Sharecropper's Son: A Journey of Teaching and Learning

By James E. Southerland

From his birth on South Alabama farmland through youth in Columbus, Georgia, and studies at the University of Georgia, the sharecropper's son James E. Southerland set out on a journey of teaching and learning that spanned six decades. Beginning with the naivete of a freshly minted Ph.D. candidate with no teaching experience and endin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brenau University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9780578515175

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

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THE SHARECROPPER’S SON

My story began in 1942 in a two-room, unpainted house at Pleasant Plains in Houston County, Alabama, where a country doctor delivered me into this world. My mother, Viadus, was 19 years old, and she came close to death as a result of my birth. Our home differed greatly from John Grisham’s dwelling in his book A Painted House. Ours was an ordinary home life with few dramatic, exciting stories that produced decades of vivid childhood memories. However, an older cousin, Billy Wells, did tell me many years later that during World War II he often babysat me while my mother and dad worked in the fields. My mother wanted him to look out for me because there were German prisoners of war working on the farm and she wanted to make sure I was protected. The prisoners of war were a vestige of the most devastating war in world history. Thus, unknowingly, as a toddler I had a brush with this significant event, so it could be said that my engagement with history began very early in life.

It is true that any life is a tiny chapter of all history, reflections of the human condition during a slice of time. Growing up in South Alabama, my parents suffered immensely during the Great Depression of the 1930s. My dad, Arthur, was born in 1920 into a respectable land-owning family, but events would change his life in dramatic fashion. His grandfather had given my dad’s father a large parcel of land. My grandfather, however, had greater ambitions and sold the land and moved my grandmother, my dad and his older brother, Paul, and sister, Nell, to Miami to seek bigger and better things. Built on the drained swamplands in South Florida, Miami was booming in the 1920s. My grandfather became a housing contractor and did very well in the burgeoning economy. His family even had two automobiles, which was uncommon at this time.

My dad told me about how he and his family survived the hurricane of 1926, called by the U.S. Weather Bureau in Miami probably the most destructive hurricane to strike the United States.¹ The death toll was estimated between 325 and 800. No storm in previous history had done as much property damage. Most of the coastal residents had not evacuated because of the short warning and because the young city’s population had little knowledge of the danger a major hurricane posed.² In his account the Native Americans from the barrier islands began to come inland before anyone else because they had some innate sense of danger. When the winds first struck the city, oranges went flying everywhere in the streets. Children ran and scooped up all they could manage, and some of the youngsters, including my dad and his siblings, set up makeshift stands and distributed the fruit to the survivors in the aftermath of the storm. I learned later that the newly established University of Miami opened its doors for the first time days before the hurricane occurred, and in memory of this horrific Category 4 hurricane, university officials adopted the nickname of Hurricanes for the university athletic teams. Every time I watch the University of Miami sports teams compete on television, I think of the ’26 hurricane and the effect it had on my father’s family.

The hurricane ended the booming economy in South Florida and brought on the Great Depression in this area before it hit the remainder of the country in 1929 following the stock market crash of that year. My dad’s family was hit doubly hard with the death of my grandfather in 1927. My dad and his family were devastated and had to return to Alabama to live in one of his grandfather’s houses. Because his older brother soon married and left home, my father became the man of the house. Being the unselfish person that he was, he left high school at the end of 10th grade to work so his sister Nell could complete her final year and receive a diploma. She was supposed to work the next year so he could graduate as well, but she was unable to do so. At the age of 18, in 1938, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program for destitute young men like my dad. This program was part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s mobilization efforts to defeat the Great Depression just as the United States had mobilized almost two decades earlier to defeat the Central Powers in World War I.

The job took my father to San Clemente, California, to help build a park there. Of the $30 a month he earned, he sent $25 home to his family to support his mother and sister. He was later transferred to Mount Charleston, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas, where he assisted in the building of a road through a park from the sage-covered high desert floor to the timbered alpine setting around the summit.

In addition to helping build the road, the CCC workers fought forest fires and engaged in various conservation efforts. In their leisure time they played baseball and other sports. I have a treasured baseball team photograph with my dad, youthful and smiling, sitting on the front row.

My father was one of 3 million young men who eagerly volunteered from 1933 to 1942 for President Roosevelt’s tree army. According to the CCC website, the men lived in Army surplus tents in 4,500 camps across the nation. In 1933, when Roosevelt asked Congress to establish the CCC, he received opposition initially from some congressmen who thought it would be dangerous to assemble large groups of jobless men in the woods. Labor leaders called it a legalized system of forced labor, but Congress approved the plan in eight days. In the nine years of its existence, the CCC planted almost 3 billion trees, put up 6 million erosion control dams, built trails and roads, fought fires, laid telephone lines and stocked lakes. It was said that the CCC boys reclaimed the land and, in the process, reclaimed themselves.³ I believe my father would agree. He was proud to be part of this group and cherished the good memories and valuable lessons that this experience taught him.

After his two-year stint in the CCC, he returned to South Alabama where he met and married my mother a year later on March 15, 1941. The Ides of March proved to be an unlucky day for Julius Caesar, but not for my parents.

Born in 1923 in Newville, Alabama, the 10th of 11 children, my mother also knew hard times. Her family eked out a living in rural Alabama working on land owned by others. She completed 10th grade like my father and was working in a small retail store when she met and married my dad. When I think of my mother as a young woman, my mind references a time when I was about 11 years old and her sister and I looked together at old photographs of my parents. My aunt commented on one picture in particular, taken when my mother was still a teenager, about how beautiful my mother was. My jaw dropped – I was stunned. Although I had seen that photo many times before, I had never thought of my mother as attractive. After all, she was my mother! However, on that day I saw a sophisticated, drop-dead gorgeous young woman who could easily have been mistaken for a movie star. Before her death in 2015, when I spent time with my then-92-year-old mother in the assisted living home with her once tall and slim frame, gnarled and stooped from osteoarthritis, I could from time to time catch a glimpse of the beautiful girl in the photograph. My aunt also remarked in general about what a handsome couple my mother and father made; indeed, when I took a look at other photos of my father, I was impressed with how tall and handsome he was. I have no idea what happened with me!

Soon after my parents’ marriage, my Uncle Paul asked my dad to go in on shares and farm some acreage owned by his father-in-law. The unpainted house in which I was born was located on this land. It was my parents’ first house. After we moved to Columbus, Georgia, in 1946, we would often travel back to South Alabama to visit Uncle Paul and his wife, Aunt Zera, and my mother’s sister, Aunt Thelma, and her husband, Uncle Ashley, and their families. Since the house was located between the farms of the two relatives, each time we drove from one farm to the other, my parents would point the house out to me with great pride. I was not exactly awed as I cavalierly glanced at the dilapidated house, which tilted to one side and looked as if it might collapse at any moment. It did not dawn on me that, despite my indifference, the house had special meaning for my parents.

Unlike the two of them, I had no memories of the time in the house since we moved from there three years after my birth when my father was drafted into the Navy. At school my friends would talk about where they were born, usually a hospital in Columbus, Atlanta or some other city. I never commented about the place or circumstances of my birth. Years later, shuttling between the relatives’ farms, we passed through the Pleasant Plains community. The house was no longer there. It had finally collapsed.

My dad was happy in those days at Pleasant Plains. He loved farming. Land was special to him. During a trip to South Alabama in my youth, Dad stopped the car, got out, stood quietly by a fence and simply looked at an area of farmland. I got out of the car and stood beside him. He told me in a wistful voice that his daddy used to own this particular piece of land. The parcel extended beyond what our eyes could see. He then turned and got in the car and we left. He never said anything more on the subject.

Since he was a farmer, Dad was not drafted until the final year of the war when American forces made the final push to defeat Japan. American leaders felt that the Japanese would not surrender peacefully, which would make an invasion of the Japanese islands necessary. Of course, two atomic bombs dropped on two Japanese cities in August 1945 would end the war and change the world forever. At the induction center in Atlanta, Dad earned a perfect score on the test that all potential recruits had to take. When I took the test in 1966, also in Atlanta, I scored 89 (I had two university degrees at the time). Because of his score, he was heavily recruited by the Navy, and he chose that branch over the other branches of service. He underwent basic training at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center near Chicago, then sailed from San Francisco the night the Japanese surrendered. He was assigned to a light cruiser, which fueled seaplanes. He spent some time in Hawaii and the Philippines.

His ship docked at Leyte Gulf on the eastern side of the Philippine Islands 10 months after what my American history professor, Dr. F.N. Boney, would describe as one of the greatest naval engagements ever. The Americans had retaken the Philippine Islands from the Japanese as a result of this battle, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur had waded ashore after the fighting ended. MacArthur had been forced to leave the Philippines just as the Japanese invaded the islands and defeated the American forces there. At that time he uttered his famous prophecy, I shall return. His photogenic reentry at Leyte fulfilled the promise. The general had been forced to leave in 1942 to avoid capture by the Japanese.

My father returned to San Diego in 1946, then made his way to Norfolk, Virginia, and Philadelphia via the Panama Canal. Discharged in Memphis, he returned to Ozark, Alabama, where my mother and I, together with two of my aunts and several cousins, moved after he left home. From there the family made its way to Columbus, Georgia, located on the Chattahoochee River some 100 miles to the north.

Columbus, a city with a large textile industry, occasionally identified itself with the nickname the Lowell, Massachusetts, of the South. Lowell, also a textile mill town, was considered to be the cradle of the American Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century. After the war Columbus attracted from neighboring areas in rural Georgia and Alabama many individuals and their families who were desperately seeking jobs in the downsizing postwar economy. Those individuals, like my mother and dad, sought their small share of the American dream.

My dad brought back a Japanese rifle and other bits and pieces of memorabilia from the war. There were photographs of Pearl Harbor, the Philippines and the Panama Canal, seashells from the Pacific, as well as his uniform and a wool peacoat, which I still have. I loved to look at those items and ask him questions about them. I believe this may have been when my interest in history began.

My father’s stories of what he saw fascinated me. I also loved looking at his photographs from his years in the CCC during the Depression. He told me about San Clemente, California, and Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada. In California in 1938, he attended the Rose Bowl Parade. That year’s football game featured the University of Alabama, making its fifth appearance in the bowl in a loss to the University of California at Berkeley. The following year he remembered seeing Shirley Temple, the famous child movie star, who was the grand marshal of the parade. It must have been something special for a teenage boy from rural Alabama to attend the Rose Bowl and to spend time on the West Coast.

My Uncle Herbert, married to my mother’s younger sister (Aunt Minnie Lou, or Minlou as we knew her), also influenced my early sense of history. He served in World War II with the 43rd Combat Engineers assigned to the Third Army under the command of Old Blood and Guts himself, Gen. George Patton. He landed on the Normandy beaches several days after the D-Day invasion. He was at places and in battles that I was to learn more about later, such as the siege of Bastogne, the town in Belgium that was part of the famous Battle of the Bulge. In April 1945 my uncle’s unit participated in the liberation of the concentration camp at Buchenwald near Weimar, Germany. I later taught courses on the Holocaust and became familiar with this particular camp. I have a photograph that shows a very young and skeletal Elie Wiesel in a bunk with several other inmates at Buchenwald. Wiesel, 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of the powerful and painful book Night, dedicated his life to bearing witness to that terrible episode in history. I wonder if my uncle crossed paths with this great humanitarian on that April day when the camp was liberated.

After the war Uncle Herbert pursued a career in the Army. When he and his family were sent to Germany in 1952, he left his World War II souvenirs in a trunk in our basement with a warning to me not to disturb the contents of the trunk. Of course, as I suspect he knew I would, I opened the trunk and was delighted to find a German dagger, a flag with the swastika symbol, a German luger, an Iron Cross and other items from the war. I often impressed my friends by showing them the contents of the trunk.

When my parents and my aunt and uncle got together along with other relatives, they often talked about the war and the days before. A recent book, Reading in the Dark, tells the story of a young boy coming of age in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. One of the short chapters, titled Feet, describes how the boy, also the narrator, would sit under the dinner table and listen to adult conversation. The plastic tablecloth hung so far down from the table that all he could see were feet. It reminded me of my childhood sitting and listening to the adults talk about life during the Depression and the war. I listened attentively, and in my mind I tried to imagine what it was like in those days. I wished I had been an adult then. I felt cheated. Why couldn’t I have lived in those exciting and historic times? Of course, that was in my mind. I was nostalgic for a war I did not experience and, in reality, did not understand. The humorist Will Rogers said it best when he said this about the good ol’ days: They never were.

After the move to Columbus, Dad worked in a textile mill for a short time before he discovered he did not wish to continue. He walked down Second Avenue in Columbus and saw an automobile garage. He inquired about a job. He had no experience as a mechanic, but he had repaired his own cars. George Taylor of the Taylor Brother Garage gave him a trial run and soon hired him. Within a year or so he was the head mechanic. My dad had a mind for mechanical things. He could do most anything he tried. He attended night school on the GI Bill and studied auto mechanics to further hone his skills.

Our first house in Columbus was located in the area known as Linwood. It was also known as Boogerville (affectionately, I am sure). I have few memories of the house in Linwood. I often asked my mother if I could eat lunch at the Goodwill Center located just down the street, and she, of course, always said yes. Years later in high school I joined the Key Club. The club’s main project was to cut the grass and generally maintain the grounds of this same Goodwill Center. I did not mention my visits there to the other Key Club members.

In those days there was an ice cream man, or the chunky man, who sold vanilla ice cream chunks coated in chocolate on a wooden stick – similar to an Eskimo Pie. The chunky man rode a three-wheeled cycle with a box containing dry ice attached to the front of the cycle, from which he sold and dispensed wonderful ice cream treats. Most every day I would hear the chunky man’s whistle and immediately ask my mother for five cents for an ice cream. She always told me to look in her coin purse for the money. After getting the coin I would rush outside and make my purchase. A few years ago I needed a stamp, and my wife, Regina, told me she had one or two in the change compartment of her billfold. I opened the coin purse compartment, and as I fished with my thumb and forefinger for the stamp, a flood of memories of the ice cream man and of my mother’s coin purse ran through my head. It always astounds me what a powerful effect a small gesture can have on memory.

We moved from the Linwood area to Mr. Taylor’s house, a large stucco structure next to the Peabody Apartments on 27th Street. There was a hall in the center of the house with several rooms on the left-hand side and two rooms and a bathroom on the right-hand side. We lived in the two rooms on the right side of the house. It was a relatively short walk through the apartments to the Royal Theater located on Talbotton Road. I made many friends from the apartments, and most Saturdays I accompanied them to the Royal to watch a double feature. Of course, just about every Saturday there was a war movie or a Western; there were serials, including Captain Marvel and Superman, as well as newsreels of the week’s important stories. I am sure I saw every John Wayne war movie made as well as his Westerns, which no doubt added greatly to my war nostalgia.

Those movies opened up a new world to me, one of imagination, humor, romance and intrigue. They expanded my mundane world on 27th Street. My friends and I couldn’t wait for the Western or the war movie, but often the other movie was the first feature. By other I mean a musical with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or a gangster movie with James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart or Edward G. Robinson. Sometimes it was a romantic comedy with Cary Grant or James Stewart, or a drama with Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Randolph Scott or Gary Cooper. We loved the war movies and the Westerns. Our heroes were Gene Autry and Roy Rogers (ole Gene and Roy of the country and western song) along with John Wayne, Randolph Scott and lesser-known stars such as Tim Holt, Tex Ritter, Red Ryder, Johnny Mack Brown (the former University of Alabama football star who actually played in the Rose Bowl a decade before my father attended his New Year’s Day game), Lash Larue, Charles Starrett and William Boyd, better known as Hopalong Cassidy. Admission was a nickel; popcorn cost a dime.

Before kindergarten I was not exposed to books. I spent most of my time with my friends as we played and rode bikes all over town until well after dark on most days. Movies and the radio were my primary sources of entertainment and knowledge. I loved radio about as much as the movies. Radio was magical to me. I loved listening to the comedy shows of Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Red Skelton and even Amos and Andy. We did not know then that Amos and Andy were white men and that the show was politically incorrect. Fibber McGee and Molly was also a favorite. My dad’s laughter was a source of pleasure and comfort to me as we listened to the small white Crosley radio in the evenings.

On Saturday nights we listened to the Grand Ole Opry broadcast live from Nashville. My parents loved the show, but the music seemed too sad to me. Instead of the twangy and sad wailings of singers like Kitty Wells, who sang about honky-tonk angels and other such themes, I preferred the comedy of Minnie Pearl, Rod Brassfield and Lonzo and Oscar. Legendary Alabama singer/songwriter Hank Williams, who sang about cheating hearts, lonesome whistles and a wooden Indian, was often on various radio programs, but I had no idea how famous he was. Nor could I ever imagine that I would be a colleague of one of his biographers, Paul Hemphill, who was writer-in-residence in my department at Brenau University.

My mother worked the night shift at one of the mills, and my dad would take me with him when he took her to work at 11 p.m. I would listen to the radio in the car as we rode to and from the mill. In the mornings when my dad picked my mother up from work, I would remain asleep on the cot in the kitchen. Mrs. Taylor kept an eye on me until my parents returned.

I began kindergarten at Waverly Terrace Elementary School, located a few blocks down the street. I did not like kindergarten from the first day. On that dawn of my academic history, my mother had to come to the school to retrieve me because I had acted up so badly. My greatest transgression, my mother told me later, was that I had torn the teacher’s hose!

So the history professor in me compels me to provide you with enough historical context so you will understand why that was such a big deal. This was shortly after the end of World War II, during which there were shortages of everything due to rationing. The introduction of nylon had revolutionized the women’s hosiery industry in the late 1930s, but the war effort conscripted most of the world’s supply of the products, so nice stockings were hard to come by. Women during that time even used eyebrow pencils to draw fake seams down the backs of their naked thighs and calves to make it appear that they were wearing stockings. When I started kindergarten, most women still did not have many stockings to sacrifice to a 5-year-old’s temper tantrum. I still cannot believe that I would do such a thing!

Interestingly, Muscogee County was one of the few counties in Georgia with public kindergarten classes. The city and county schools had merged sometime around the end of the war into the Muscogee County School System, which was unusual at that time. Of course, there were separate schools for black students. Since kindergarten was not mandatory in those days, my mother wisely told me that I did not have to go to school if I did not want to.

Naturally, it was not long before I begged to return. After staying home from school the next day, it dawned on me that it would not be much fun since all my friends were in school. I went back and remained a student at Waverly Terrace until 1950 when we moved to another part of the city.

Having no books at home, I struggled in school those first years. About 20 years ago my mother cleaned out one of the rooms in her house, found my early report cards and gave them to me. I did not want my daughters to see the less-than-satisfactory grades I earned. However, I loved the books that we read, and I am sure this is when I fell in love with books. There was something magical about them to me. Books offered another outlet for me in which to lose myself and escape my environment. I couldn’t wait until I reached second grade because students in this grade were allowed to take books home. From third grade on my grades improved markedly.

I suffered the usual childhood diseases, such as chickenpox and measles, along with the more unusual scarlet fever while living on 27th Street. The beloved Columbus pediatrician Dr. Blanchard emphatically told my parents that I had to be quarantined while the fever ran its course. I was isolated from my friends for several days, but the warning did not deter my courageous and perhaps not-too-wise friend Harold Clark, who climbed in the front window from the front porch and visited me while my mother slept after working the night shift at the mill. Harold was Mrs. Taylor’s nephew, who lived a few blocks away on Hamilton Road. He and his older sister, Bobbie, often visited their dad, who lived upstairs in the Taylor home. They were the first children of divorced parents that I knew.

My dad soon outgrew his job at the garage and, after working for a brief period of time with civil service at Fort Benning, moved to the City of Columbus Motor Transport. He left Fort Benning because of a short layoff; he was offered his job back, but he could not risk another layoff. As a child of the Depression and as the man of the house following the death of his father and the marriage of his older brother, he had a strong sense of responsibility toward taking care of my mother and me. He couldn’t bear the thought of being without a job. So he worked hard as a mechanic, as did my mother in a cotton mill, to provide for me.

In 1950 we left 27th Street behind and moved to the county to a small framehouse at the end of a short, unpaved street. There were only three houses on the street at the time. Although we were only six or eight miles away, it seemed like we were in another world. Houses were farther apart, and I did not know anyone. There were no sidewalks, no movie theaters, no cafes or stores near us with the exception of a small grocery store up the street. We moved in summer, and I was without friends and saw few children my age until the school year began. It was the loneliest summer of my life. Even though it was traumatic at the time, the move to the county (we would say suburbs today) was a godsend and changed my life for the better. I loved my friends that I left behind, but I soon made new friends and enjoyed my new world. The new neighborhood was a solidly middle class one made up of carpenters, factory managers, civil service workers, teachers and tradesmen.

In September 1950 I entered a new school, Rosemont Elementary. I was the new student in Mrs. Head’s third-grade classroom. I found out from one of my first new friends, Ted Jones, who was in Mrs. Head’s room the year before, that she had locked him in her bookroom for misbehavior one afternoon and had forgotten to let him out at the end of the school day. When his mother called Mrs. Head’s home around 5 p.m., Mrs. Head, with great chagrin, returned to the school and took Ted home. I knew I did not want to spend any time in the bookroom. Mrs. Head was very strict, thinking nothing of slapping the palms of your hand with a ruler if you made a mistake in handwriting. I’m afraid I did spend an afternoon or two in the bookroom, but she never forgot me. I was introduced to riding school buses that year; I would ride school buses for the next eight years. In 11th grade I received my driver’s license and would drive my dad to work around 7:30 a.m. in the family car and then drive to high school and return to his work in the afternoon to pick him up.

Looking back, my years at Rosemont were wonderful. I liked my teachers, even Mrs. Head. They cared about their students. I particularly liked my sixth-grade teacher, Billie Ann Murray. She had flaming red hair, and all the boys were in love with her. She was fresh out of college, and she allowed us to express ourselves in several ways, even occasionally allowing a student to sing a popular song in class. I do not know why, but one day I volunteered to sing Eddie Fisher’s hit Oh! My Papa. Perhaps it was this experience that made music such an important part of my life. I do not know what possessed me, but I did it, and it was not bad.

Later, as a teenager, I would sing popular songs on dates. I was particularly fond of the Platters’ rendition of the old standard Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and the songs of the Everly Brothers and even some of Elvis Presley’s tunes. It is little wonder that I had few dates. The first time I heard Elvis singing Heartbreak Hotel, I was 16 years old and driving my 1953 flamingo red and white Crown Victoria Ford hardtop with twin glass-packed mufflers, which reverberated loudly when the accelerator was pushed down hard and released. I had never heard a sound quite like it, and I almost ran off the road. I would have a similar reaction to the music of Buddy Holly and the Crickets, who still remain among my all-time favorite musicians. Don McLean’s words The day the music died in his famous song American Pie refer to the death of the iconic Holly, who was killed in the prime of his life and career in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, on Feb. 3, 1959.

There are many other formative memories of Rosemont School. I believe it was also in sixth grade that Franklin Leverett and I volunteered to take down the American flag each afternoon. We loved lowering the flag and furling it in the precise manner that was required. We also were allowed to leave the classroom about 20 minutes early. Franklin would be an exemplary member of the Junior ROTC in high school and go on to pursue a career in the U.S. Air Force. This also was the year of my first girlfriend, Sonya Vickery, who was a seventh-grader – an older woman.

I had made friends with neighborhood kids. James Grimes, Ted Jones, Edward Pate, Emmett Swint, Franklin Leverett and later Lamar Henderson, who was a few years younger than the rest of us, had become good friends. I still have great memories of bike riding, ball playing in cow pastures and sandlots, and swimming, sometimes skinny dipping, in Cooper Creek. Summers were great for doing all those things, but after several weeks we grew tired of the same activities. Can you imagine?

Happily, the bookmobile would come around to the neighborhood every two weeks or so, and we would check out books and read during those hot and humid days. I had become a voracious reader, and books replaced movies as my favorite way to escape from reality. It was more difficult to go to movies living in rural areas. The theaters were in town, many miles away. Every once in a while one of the dads would take us to a movie at the downtown, thickly carpeted Bradley Theater, which was plush compared to the old and shabby Royal Theater, or we would go to a drive-in theater with parents. A dad would also take us to Golden Park to see the Columbus Cardinals, a farm team of the St. Louis Cardinals, play baseball. As a teenager I saw the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago White Sox in an exhibition game as they played their way back from spring training in Florida to their home cities. I saw the legendary, future Hall of Fame star Stan Musial along with Red Schoendienst and Rip Repulski, Cardinal greats, and White Sox greats such as Orestes Minnie Minoso, the first black Latin player in the Major Leagues, and Luis Aparicio. I also saw another future Hall of Fame megastar play baseball at Golden Park, a second baseman named Henry Aaron, who played for the Jacksonville Braves. But I will tell you more about that later.

The neighborhood seemed peaceful enough to me, but a scary incident happened when I was about 11 years old. The Ku Klux Klan was allowed to burn a cross in a pasture owned by the parents of one of my friends. A local television newsman appeared that evening to take pictures and report on the cross burning. The Klan members roughed him up and gave him a black eye. The next evening he appeared on the local news seething with anger and sporting the black eye. The burning was less than a mile from our house, and it was unnerving to me. I was also told that the father of one of the boys we all knew was a Klan member.

Race was a puzzling thing to me. Black kids would often walk through the alley by our house on 27th Street. The alley was on our side of the house, and one evening my mother saw one of the young kids attempting to look at her through the bathroom window, and she let out a startled shriek. Mr. Taylor heard my mother, and the next thing I knew he was in the alley with a pistol cursing at the boys who had by that time run a good ways down the alley. I was terrified; it happened so fast, and I was not able to move for several minutes. The sight of Mr. Taylor running down the alley and the sound of the shot fired in the air still burns in my memory. I knew it was wrong for the young boy to look in our window, but I did not understand the magnitude of Mr. Taylor’s anger and why he hurled racial epithets at the kids. Peeping in the window did not seem to me to be a killing offense. Knowing little of these matters, I did not understand as I later would the racial taboo involving white women and black males. I read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice in college and his justification of his deliberate assault of a white woman, which was, in his words, the ultimate act of revenge that a black man could commit in America against an unjust white society.

The incident in the alley frightened me and confused me, but in a short time it was forgotten and the alley was not a scary place anymore. It became the place of good memories, the place where my dad months later taught me to ride my new bicycle that I received at Christmas. He pushed me from behind as I pedaled down the alley, confident that he was holding me up and would not let me fall. After a few minutes I spoke to him; receiving no response, I looked back, and he was not there. I panicked and realized I had not asked how to stop the bike. It never occurred to me to reverse the pedals. I picked myself up after the crash and walked the bike back to the house to tell my dad what happened. He seemed amused and explained to me how to stop the bike. He insisted that I get back on the bike, which I did, and all was well again. I could ride my new bicycle, and the earlier incident in the alley became a distant memory.

I grew up in a clearly segregated South. Segregation was a degrading and horrendous system that was an affront to the dignity of a large segment of American society. I had little understanding of what segregation meant and why things were the way they were. As a matter of course, Southerners were supposed to accept this racial separation along with a belief in the inferiority of blacks. I somehow missed the indoctrination. My parents did not discuss those issues to any extent. When they did, they did not use epithets or show great emotion. I am sure they were accepting of the system, but they did not teach me to hate or mistreat another person because of the color of his or her skin. My dad worked with coloreds, as African Americans were called then, but he was never unkind to them. Many times on cold nights I accompanied him to the home of a black person whose car would not run, and my dad would repair the car and charge little if anything for his efforts. I remained confused about race. On some occasions I thought segregation was the right thing, but at other times I thought it was not.

Being born and raised in the South was a complex matter. Segregation was a puzzling matter to me during those times when history and culture were convoluted. Another matter that bothered me was simply being a Southerner. In school we read the Weekly Reader, which was filled with statistics about education, such as which regions ranked high and which regions ranked low in education. The Southern states were always at the bottom of the rankings. Since I was in the educational process in the South, I deduced that my education must be inferior, and I developed an inferiority complex about being Southern. Not only did I read about how far behind the South was in education in the Weekly Reader; I also read the same thing in the local newspaper.

Columbus, being the home of a huge military base, was filled with military personnel and their families. Very often, at almost any time of the year, new students would be added to classrooms in schools throughout the city. My elementary school was no exception, and every time a new student enrolled from outside the South, I was impressed with them initially since in my limited mind they had to be better students than we poor Southerners were. I would quickly try to see how well the new student did on an assignment or a test. I was generally wrong about the new students; they did not perform any better than I did and sometimes did much worse. But the inferiority complex did not go away very easily. I still read and heard criticisms of the South. Stereotyping is a commonplace activity anywhere and at any time in history, I would later discover. Ignorance knows no geographic boundary.

Speaking of ignorance, I have to admit that I was not thrilled with my surname. I thought the name Southerland had to do with the Southern region of the United States, so in my mind I was linked to the backward South in name. It was not until middle school that I asked my dad about our family name and he told me that the name was Scottish in origin. I found that the name Sutherland (simply another spelling of my surname) came from the northern Highlands of Scotland. This piece of information was puzzling: How could Sutherland or Southerland be located in the north and not the south of Scotland? Again, after more investigation I found that the name was derived from the Norse language.

The Norse, also known as Vikings, long ago came to the Orkney Islands, which are located just north of mainland Scotland, and they also settled along the northern tip of Scotland in an area known as Caithness. The Norse called the region below where they settled Sudrland (Southern-land or Sutherland). Years later I visited this area of Scotland, where I saw Dunrobin Castle, the ancestral home of the Sutherland Clan, a beautiful fairytale-like castle located on the North Sea in the county of Sutherland. As I walked through the castle and as I later rode through the beautiful rugged terrain of Sutherland, I thought what a contrast this area was to my birthplace in the flat, hot, dusty environs of southeast Alabama.

In addition to regional educational rankings, the Weekly Reader raised another issue that was disconcerting to me as an elementary school student – the Cold War. Each week there would be articles about how the Soviets were expanding to all parts of the globe, spreading the insidious communistic way of life. Maps were included, which indicated in red the areas of the world infiltrated by the godless Soviets. Asia, Africa and Latin America seemed to be suffering from this expansion.

To an impressionable young boy this was terrifying stuff. I did not understand the term Cold War, but I knew it had to be bad. I felt like any day the Red Army would appear on the horizon and subject us to all sorts of terror and mayhem. Of course, those fears did not stay in my mind too long at a time. That was a good thing. Reading and studying history later would clarify and put matters like segregation, education in the South and the Cold War in a more proper perspective.

Another aspect of being a Southerner involves history. I already had a sense of history to a slight degree from hearing stories told by my parents and relatives about the Depression and World War II. Added to that was discussion at school outside of class with my friends about the Civil War. I had read about this great conflict, and I had seen movies and would later see television programs about the Civil War.

We all had unrealistic notions about the war. We did not know it, but we were victims of the Myth of the Lost Cause. My young schoolmates repeated what they heard from their parents, who saw the war as a gallant effort led by the noble Robert E. Lee against heavy odds to defend and preserve states’ rights. There was no discussion about slavery. Memory is a powerful thing and often very selective. The collective memory of the South did not deal with the reality of the cause of the war. The memory was highly romanticized.

A young woman from Atlanta would add to the romantic view of the war with her nostalgic novel Gone with the Wind, which she conceived as a teenaged girl after viewing the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, which depicts the Klan in a positive manner. After a special viewing in the White House, the film was endorsed by President Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner and a historian, who had been president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey before being elected to the U.S. presidency in 1912.⁴

Memories and myths die hard. Today, good ole boys sport Confederate battle flag stickers on their pickup trucks; sometimes they have an actual flag affixed to their vehicle. Until recent years the flag was carried into the football stadium ahead of a well-known state university’s football team as they took the field on fall Saturday afternoons. In the 1970s I taught a student who had carried the Confederate battle flag into battle in the jungles of Vietnam. He and I had