas and came to Calif. via Indiana and Texas. In the '30s. My father was raised in Calif. and when he met my mother he said he would take a chicken to Sunday dinner so they would have some meat to cook. (This was 1931-2.) I can only remember some joking by my mother about negroes (as they were called then) but not really any derision or hatred. A man my father worked with gave me a black baby-doll one year and I called her, to my continuing regret, n------baby. BUT she was my favorite doll and I don't think I knew really what impact that word had. I was much more aware of the prejudice against Mexicans, which was more openly expressed.
fallinglady
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