Failed to befriend first black student.
Lynn Scott Cochrane,
Washington DC.
I grew up in a deeply segregated Charlotte, NC in the 1950s and 60s. When my high school, North Mecklenburg, was finally integrated in about 1963, there was one black girl who always sat alone in the cafeteria. She may have been the only black girl in the school that year. I KNEW I should befriend her, but I didn’t have the courage, to my everlasting regret and shame.
Black horse will ride white horse
Don
Pittsburgh, PA
Stated in spring of 1963 by negro at the time with no agitation or explanation. As a white person I thought comment strange not knowing the future implications to follow. Strange that statement has stayed in my conscience all these years. Always felt comfortable among black people.
Whitefish Bay white school white Church
Mark Brandfass.
Pittsburgh, PA.
In the summer of ’63 my family had just moved to Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin. My father was a salesman for Westinghouse Electric and we moved as his work demanded. I would be entering the diocesan Catholic seminary the next year, my brothers and sisters attended the local Catholic schools. I don’t remember ever seeing anything else but white people in school and in church.
Now, I can protest that murder
David C. Ruffin
Washington, DC
I participated in the March on Washington in 1963. I was 18 and home on leave from the Air Force. My most enduring memory of the March was a conversation I had with an older man on the train ride from Pittsburgh to Washington the night before. He told me that when he was in the Army in the Jim Crow South during World War II, he witnessed the murder of another black soldier. He was powerless to do anything about it at that time, but the March finally gave him an opportunity to protest the killing.
I had been based in Texas where I was subjected to racial discrimination. The March was also means for me to stand up against racism. Below is my short remembrance of that time.
Stood-Up-at-March
1963 Respectful, Uneducated, Dependant, Poor, Grateful, Happy
Louis
Wausau, WI
2013 Attitude, Uneducated, Dependant, Poor, Feared, Unhappy
Babies switched at birth. Mine’s black.
Anonymous,
Kirkland, WA.
In 1963 – yes, 1963! – The Dick Van Dyke show aired an episode where Rob mistakenly thought his new baby had been switched at the hospital. When the other parents arrived to (what Rob thought) make the exchange, Rob was shocked to see that they were black and there was no way their babies had been switched. That show was so far ahead of its time and so funny. They were early leaders of race awareness and equality. I own the entire collection of the show on DVD and would be willing to share. That wasn’t the only episode where race was the topic. In another, the entire Petrie family accidently dyed their hands black. That evening had to attend a formal award ceremony for the NAACP. They handled the issue of race so professionally and matter-of-factly and, of course, with humor. I think this would be a fun story to air. Thank you.
Wrong race, Wrong day for fun
Reginald Leroy Johnson,
Randallstown, MD.
On my birthday in June 1963 my mother decided to take me to Gwynn Oak Amusement Park as birthday gift…
We rode on the #28 bus…leaving the city the air was so sweet and clean, I saw ducks, and trees.
I was so overwhelmed by this beauty…that I thought we where in “heaven”
the park was was nice. A miniature train ride, carrousel, and Ferris Wheel..this is where “race card” plays in.
I insisted that my mom put me on the Ferris wheel…I get on board and I’m the only one riding alone on the wheel.
all the other kids (white) was in the the other seats two and three across.
When my seat on the wheel arrived to the top it stopped for about 5min (it felt like 5 hours)…I panicked and called for my mother and as I looked down she was aggravated at the operator…she was so animated in her actions that I knew she was after the operator to let me down.
He did eventually let me down(at his own pace and and speed), no hurry whatsoever.
As I got off the ride I heard him say to my mom …”this ‘ant ya’ll’s day”.
We left the park in silence…all these white people looking at us…I was scared all over again but, I did know why. My mom held me so close to her if she could fit inside her skin she would have that day.
We stood in silence as we waited for the bus to take us back into the city.
We got on the #28 and rode into town…we were the only ones on the bus for a while before we got to the city line.
All this time, my mom held my hand. Then her grip loosened, I looked up to her and saw her crying…not making a sound..it was a waterfall of tears so deep…drenching her blouse to her underwear. Her mouth open …no sound not a peep. By the time we got into town…she stopped crying.
She told me, as we got on the packed and hot #15 bus, that she was sick and that we could go another time she promised.
We never went back…ever.
READ MORE
REPOST: 50 years later, desegregation of Gwynn Oak Amusement Park celebrated
Former protesters, and child who broke color barrier by riding merry-go-round, return
July 07, 2013|By Lorraine Mirabella, The Baltimore Sun
Civil rights activists from the ’60s and others sing freedom… (Algerina Perna, Baltimore…)
The wooden roller coaster and the Dixie Ballroom are long gone.
Gone, too, from Gwynn Oak Park is the merry-go-round where a toddler in a pink dress took a historic spin on a summer afternoon a half-century ago.
That simple pleasure, a first for a black child at the formerly segregated Gwynn Oak Amusement Park, had become possible just weeks earlier in 1963 when hundreds of black and white protesters thrust Baltimore into the national spotlight and succeeded in integrating the park.
On Sunday, several hundred people filled the grassy Baltimore County park where the rides once stood, toting chairs and picnic lunches and sipping water in the sweltering heat, to mark the 50th anniversary of July 4 and 7 protests in 1963. Until then, nothing at the 64-acre park with picnic tables, playgrounds and a volleyball court hinted at that defining moment in Baltimore civil rights history, when nearly 400 people were arrested for trespassing, including nearly two dozen Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergy members.
“I feel like we are righting a wrong by being here,” Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz said shortly before locking arms with clergy members and former protesters and leading a march to unveil a commemorative plaque.
“Opening the Gates,” sponsored by businesses, foundations and Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups, drew many of the original protesters who were jeered at by hecklers and jailed when they tried to enter the old amusement park.
Sharon Langley, now a Los Angeles resident who broke the Gwynn Oak racial barrier as a child, came back, too. And on display was the original wooden horse where Social Security Administration supply clerk Charles C. Langley Jr. had perched his 11-month-old daughter on Aug. 28, 1963, the same day Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech. The horse’s private owners brought it to Gwynn Oak from its spot on the carousel, a ride on Washington’s National Mall since 1981.
Sitting at a shaded picnic table, Sharon Langley recalled coming back to the amusement park after that first time, playing skee-ball and learning to ice skate on the pond in winter. Sunday was her first time back since her family moved out of state after elementary school.
“So many ordinary people were part of civil rights,” said Langley, an elementary school administrator. “I’m glad my family felt this was an important thing to do. Every person has a part to play. Every person can do something in her community to move her community forward.”
Langley said she grew up knowing the Gwynn Oak visit was an important family event, but “I didn’t necessarily know it was still important to people.”
She found out otherwise, spending much of the day posing for pictures with people eager to meet her.
“That must have been some ride,” one woman said, shaking her hand.
As church and synagogue choirs sang, former protesters reminisced about the events of 50 years ago. Todd Gitlin had been a recent college graduate and activist with Students for a Democratic Society when he came to the July 4 protest, was arrested and spent the night in a packed jail cell. He returned for the July 7 protests and with others crossed a stream in the rear of the park to get in. Singing, the nonviolent demonstrators were met by angry mobs, recalled Alison Turaj Brown, another protester. A woman with a child threw a rock, which hit Brown in the head.
“All I know is I couldn’t see because of the blood,” said Brown, who lives in Sarasota, Fla.
The amusement park was different from the restaurants and theaters that the Congress of Racial Equality was pushing to integrate in the early 1960s, said Leo W. Burroughs Jr., 71, then a Morgan State College student and activist leader with CORE’s Baltimore chapter.
“That was the only large amusement park in the area,” said Burroughs, of Bolton Hill. “It was one of a kind. There were many restaurants, but there was only one amusement park of size, and that was Gwynn Oak.”
During the protests, he said, “a lot of people went to jail. … That was the strategy, to overwhelm the facilities.”
Protests that had begun nearly 10 years earlier ended after then-County Executive Spiro T. Agnew negotiated a settlement with the park’s owners to end segregation on Aug. 28, 1963. That day, Charles Langley visited with his wife, Marian, a nurse, and Sharon, not as members of a civil rights group but on a family outing, according to Baltimore Sun reports.
They “strolled through the midway, examining the different arcades until they reached the merry-go-round, where Sharon got her first ride,” a Sun report said. The privately owned park stayed open until 1972, when Tropical Storm Agnes washed much of it away. The county eventually acquired the property.
I’m not colored I’m an American
Ralph Brown (Coach~B :)),
Dallas, TX.
My six words are in response to these six words: “We don’t allow colored in here” which were said to me on March 19, 1963 by a young female movie ticket clerk at the Majestic Theater in Dallas, Texas. I was attempting to see the world premiere of “How The West Was Won” but was rejected because of the color of my skin. I’m from New York, and was in the process of traveling across the country from southern California. It was the first time that institutionalized racism confronted me face-to-face, but sadly enough, it would not be the last!! Two years later, as a member of the USAF, I volunteered to go to Vietnam!
Baby born. What color? Healthy girl.
Kessara Eldridge
Fredericksburg, VA
My aunt – Irish/German ancestry married a Cape Verdean man. When they had their first child, my cousin, my grandfather didn’t ask if it was a boy or a girl – he wanted to know what color it was. That showed me more than anything the differences in generations – how a man born in 1912 and a girl born in 1963 could see the world so drastically different.
“How we get along in Washington, D.C.!”
Isabel “Scottie” Dalsimer
Alexandria, VA
It was a bright and sunny day in August 1963. I was 25 years old and just back from a two year assignment in West Africa. My household effects were arriving at my Washington apartment that afternoon, but I had time to go to the March on Washington beforehand. I made it downtown into the crowd and ran into an old acquaintance. His name was Bill Pope. Bill was a 6’4” African American man. I am 5’1” white woman. Bill asked me if I wanted to march with him and I said “Sure.”. We marched and it was wonderful. People were friendly and were all singing and happy together as we went along. Then we saw a TV camera suspended in the air just above us in the crowd. Bill looked up at the camera and stopped. He picked me up and said to the camera: “Hi all you folk in Mississippi & Alabama. This is how we all get along in Washington, D.C.!”, and he planted a big kiss on my face. We both looked in the camera and laughed. He put me down and we marched on. I couldn’t stay for the speeches because I had to meet my movers at my apartment. I haven’t seen Bill Pope since, but I heard he later became the Coca-Cola company representative in Nigeria. Washington, DC was so segregated at that time, so everyone getting along together so well and in an unsegregated way made the experience so wonderful – proof of how the races could truly get along. My memories of that time have been floating back in my mind lately and so I’m happy to share my experience at the March on Washington in 1963.
I listened in apartheid South Africa
Ann Karson
Asheville, NC
In 1963, I was an active member of the Liberal Party of South Africa, a small, multi-racial group, a political party made up of people opposed to apartheid who wanted that opposition to be fully non-racial. We were liberal in that sense, not economically: some of us were capitalists, some socialists. We were horrified at what our government was doing. What it was doing was similar to what was going on in the south of the United States, but with the full force of national legislation behind it.
I say I “listened,” because we had no television. Our government seemingly feared to let the outside world in. But we were attentive. We cheered every civil rights success and mourned every adverse reaction in states or in the United States as a whole. We were inspired by the civil rights movement. We also sang “We shall overcome.” We clung to hope that we too would see a day when we would have majority democratic rule and non-racial policy-making.
Eventually, apartheid fell. Having married an American, I now live in the United States. But I look at what is happening today in my country of origin with serious misgiving. We knew apartheid would leave a bad legacy and that, even after its end, the struggle would continue. That is true here also. But how much more difficult it has to be in a country that went through what South Africa did.
Everywhere, the basic human struggles persist. Whether it is race, gender, poverty, preventable disease, it is important to maintain morale and keep fighting. Let us keep right on singing “We shall overcome!”
Thank God for Bull Connor’s actions.
Kelly
Ft. Myers, FL
Bull Connor’s actions in Birmingham in 1963 presented virulent white southern racism to our nation and to the entire world. Rather than describe his actions, you may see them firsthand on YouTube: http://youtu.be/j9kT1yO4MGg
