White supremacy a scourge to take seriously

Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, 3 September 2017

The events two weeks ago in Charlottesville and the glee with which openly white supremacist leaders spoke of President Trump’s response really bothered me. It took me about a week to figure out why. I traced it back to ninth grade.

As I entered the seventh grade, Florida schools desegregated under federal court orders. Needless to say, the officials in charge didn’t do a very good job; it seemed they did it in such a way to foment a stiff and at times violent reaction to it. Then Governor Claude Kirk was an ardent foe of “busing.” That was 1970. For me, my junior high (seventh, eighth and ninth grade) was desegregated and my parents sent me to a “white flight” Christian school. That should tell you about my parents’ racial views.

The next year I returned to public school because my parents were OK with how school officials were achieving “busing” (basically that I would not be bused to a “black” school).

My future high school was just a few blocks away from the junior high and it was the site of considerable racial violence. It even made the CBS Evening News and often the trouble “walked down the street” to my school and we had our share of racial violence as well. One morning, in November, we arrived on school grounds and someone (I doubt anyone from the school, although a parent might have been a culprit) had painted a racial epithet on the basketball court. We did not have an inside gym, so this racial epithet in six foot letters in the very center of the school, was so inflammatory (I doubt the Trib-Star would print it) it created immediate tension and strong reactions.

I was on the yearbook staff and we met an hour before classes started. That day, I was in Mrs. Smith’s room doing yearbook stuff when I saw another yearbook staff person, my friend Carl, walking in from the bike racks and a black kid (African-American was not yet used) ran up behind him and hit him in the back of the head with a baseball bat. I saw him go down and I ran out of the room and around an exterior stairway to see if he was okay. He was. He said he sensed something behind him and scrunched up his shoulders and the bat hit him there. His books were scattered and I told him to get inside and I grabbed his books. Then I was surrounded by eight black guys, most of whom I recognized and a few others who were older, high school boys. One had a bat, another a chain. They pushed me back and forth like a scene from West Side Story, the bat was swung at my head but I ducked and the chain was swung at me and caught me on the side. I broke through the group and ran away to the safety of Mrs. Smith’s room.

The “gang” then walked down the length of the building to an interior stairway and assaulted another kid. He was not as fortunate as I was. He was lashed several times in the face with the chain and his eyes were permanently damaged. This attack created, not surprisingly, an uproar and the eight boys were caught. The issue for the police was who swung the chain. The captured boys named the chain swinger, a kid named Johnnie. Johnnie was known by many other black kids as an “oreo.” In fact, Johnnie, Mike, and I were friends and played gym towel basketball everyday instead of eating lunch.

Johnnie was charged and had a juvenile court hearing. His attorneys (no kidding, I think they were just law students from the local law school) heard that I was assaulted just minutes before Rusty was. They came to see me. No police or prosecutor ever spoke to me. They asked if Johnnie was in the group that assaulted me. “No.” Do you know who swung the chain at you? “Yes.” So, during the trial, I was brought in to “impeach” a couple of the witnesses.

That I was going to testify in open court in defense of a “n****r” became an issue for me and my parents. To my parents’ credit, despite they themselves being white supremacists, told me to just tell the truth. I knew then it was hard on them, but I hope the “always tell the truth” that they drummed into me, somehow gave them some satisfaction.

The day I testified was ugly. There were protesters but after the trial was dismissed for that day, the parents of the boys I had contradicted got in my face, they screamed at me, they threatened me. Somehow I understood that, I had just called their boys liars. I was scared but that compared nothing to the response from the white supremacy crowd. They didn’t care about the truth. They only wanted to see a black kid be punished. It didn’t matter who it was, as “they” are all the same. For me, this was the crack that I needed to see my own way out of that world.

Our house was vandalized with “race traitor” sprayed on our driveway. My life was threatened multiple times by angry white folks, most of whom I knew and knew through my dad were KKK. One day, my folks were out, I was to cut the grass and was getting the mower ready to do that when a car pulled up, full of angry white guys, none of whom I recognized, they told me that they were going to “f**k me up” and two got out of their car, one with a bat and the other with a piece of wood with a nail protruding from it. I was frightened and I reached for a huge wrench my dad had and turned and just waited for these two guys. I said nothing because I was petrified and felt like I was going to puke. Then they stopped, turned around, got back in the car and drove off. I don’t know why, they were at the right place and had called me by name.

I’ve faced racial violence and I’ve faced angry white supremacists. The white supremacists scared me (and still do) far more than any angry BLM protest or Louis Farrakhan fulminations. I’ve received death threats twice in my life. Then and later after first moving to Terre Haute and encountering the Klan at the Covered Bridge Festival and writing a letter to the editor of the Trib-Star about it. After it was published I received death threats over the phone. My earlier experience though taught me the real danger isn’t the threat, but when out of the blue a car full of angry white supremacists shows up, unexpectedly.

For those white folks who have liberal views on race, immigration, diversity, and so forth, do not take this rise in white supremacy activity lightly. You are all “race traitors” and a race traitor to them is the worst thing one can be.

Thomas L. Steiger is a professor of sociology and director of the Center for Student Research and Creativity at Indiana State University. Email thomas.steiger@indstate.edu.