Baltimore 1960-Eight: Childhood, Family, Fury And then there was the Purple couch!

By Shell Stokes

Follow this eight year old child through the loss of innocence as he witnesses the war in Vietnam during the 60's the 'TET Offensive' in the beginning of 1968, as he tries to adapt to Catholic school. Hear his thoughts and fears as he grows up in a black family during a segregated country and racially cha

• Language: English
• Publisher: Authors' Tranquility Press
• Release date: Sep 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781961908819

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth;

And let thy heart cheer thee in the days of

Thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine Heart, and in the

sight of thine eyes…

-Ecclesiastes 11:9-

Christmas 1967 was one of the very best I ever had. It was filled with all of my favorite things at that time of the year. From putting up our tree to the smells and colors of the season, an assortment of nuts and candy on bowls around the dining room table, with a larger bowl of tangerines in the center, made the house smell like something was always cooking. Our red stockings were hung over the mantel in the living room, where our sparkling silver Christmas tree changed from blue to yellow to red to green. In 1967, artificial trees were the rage. With those wonderful colored revolving (better known to us as bobbing) lights were a child’s amazing wonder.

I could lay on the floor in front of that tree for hours just watching the colors turn, occasionally hanging a toy soldier from it simply because it was fun. It was fun to put together, trying to figure out what aluminum branch went where and trying to hide the ones that were shedding at the bottom of the tree. My two sisters and brother could not wait until we got the ‘ok’ to break out that box with that shiny mass of aluminum joy. Then the chaos would ensue as we put it together two or three times until we were sure it looked like a tree. My brother and I had the task of untangling the lights and finding out which one light was killing the whole string and stopping them all from working—a thankless job, to say the least. I think my parents got a kick out of watching us and wondered how many bulbs and ornaments we would break before a new box had to be opened. And, of course, we always ran out of hooks. Whose job was that? Ornament supply. It was my older sister’s job to swirl the tinsel, and my next oldest sister would hang the lights and hand my father the star, and he would put that up. Once the star was lit, it was officially Christmas. The last time we had a real tree, I think I was four or five. I like the artificial ones better. Don’t ask me who thought of the color silver.

Our customary large, plastic candy canes filled with treats and toys were also hanging from the tree. They were compliments of our insurance man, a nice old white man who dropped them all around when he came to collect on the policies my parents had on everyone. Those were the days when black people were limited in their choices for such services, and people in general had a more personal touch with their customers. He was a nice enough man and never had a bad thing to say. The Joy of Christmas. We had some knowledge of the school change that was coming, from public to Catholic, but it was not important at the moment. So what, a new school. But it wasn’t Christmas until we heard the song ‘Fat Daddy’ on the radio. Then it was on. Come on, tangerines! Come on, Pecans! Oh, oh, yeah! We were one of many of the black families living in America during a time of segregation, extreme prejudice, the Civil Rights movement, and the upheaval that was the Sixties. We lived in Baltimore, Maryland, bordering Virginia to the south and Pennsylvania to the North at the Mason/Dixon Line all along the Atlantic coast. Baltimore having a harbor off the Chesapeake Bay and nestled between Delaware and Washington, D.C. For the record, at age eight, I could care less. Hey, how many people know where Delaware is? These three states were steel and shipping giants that had helped forge the weapons and transportation, not to mention manpower, that helped win the last great war. The sleeping Giant; Industrial, Manufacturing, Manpower, was as Isoroku Yamamoto had predicted, awakened in 1941. That was a time that only came around once in a lifetime—all the right people, at the right place, in the right position in history, at the same moment in time. Good versus evil collided on what Carlos Castaneda called the Fifth Ring of Power and, like Dwight D. Eisenhower, put together one of the toughest coalitions to ever fight a war. Winston Churchill, who defiantly took the tiny Island of Britain through the Nazi Blitz all alone, and George S. Patton III, who said all the wrong things but won all the right battles. He fought with more Negro soldiers than any other general. They created his supply lines, volunteering to drive the dangerous roads day and night to keep his army moving. They called it the Red Ball Express. Things were again shaping into another once-in-a-lifetime moment. I knew more about Patton because he was well-loved by Negro tankers. He had Negro engineers building bridges and black truckers who drove the Red Ball Express, keeping Patton’s Army supplied and tanks filled with gasoline. Future Senator Huey Long was there. The 761st all-Negro tank battalion, ironically named The Black Panthers saw heavy action and fighting across Europe and into Germany. Their motto was Come Out Fighting, and they did just that. They were instrumental in relieving the siege at the Battle of the Bulge. They received the Presidential Unit Citation 33 years later. They liberated numerous towns and concentration camps, including Buchenwald, and saw firsthand man’s inhumanity toward man. They didn’t need to be reminded, but they were. Lieutenant Jackie Robinson was a member of the 761st until he refused to give up his seat on an Army bus to a white officer and was brought up on charges. They were later dropped, allowing him to become the first Negro to play in the American Baseball League. My grandfather and great-uncles served in Patton’s 3rd Army, and they didn’t have to tell us, boys, preparing to go to war in Vietnam, that they shoveled shit in Mississippi. But ever since the Second World War, life in America had begun to change. Black soldiers coming home from an unsegregated Europe were ever increasingly aware that being treated as a second-class citizen in a country you sacrificed for was just not good enough. While Winston Churchill was relieved to have America as his ally, the British people did not share the same ideas and prejudices as the Americans. Churchill may have wanted to appease his American allies, but the people of Great Britain allowed Negro soldiers to go wherever they were welcomed. They did not share America’s views on segregation. Having had the experience of equal rights, upon returning to the States most black soldiers joined the Civil Rights movement.

The Civil Rights movement had begun in earnest in the 1950’s with the Montgomery bus boycott. It had started out slowly with stubborn white America not wanting to give an inch. Since that time, it had become bloody, continuous, and very violent, especially in the South. Then some things began to change slowly, and in came the radical sixties. Change was coming and the sixties would become the most important decade of the twentieth century. It was a time of complete and utter turmoil. With 1967 looming in the rearview mirror, and having been one of the most contentious years thus far, 1968 was fast approaching and it too would be a once in a lifetime moment.

After World War II, Eisenhower became president and led the country through a tranquil period of peace through stealth, secret wars, and exploration. But civil rights was largely ignored by a majority of states that enjoyed all the benefits of a free and prosperous America but didn’t know a thing about the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States and, in most cases, didn’t care. The Korean War, which my father fought in, was mostly overlooked, but it was the first time Americans had fought together as a desegregated military. When the Air Force split off from the Army and became a separate military branch, someone with common sense must have asked, Well, what do we do with all the Negro pilots and support in the segregated Army Air Force? Good question. Integrate. That lead to the desegregation of all services in 1948.

Still, the disparity in treatment of black Americans through laws that kept black people from realizing the promise of the American dream in a still-segregated America had to be faced. In spite of the 15th Amendment, there were eight civil rights acts passed over the years in order to specify exactly what the rules of the amendment were because every state and local government kept finding ways to ignore them. Jim Crow laws, the literacy test, and the grandfather clause, just to name a few. Then there was that ever-present threat of violence if you walked in this place or that or drank from the wrong separate but equal fountain. There was no such thing. Things were clearly marked for whites only. You didn’t have to ask. So, the fifteenth amendment had to have Civil Rights Acts added because of prejudice and a total ignorance of the rights men had fought for and died for.

The vigor of hatred was so prevalent, and the Civil Rights Movement became so powerful that by 1968, black people had been outright defying the laws of racism and segregation. The Civil Rights movement continued to gain momentum, but America was now focused on the space race and the Cold War. The Cold War, which was the time we were living in, was probably the most unforgiving because no one died in combat. Everyone who died died in a training accident. It was hard to explain the cold war when Vietnam was a growing hot war. The Cold War would not end until the fall of the Soviet Union and the downing of the Berlin Wall in 1990. However, it would take a lot of training accidents. Vietnam was as hot an issue as the Civil Rights movement. What about this equal treatment thing? But hey, I’m in the third grade, transferred to a new school, and the math is scaring the heck out of me. I would also learn the constitution as written.

Plus, it was just not the time for stupid things. In the war to end all wars, it was Dwight D. Eisenhower who led Europe against Adolf Hitler. Hitler was the type of evil seen only once in a lifetime. In the name of racial superiority, he committed one of the greatest atrocities in history. You can never take for granted what horrors will happen to a whole race of people if the world ignores them. Those in the Civil Rights Movement knew that all too well. Black people knew that all too well.

He fought against evil in Europe, yet at home he had his hands full with the cold war and the space race. He was a man of daring and destiny. He had a vision of the future, and like a good chess player, he could see three moves ahead of his opponent when the opponent knew he was coming, and still he came and won, sometimes teetering on the brink of disaster. Even though civil rights were on the periphery of his life, they were fast becoming a powerful force. He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He had to federalize the National Guard to integrate Little Rock, Arkansas, high schools. It would not be the last time a president had to federalize a state’s National Guard to enforce desegregation laws. This one legally established the Civil Rights Commission, providing equal rights for all citizens, specifically the Voting Rights Act. Like Eisenhower, the Civil Rights Movement moved like a good chess player, planning three moves ahead and always moving strategically. They went into the southern strongholds that were staunchly against desegregation and buried deep in hatred. They went to Montgomery, and Selma was led by a young, unknown minister named Martin Luther King Jr. and other ministers who were pressed into service by the people who wanted action. They knew he was coming, and he did. His life and the lives of many were always on the line. They took the beatings and the dogs, went to jail, and kept going. Wherever the resistance was strongest, that is where they went.

I studied the history of the American Civil War purely from a military historical point of view. The south, which was rich, had a free labor force of slavery, and because the Europeans loved that damned cotton, with fewer men and fewer resources at the outset, damn near whipped the north because General McClellan, commander of the army of the Potomac, just would not fight. Of that once-in-a-lifetime event came two of the most important documents of American history. The Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. Neither of which, for the past hundred years, seemed to matter to white America at all.

History was dotted with men of destiny. Since the 1950’s bus boycott, when the Civil Rights movement became more than a protest, Medgar Evers, Malcom X, and Martin Luther King Jr., among others, would be three of the key figures to stand out and lead this new movement. These three men would meet their destiny. Like Churchill, Patton, and Eisenhower, these three would stand against injustice. What had started out as a boycott in the 1950’s in the South soon turned into marches and sit-ins, met with a viral hatred that would grow in size, scope, and momentum unseen before in American history leading to further Civil Rights Acts in 1960, signed by Eisenhower, and again in 1964, proposed by John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated before he could sign, and signed by his successor Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1968, President Johnson would sign yet another, all guaranteeing protections for voting and registering to vote, fair housing, employment, protection from threats and violence, and all matters involving people and states who wanted to ignore the constitution and keep segregation as a whole. The 1964 Act had taken a push from the civil rights movement to get through Congress, and little did I know at the time that there would be more in the future.

By 1967, two of the three black leaders had already paid the ultimate sacrifice for their efforts for the Negro in America and the progress gained with their lives. Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963, and Malcolm X in 1965. Even though Malcolm X had not been killed by white people, his influence in Black America was so powerful during his time in the depth of Black pride, respect, and love for each other. His teachings of what a man should be, and if white people didn’t want to give it to you, then you had to demand it. By any means necessary. His influence was powerful and deeply meaningful indeed. It was extremely troubling to white America because violence was part of his teaching in the beginning. These were the new men of destiny, who, at the right time, would move the world against tyranny. That would leave Martin Luther King, Jr. The highest-profile man to champion the cause. The difference was that they were black, and the tyranny was in America itself. An America that had not made much progress with race since 1865.

With ‘The Gettysburg Address’ and the Emancipation Proclamation Abraham Lincoln had set in motion an inevitable chain of events, the greatest of which freed all black people and put an end to slavery. The worst of which was that it left the largely uneducated, untrained negroes with nothing. They were mostly unskilled. They had been brutalized beyond human imagination. Their families had been ripped apart, and their homes were broken. Their wives had been raped or used as breeding stock. Their husbands and children had been sold. They had been categorized as three-fourths of the population in the Constitution, slaves in the South, and, like Malcom X said, house Niggas and field Niggas everywhere else.

After the assassination of Lincoln, a systematic destruction of his progressive agenda began. In spite of it all, Negros have served this nation faithfully in every war since 1619, with hope in the nation that freedom would be theirs, as promised. It never happened. It had to be fought for. Negros found that they were treated better by the Europeans than in America during World War I and World War II. Black men and women fought with the French resistance. Some famous black jazz singers and band leaders were spies and fighters in the French resistance. Hitler once said that America was weak because it was a nation filled with Niggers and Jews. Still, black people served this country. Mostly for the right to be men, mostly because they felt a sense of duty. After all, it is also our country. When it was our turn to serve, my brother and I would also serve. My younger brother would come along later. The men in my family, direct and extended, including my father, were all veterans. They had a strong sense of service and believed that, You are not a man unless you have done at least twelve months in the service. Talking badly about serving your country would get you cursed out at least. Maybe an ass whipping, depending on whose uniform you talked bad about. Service in the military was a family honor, and you were not going to break it. If you wanted to go to college, that was okay. When you finish going into the military, be an officer. Then there was ROTC. Go to college and come out as an officer. Go in and serve, and then go to college on the G.I. Bill. One way or another, you were going to serve. Oh yes, you were going!

Like I said, we knew we would have to go. This became increasingly real as the Vietnam War was the first televised war, and I saw it every night on television. It looked like you had a fighting chance. On the other hand, being seen as a coward was sure and real in my family. Hell, I’ll take my chances in combat, with a rifle and some friends, and anything but dishonor to my family. Eisenhower, the man who bore the burden of World War II, had led the war in Europe to an end, but at what cost? Millions of people were killed, a brutality that both black and white soldiers had never seen before in the Holocaust. Now fix the problems right outside the door, as all black people were asking. Negros faced racism in the military, but at least they got to shoot back. He did his part with civil rights, but it took more than one president to clean up the hate this country had hidden in its heart. Two of them died for it as well. The all-black Tuskegee Airmen never lost a bomber to enemy fighters—not one! The Red-Tailed Devils, the Germans called them. They were the first unit to shoot down a German jet fighter in history, as they wreaked havoc on the Luftwaffe and compiled one of the best records of an air