Older African-Americans in awe but on edge

Another surprise, not so pleasant
Despite the pleasant surprise of Obama’s nomination, McGee said he has been caught off guard by the racial intolerance that has surfaced during the campaign. “I had not realized there were that many people in the country who were that bigoted against African-Americans,” he said.

McGee describes his personal exposure to bias as limited in comparison with some others because “my parents sheltered me from the rough edges of racism.” Still, he was chased and had rocks thrown at him in various parts of Chicago, was unable to get job interviews and was refused service in “whites only” restaurants.

The racially polarizing experience that stuck with him the most, however, was when he visited relatives in Hot Springs, Ark., as a boy of 13. On an outing in town, he held a door for a white woman and was chastised for going out of his way to help someone who was seen as a member of the oppressor race. “I thought it was so incongruous and odd,” he said. “In the South, black people were bitter.”

The current campaign has shown him that “in the deepest bowels of the country there remains a reservoir of bigotry and racial hatred,” McGee said. “Nonetheless, that’s dwarfed, it seems to me, by people of good will. And the younger they are, the more likely they are to be that way, and that’s real hope. “

Beverly Kelly’s experiences have led her to the same conclusion.

Growing up in Seattle, she attended Garfield High School, which in the 1940s had a student body that was about one-third white, one-third black and one-third Asian. “We didn’t know until after we got out of high school that there was any racism,” she said. Then, however, she was refused service at some restaurants and theaters and told by one employer: “We don’t hire Negroes.”

After obtaining a degree from the University of Washington in 1954 and a teaching credential, she was initially only able to find domestic work in a gated white neighborhood. Within a few years, however, she became one of the first black public school teachers in Seattle. On her first day, “As I walked up the steps to the school, the principal met me at the top and said, ‘If it was up to me I wouldn’t have hired you. I didn’t want any black teachers.’”

An unwelcome gift
In the 1960s, when she and her husband moved across Lake Washington to the well-heeled and lily white suburb of Bellevue, their new neighbors took up a collection for the family. “They got $2,500,” she said, “and they brought it to us and offered it to us not to move in!” Now, after 40 years of living among them, making friendships, sharing triumphs and disappointments, she has concluded, “These people are the nicest people in the world. My kids grew up in their houses. They could not have been nicer.”

Kelly, who remains well-known in the Seattle education community for her work as a volunteer reader and storyteller in the schools, believes that this one-on-one interaction is the level at which true progress has been made in improving race relations in the United States. Across much of the nation today, she said, “We don’t think in terms of black and white. Most of our kids have grown up with all kinds of races.

“I pity white people if you haven’t opened up and connected with a person of a different race. I have much more in common with a lot of white people than I do with black people.”

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