Black but not blue

Seeing segregation, then successes

By: Dick Brinster
   EAST WINDSOR — Like many from his generation of black Americans, Walter Daniels Jr. experienced the indignities of segregation.
   Disparate objects and incidents stand out for him. A certain sandwich, an Alabama bridge, a Texas theater balcony and a particularly galling question from a college teacher to his dad.
   But the 63-year-old deputy mayor is well aware of progress in areas of civil rights and race relations over the last half-century, and observes Black History Month as more than a milestone. It’s all about opportunities he says have become more plentiful with the passing of time.
   "If you had told me when I was in elementary school, or junior high, or high school that I would be the deputy mayor of a town that’s only 4 or 5 percent black, I probably would have looked at you like you were crazy," he said. "But I’m an elected official because I was, as Martin Luther King asked, judged by the content of my character, not the color of my skin."
   And it has happened for other African-Americans in both politics and business. He mentions presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, as well as the men who run Time Warner, Merrill Lynch and American Express.
   "The path they had to take, did it have to be that hard for them to get there? I don’t think so. But it shows that if you pay the price you can get there," said Mr. Daniels, a Vietnam veteran now completing his 12th year on the Township Council.
   "I disagree that there is a lack of opportunity. It might be more difficult than it is for someone who is white, but every step you take makes it easier."
Still his favorite sandwich

   The widower and father of two children recalls with a slight laugh his first experience with desegregation, one he’s reminded of every time he eats his favorite sandwich. It happened in Washington, D.C., where he grew up amid segregated schools and public accommodations.
   That changed in January 1953, when the capital was desegregated.
   Mr. Daniels, then 9, didn’t grasp the significance of the act until his mother took him the next day to a downtown restaurant in which he always wanted to eat.
   "She had always told me we couldn’t go there and always had a painful look on her face," he recalled. "But on this Saturday morning she was very excited."
   So, away they went to the Blue Mirror, no longer an all-white establishment.
   "I saw this thing called a turkey club sandwich and I didn’t even know what it was," Mr. Daniels said. "She explained it was turkey, bacon and tomato.
   "I said, ‘I’ll try that," and I loved it. So, to this day, my favorite sandwich is a turkey club."
A bridge apart

   But segregation still reigned in the South, and Mr. Daniels was reminded again that all men were not created equal when he took a trip to Bracketville, Texas with his father in 1960. Because of the Jim Crow laws, they had to stay with friends on black college campuses or reach cities with hotels that would accommodate them.
   One of the towns they had to pass through was Selma, Ala., where five years later on what became known as Bloody Sunday about 600 civil rights marchers had covered only a few blocks to the Edmund Pettus Bridge before being attacked and driven back by local and state police.
   "As we went across that bridge, there was a big Ku Klux Klan sign that said ‘Segregation is God’s Law,’ " Mr. Daniels remembered. "I will never forget that bridge."
   They also passed through Demopolis, Ala., which he said billed itself as "the arsenal of the Klan."
   "My father wanted to get some cigars and I said, ‘Why are we stopping here?’ Well, he had a teasing side to him," said Mr. Daniels. "It was as hot as hell, but when he went inside I rolled up all the windows and locked the doors."
Theater of the absurd

   He said Bracketville, where his grandmother lived, was an advertisement for the "irrationality of the whole Jim Crow system." Blacks were required to sit in the balcony of the local movie theater, except on July 4 and June 19, the anniversary date of the freeing of the slaves in Texas and Oklahoma.
   "But on June 20, it was, zip, right back to where they started," he said.
   It wasn’t until they reached Kansas on the way home that they were allowed freedom of choice.
   The impingement of freedom was not limited to the lawless in an era of politicians trying to uphold the purity of race.
   "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," George Wallace said in his 1963 inauguration speech as governor of Alabama.
   But intimidation tactics were not limited to the deep South, Mr. Daniels said, recalling that a black man could experience fear and trepidation all the way to the Mason-Dixon Line. He was especially aware of the racial tensions that existed in the early 1960s on the Delmarva Peninsula in Maryland, when he and some friends got lost on the way to a college and stopped at a service station to ask for directions.
   "Standing outside were some good ol’ boys, you know, the kind with pickups and their shotguns in the back, and one of them asked, ‘Y’all boys lost?’ and we said, ‘Yes, sir,’ " Mr. Daniels recalled. "He said, ‘Y’all trying to get to that colored college ain’t ya?’ and it was a menacing tone.
   "It was getting dark, and we got out of there in a hurry."
Teacher’s bet

   He said the effects of prejudice were something his father told him about years earlier. Mr. Daniels’ great-great-grandfather was among the former slaves who in 1867 fled to the swamps of Florida, where blacks were accepted by Seminoles, one of the American Indian tribes constantly expelled from their land by the federal government.
   Mr. Daniels, himself part Seminole, remembers several stories related by his father, who earned a degree in civil engineering from the University of Arizona. His father and co-workers did surveying work in the desert in the 1920s, and whites were allowed to stay in hotels while the blacks had to find cars to sleep in.
   One day, his father was asked why he was taking a specific course and answered that it was required for his college major.
   "He was asked by his teacher, ‘Why does a nigger want to become an engineer? I don’t think a nigger can pass my course,’" Mr. Daniels said, adding that his father got a B, but claimed he really deserved an A.
   The only employment his father could get during the Depression was digging irrigation ditches for the Works Progress Administration. Eventually a job offer came from the predominantly black Prairie View University in Texas, and his father’s boss advised him to accept, "because that’s the only way you’ll ever get out of that ditch."
   He did just that, then moved on to Iowa State University to earn his master’s and doctorate. Among the school’s most famous alumni was George Washington Carver, a black farmhand and janitor who became one of the nation’s great agricultural researchers.
   Mr. Daniels says proper instruction in American history might make it unnecessary for an observance of Black History Month, and he cites as an example the lack of recognition for people such as Elijah McCoy, a Canadian-born inventor.
   During the Industrial Revolution, child labor was used to lubricate gears in very tight spaces of large machines, and Mr. Daniels said there were many accidents and deaths. That ended when one of nearly 60 McCoy patents, an automatic lubricator, was produced.
   "Other companies would try to make knockoffs, and when they would go to sell their products they were told, ‘No, we want the real McCoy,’ " Mr. Daniels said.
   He acknowledges widespread acceptance beyond the black community of the civil rights work of people such as Dr. King, Jackie Robinson, Lyndon Johnson, and Rosa Parks, who in 1955 violated a Jim Crow law by refusing to relinquish her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Ala.
   "That was a very brave thing," Mr. Daniels said. "You never would know what might happen to you if you got locked up in a Southern jail cell."
Clearing a path

   
   Mr. Daniels says both blacks and whites need to understand that interaction is the best route to racial harmony and that leadership is essential to that goal. He refers to a passage in the Bible to illustrate his point that people must point out the way for others to follow.
   "It goes something like, ‘When you cross the River Jordan leave 12 stones behind,’" he said.
   That’s the attitude he takes when speaking to students of all races in the East Windsor Regional Schools, says Kenneth Boardman, the district’s supervisor of community services.
   "What makes him particularly interesting is he speaks from the heart and tells stories he has experienced," Mr. Boardman said.
   Mr. Daniels says mentoring at all levels will help cement harmony and understanding between the races. But he wants no special recognition for his efforts in that direction.
"I’m just trying to leave my 12 stones," he said.