OTHER STORIES:
1 (pg. 48, Terkel) Anita Herbert- 37 year old black woman
“I’ll never forget the English teacher I had in high school. I wrote a poem. She called me in and said, ‘Where did you plagiarize this poem from’ I said I didn’t. She said, ‘If I ever find out that you plagiarized this poem, I’ll make sure that you get an F in this class and I’ll have you kicked out of school.’ If that had been a white student, she would have said, ‘This is a commendable poem. Maybe you should pursue the field of writing.’ She never gave my poem back either [laughs]
· This is about the same speed as the example of Betty Hoard’s-our guest- husband. At her sister’s wedding, people were amazed that a black man could have a high intellectual level. If you were black, nothing you ever did was as great as what a white person did.
2 (pg.51, Terkel) Peggy Terry
“…I never made friends with any of them [blacks] because I was brought up in prejudice. How can you be raised in garbage and not stink from it? You pick it up…I picked it up from everyone in the family. My father never changed. In one of our trips from Kentucky to Oklahoma…we went there in a model T Ford. Daddy slid off into a ditch. We were just laying sidewise. This old black man came by on a wagon and offered to pull daddy out. Daddy says, ‘Nig***, you better get you black ass on down the road. I don’t need any help from you!’ Here was my mother, pregnant-she had the baby two weeks after we got there-and three other little children in the car. I was eight. I remember it was so cold. Here’s this bigoted man cutting of his nose to spite his face. That’s what a lot of white people do.
· There was so much prejudice that whites, even in tough situations, wouldn’t accept black aid. Even when trying to be friendly like anyone else, blacks were still treated poorly.
3 (pg.84, Terkel) Joe Gutierrez- mixed with white and Mexican; looks white
“We were about eight years old, my brother, Vince, and I when we went to a public swimming pool in a park in East Chicago. We took a black kid with us…As soon as we dove in the pool, everybody got out. The lifeguard got out, too, a female. They shut down the pool.”
· This is another example of how blacks were just not fit enough to be with whites. It’s almost like they didn’t deserve to be with the whites.