Whitebread - 2

. .
.
The atmosphere in Tuskegee changed dramatically between the first and third summers I was there. The first year there was a lot of tension about integration. Students and my black colleagues didn’t think it was safe to be seen in the same car with me, except right near the campus. It just hadn’t been long since Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner had been killed, and people were plain scared that rednecks would think they were civil rights workers. In fact, the following year a student activist was killed in Tuskegee when he tried to use a white-only rest room at a gas station. On the other hand, I found two or three people who wanted to ride as far as Washington DC with me at the end of the summer session and split driving and gasoline expenses. Maybe it was because we were headed north as fast as we could go.

Both the second and third summers I hung around (and just hung around. I’m keeping my sex life strictly off the net, but there’s nothing to tell about those summers anyway) a lot with three women, Jacquie, Connie, and Pete (Elma Pettus). One evening in ’66 when I went to visit Jacquie she said, “We’re going to play bingo at the Tri-County Club. Come on.”

Earlier that summer I had gone to see “The Pink Panther” at a drive-in with the same three women, When the movie was over I said it had been kind of dumb, but Jacquie said, “You were laughing enough.”

This time there was more driving involved, maybe fifteen or twenty miles each way, and nobody was worried about the integrated car. When we got to the Tri-County Club they told me, “Oh, you’re buying the bingo cards.” I wonder why I put up with that kind of thing. I must have enjoyed their company. I went to an all male college and even a year after graduation it was a treat to be able to talk to women without making a long trip off campus. Anyway, that was the only time I ever played bingo, and the only time, even in Alabama, that I was the only white face in that big a room. By then I was used to being easy to spot all the way across the dining hall, but I still felt self-conscious at that club out in the boondocks. Really, though, there was nothing remarkable. None of us won a single game.

By the third summer federal law said that public accomodations were supposed to be integrated. I think that law had been passed before the end of the second summer, because I asked the people I was riding north with at the end of that program if we would be served if we stopped at a restaurant. Prior to the civil rights act the answer would certainly have been no. In ’66 the answer was that they didn’t want to try. There are times you want to be a sit-in, and times you want to get to New York by tomorrow morning. In ’67 an integrated group of us pre-freshman program instructors went a couple of times to a state park in Auburn, twenty miles from Tuskegee. We all swam and rented a rowboat and nobody at the park seemed at all upset.