Indivisible, How Four Interracial Friendships Brought America Together

©2019 Richard Tushingham All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 978-1-54398-163-6 eBook 978-1-54398-164-3

Introduction

The writing of these stories began when a sixteen-year-old black girl sitting in a high school class in Trenton N.J raised her hand. Her all black class had been assigned the task of writing a short essay on any personal experience with a white person. She raised her hand to say simply, I don’t know any white people except my teachers. Then other hands throughout the class sprung up as other students expressed the same problem.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the blockbuster bestseller, Between the World and Me, created the 2015 book as a warning letter to his then fifteen-year-old son. Early in the book, he likewise confessed, when I was your age, the only people I knew were black.

Coates wrote the book as a message of danger to black America. The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of exploitation and one of plunder…. Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage…. The power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black. 

While his book draws on his own anguished experiences as a black teenager and black man in America, he also widely summons the many stories, past and present, of black oppression in America. When African-American novelist Toni Morrison called Between the World and Me required reading, she cemented his standing as the preeminent African American voice of his generation.

Indivisible in no way questions either the truth or the immense importance of the notorious stories which led Coates to his conclusion that the physical threat to black America continues relentlessly.

In 1921 Tulsa Oklahoma, a white mob burns down 35 blocks of black residences and businesses. While visiting Mississippi in 1955, Emmitt Till, a 14-year old African American from Chicago, is lynched by two white men. In 1963 Birmingham Alabama, Sheriff Bull Conner directs his police force to use fire hoses and attack dogs on African American Civil Rights protesters. In 1992 Los Angeles, race riots erupt with 63 people killed and over 12,000 arrested.

 That history carries ceaselessly into the present as stories of black-white conflict continue to seize current headlines. On a 2012 night in Florida, George Zimmerman, a white neighborhood watchman and Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, confront each other and violently struggle. Trayvon dies. In 2014 Ferguson Missouri, a white police officer shoots an unarmed black teenager. The story of white police shooting unarmed black males repeats itself in one American city after another. In Charleston, S.C., a 21-year old white male who self-identified as a white supremacist walks into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and guns down nine church members.

When TV show host Stephen Colbert interviewed Coates in 2017, he expressed both understanding and admiration for Coates message. He also offered an opportunity for Coates to soften his stark pessimism. Do you see any hope that we could have better race relations? Coates rejected it. No, I would have to make s--- up to answer that question in a satisfying way.

When Colbert and Coates discussed race relations on The Late Show, they were reasonably following the lead of academics, activists who frame the topic of race relations as a national issue. Georgetown Sociology Professor Michael Eric Dyson pronounced, White supremacy is the conscious or unconscious belief in the superiority of some while others are believed to be innately inferior. It is a machine operating in perpetuity. Civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton preached, Discrimination and inequality still saturate our society…through racism may be lass blatant, its existence is undeniable. New York Times columnist David Brooks called the large stories of African American history, tales of genocide, slavery, oppression, and segregation.

Public opinion polls, year after year, offer a similar dire picture of race relations in America. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows 70% of Americans think race relations are bad or very bad. Polling from Public Religion Research shows that blacks and whites continue to live largely separate lives. For a typical white person, more than 90% of their friends are white. For a black person, more than 80% of friends are black.

With such a national perspective, we can disclaim and condemn racism. We can dispute and debate its roots and causes, We can even march and protest. But as we see it as an issue, we depersonalize it. Rather than sensing how race touches each of us, we intellectualize the considerable difficulties of race relations. We come to believe that any solution to such a large national problem must itself be national and outsized. With that perspective, we can be persuaded by Coates message that America’s racial divide is intractable.

But what if we shift our focus on race relations from the national to the personal? What if we move beyond the large stories of racial injustice in America to small stories of specific human relationships.? When one black person connects with one white person, they can create a deep personal bond. When we shift our attentions to the individual, the immediate, and the personal, can’t we arrive at a different racial finish line that Coates and other racial defeatists? Can’t we find hope?

Indivisible tells four nonfiction stories with that small emphasis, stories of one to one black and white human relationships. Quite simply, these are love stories. They are evidence that blacks and whites have done far better than coexist in a perpetual state of racial distance and divide. As the very many American stories of racial discrimination and oppression have shaped our perceptions of the racial divide, can’t equally authentic stories of black and white friendship amend, at least partially, our understanding of racial division?

Coates argues that there is no hope for better race relations. But the central message of Indivisible is that hope. Hope in seeing that individual African Americans and white Americans have formed, against heavy odds, close lifelong relationships. Hope in discovering how close friendship with an individual from another race remade each of their lives. Hope that black America and white America can see and feel how we are all connected.

Coates has stated many times that he wrote Between the World and Me for a black audience. But the book has sold millions by also attracting a large white audience. In his review of the book, Washington Post columnist Carlos Lozada described those white readers as a lovely enlightened audience who suppose that, through their reading of Coates and their deep sympathy for his message, they might attain some exoneration or absolution from America’s original sin of racism. Then Lozada indicts them as an audience that continues to applaud and continues to do nothing.

For those persuaded that America’s racial divide is too deep or too wide to be bridged, Indivisible offers eight individuals who lived lives of racial unity. For young adults, black or white, who’s limited or no contact with those of another race has created suspicion, Indivisible offers narratives of trust. For those who see race relations as an impersonal national problem, Indivisible instead offers personal models of promise.

Sceptics can say that offering black and white friendship as an answer to any of our racial divisions is little more than a banal bromide. In 21st century America, most of us have regular contact with people of a different race as classmates, co-workers, neighbors, or colleagues in civic, social, or religious organizations. Yet our racial differences remain.

Cornell University Professor Noliwe Rooks argues just that position. When scholars have studied the racial beliefs, feelings, and policy views of whites who have contact with blacks as friends, acquaintances, or neighbors, they consistently find that the negative racial perceptions of those whites are substantially similar to the perceptions of whites who have no black friends. Indeed, almost one-third of black people hold similarly negative views. Her research leads her to conclude that friendship is no answer to the issues of race relations. "We’re going to have to sober up about the limitations of friendship’

The stories of Indivisible do not contradict Professor Rooks. Our acquaintance or even cordial relationship with black or white others may well have little or no effect on our own racial perceptions. But the lifelong friendships of Indivisible go far beyond simple acquaintance or cordiality. These stories of deep personal connection transform the paradigm of racial separation into an entirely different synthesis. Racial distance and divide disappear.

In a personal N.Y. Times essay, Cardoza Law School Professor Ekow Yankah concurs with that understanding of deep friendship. He rejects as meaningless any broad definition of friendship which includes neighbors and acquaintances. Instead he argues that genuine friendship requires serious mutual commitment. Meaningful friendship is not simply being able to share a beer. Real friendship is impossible without the ability to trust others, without knowing that your well-being is important to them.

Then, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, he draws on America’s long history of racism to assert history has provided little reason for people of color to trust white people in this way. But he goes beyond Coates wide angle lens focus on black and white race relations. He carries the banner of racial distrust to personal friendship itself. For many minorities, the ridiculous thing was thinking friendship was possible in the first place. Let me assure you that my heartbreak dwarfs my anger. It hurts only if you believed friendship could bridge the racial gorge. Like Coates, he directs his warning to his sons. I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible… You can’t trust these people.

Although Yankah recognizes the power of deep, mutual, lasting friendship, his perception that close friendship with an individual of another race is impossible is wrong. The lifelong black and white friendships in Indivisible have happened and are happening.

These stories describe individuals rebelling against the racial conventions of their time. Through four generations, those conventions evolved significantly. In the 1930s to the 1950s, near complete racial separation was either legally required in the south or de facto in the balance of the country. By the 2000s, polite or even cordial black white relationships were the norm but deep friendships remained unusual. None of these individuals deliberately sought interracial friendship. None consciously dissented from the racial conventions of their times. Yet they found each other and formed radically close personal relationships. Each lived a racial indivisibility which few others could envision. These are their stories.

Eleanor Roosevelt had grown up in a highly affluent and sheltered world which allowed no contact with African Americans. When she moved from New York to Washington D.C in 1913 with her husband, the future 32nd President of the United States, she referred to her new black household staff using terms she learned from an aunt in Georgia. She wrote later that she had never imagined that the words darkies and pickaninnies could give offense. Yet she would live a twenty-year deep friendship with civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. At Roosevelt’s death, Martin Luther King Jr. would salute her, abiding interest and concern about minority communities and appreciate that she was particularly sympathetic to the plight of the American Negro.

Mary McLeod Bethune had grown up in a large family of South Caroline sharecroppers where she was the only one who learned to read and write by attending school. After a lengthy career in both women’s rights and education, particularly the founding of Bethune-Cookman College, she accepted Eleanor Roosevelt’s invitation to join the federal government. Together Bethune and Roosevelt advanced civil rights causes through resolutions, discussion, and compromise, the unconfrontational tactics of the time. But in 1941, Bethune was forced to choose between the wide support of the black community for the first proposed March on Washington or Eleanor Roosevelt’s strong opposition to such public confrontation. She stood with her friend Roosevelt at that moment and through the next fourteen years of her life. Roosevelt would later refer to Bethune as her closest friend in her own age group.

In the civil rights generation after Roosevelt and McLeod, public confrontation and protests on racial issues became the common tactic. One of the loudest voices expressing those racial tensions was three-time world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali. After growing up with the discrimination of 1950s Louisville Kentucky, Ali came to embrace the doctrine of total racial separation advocated by the African American Nation of Islam. Ali fervently described their teachings as, the white man is the devil, Yet when The Nation ordered Ali to replace his white trainer, Angelo Dundee with a black trainer, Ali rejected that order. He stood firmly with Dundee. He belongs with me.

When Ali refused to be drafted into the armed forces and sent to Vietnam, his boxing title was revoked. Soon after, he also lost his wealth. In those dark years of no title and very little money, The Nation abandoned Ali. The person who stood by Ali and took every opportunity to provide both emotional and financial support was Angelo Dundee.

In the waning days of Ali’s boxing career, the radio personality who came to embody the term shock jock was Howard Stern. With a provocative mix of salty language, on-air sexual gags, and normally offensive racial references, Stern attracted huge audiences from the 1980s into the 2000s. Feeling isolated as a white teenager growing up in a largely black school system, he often ridiculed what he saw as black culture. Siting only a few feet away in their radio show studio was his on-air African American partner, Robin Quivers.

During their many years together, four hours on-air five days a week, Quivers didn’t hesitate to criticize his opinion on serious issues such as the 1992 Los Angeles race riots. But her normal reaction to his on-air racial jokes was laughter. As he was denounced as a racist, she was condemned as a sellout. Yet, as they matured together, TV reality show host Jeff Probst would admire Stern as one of the most sensitive, pro equal rights guys. The Huffington Post praised Quivers as The Incredible Thinking Woman.

Beyond their shared public controversies, they unfailingly supported each other in private. When Quiver was diagnosed with a potentially fatal cancer, Stern confessed to her, The thought of losing you, it was unbearable, I would just get into tremendous crying jags. When Quivers was finally declared cancer-free, she acknowledged his total emotional commitment to her recovery. We know we love each other.

The children of the baby boomer generation of Stern and Quivers, millennials born after 1980, have been derided as a me, me, me generation of narcissists. But millennials Justin Cohen and Anthony Wilson turned away from conventional career pathways to material success. Instead they committed themselves to changing the world through public education.

They came from very different backgrounds. Growing up in a prosperous New Jersey suburb, Cohen progressed to the privileged world of Yale University. Beginning in Compton California where his parents were gang leaders, Wilson defied the odds against him and advanced to Xavier University of Louisiana.

After college, their idealism brought them together in a workplace consulting with public education school systems. Each believed fervently that racial diversity and progressive teaching methods were the future of American education. But each was acutely disappointed to learn that public education was not so interested in changing itself. In particular, due to changing community demographics, the populations of many schools were and are moving away from diversity toward de facto segregation. In their public struggles with schools resisting change and their privately shared trauma of the Treyvon Martin killing, their friendship grew ever closer. As that happened, they would build a lasting connection together.

In the parlance of American race relations, words of separation such as distance or divide are frequently used. But those typical words of separation often seem too weak to express the distrust which black and white America can feel for each other.

What if, instead, we view race relations through a lens of dysfunctional personal relationships? That perspective can allow us to understand contacts between black and white America not just as divided but as broken. As in any broken relationship, there are mutual feelings of suspicion, doubt, cynicism, and disbelief.

In the stories of Indivisible, black and white individuals found certainty, trust, and faith in each other. They could not and did not solve the large issues of American race relations. But they healed each other. Their healing offers potential for the future and the freedom to seek it.

Richard Gordon, Professor Emeritus California State University Dominquez Hills, has authored numerous scholarly articles on multicultural education and delivered keynote addresses at education conferences worldwide. Richard Tushingham is a retired public-school teacher and community college professor. Gordon is black. Tushingham is white.

Contents

Opening Doors to a Newer World:

Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune

Remember Me as His Friend

Muhammad Ali and Angelo Dundee

Radio Days… and Years… and Decades

Howard Stern and Robin Quivers

Go Change the World, I Dare You.

Anthony D. Wilson and Justin C. Cohen

Opening Doors to a Newer World:

Eleanor Roosevelt and

Mary McLeod Bethune

Source: BCU archives

A First Door Opens

As she approached the stoop of the Manhattan townhouse at 49 E. 65 th St. on Dec 7 1927, Mrs. Mary McCloud Bethune had a good idea of what to expect inside. She understood that, aside from the servants, she would be the only black person in the room. She had come to New York City to attend a meeting of The National Council of Women.

The NCW had been founded in 1888 to advance the cause of women’s rights and, unusually for the time, included members of all races, creeds, and traditions. In the 1920’s, women’s groups were largely organized along racial lines. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs had a strict whites only policy at the time. Prominent women’s groups such as The League of Women Voters and The Women’s Trade Union league either completely excluded black members in order to placate their southern membership or were dominated by white women. However, with its roots in anti-slavery activism, The National Council of Women was the exception.

Most of the NCW meeting’s delegates were attending a general lunch that day. But Bethune had been invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to a private lunch for the presidents of the 35 women’s organizations affiliated with the NCW. Bethune was President of the NACW, The National Association of Colored Women, the only African American women’s club in the NCW.

Black women’s groups such the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) or Colored Women Voter Leagues, which formed in some states, had a far different agenda than their white counterparts. Unlike the women’s clubs which sought the expansion of women’s rights and political influence, black women’s clubs sought elimination of the legal barriers that severely limited the rights and opportunities of all African Americans, male and female.

Co-hosting the lunch that day were Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and her mother-in-law, Mrs. James Roosevelt, who lived next door at 47 E. 65th. They would become much better known, over the next several years, as Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Franklin Roosevelt, and Sara Roosevelt, his mother. Eleanor involved herself with multiple women’s groups within New York City and state. Despite private family tension with Eleanor, Sara Roosevelt publicly supported her daughter-in-law’s work with these women’s organizations, including hosting lunches such as the one about to begin.

It was actually Sara who brought Eleanor (ER) and Mary McLeod Bethune together that day. Bethune remembered it this way:

I can still see the twinkle in Mrs. James Roosevelt’s eyes as she noted the apprehensive glances cast my way by the Southern women who had come to the affair. Then she did a remarkable thing. Very deliberately, she took my arm and seated me to the right of Eleanor Roosevelt: the guest of honor. I can remember, too, how the faces of the Negro servants lit up with pride…From that moment, my heart went out to Mrs. James Roosevelt… and our friendship became one of the most treasured relationships in my life. ¹

That Bethune remembered Sara more vividly than ER that day was ironic because the relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune would become the most widely recognized interracial friendship in the first half of the twentieth century. But on that day in 1927, Sara Roosevelt’s decision to seat them together made for an odd pairing by the standards of the time.

ER was from a patrician family of very considerable