As a teenager in an English new town, Gary Younge felt an affinity with the Deep South of America and a fascination for the civil rights pioneers of the 1960s. As a grown-up, he set off on a journey to explore the myth that had helped form him
I was born and raised in the South – well, Stevenage in Hertfordshire, anyway. There is nothing wrong with Stevenage. It’s not the sort of place that you would visit and on your return tell everybody it was horrible – it’s not the sort of place you would go to at all, unless for a specific reason. Stevenage is all right. The main problem with it when I was growing up there was that it still bore the indelible stain of the planner’s magic marker.
In human terms, it was still so very new – it was younger than my mum. And while lots of my friends, like me, were born in or around the town, almost everybody’s parents came from somewhere else. That somewhere else was usually London or Essex, Wales or Scotland. With a handful of exceptions, there was no such thing as indigenous. As the Irish would say, we were all blow-ins.
Stevenage, I can safely say, had no long- standing tradition of racial prejudice. Stevenage had no long-standing traditions at all. It was not so much redneck as redbrick, a working-class town in the purest sense, since – for all the time that I grew up there – most people could actually find work. I didn’t know anyone whose dad was unemployed. It was a safe haven for your basic Steady Eddy. You could get a job that paid okay, a nice enough house with a garden, a holiday abroad every couple of years and a decent school for your children.
Quite how my mother, Reba, who was born in the parish of St Phillip in Barbados, ended up in Stevenage is largely down to chance. Getting across the Atlantic was the easy bit. The government was so desperate for workers from the colonies to help it out with its labour shortage that it literally paid my mother’s fare to get her there (and then asked her to pay it back later). There were orientation classes, where they told people to wear flannelette pyjamas and bring woolly hats because it would be so cold. They never mentioned anything about racism.
Not an awful lot of black people came to Stevenage. In fact, the black community was small enough that almost everybody almost knew almost everybody else. We could not have numbered more than about 300, so you were never more than maybe two acquaintances removed from another black person in the town. There were three other black kids in my year, and no more than about 10 of us in a school of 800.
There were three types of reactions a black family could expect in a place like Stevenage. There were those who welcomed us. There were those who tolerated us. And there were those who positively despised us.
You knew when you were in the company of the first group because when you met them it just felt right. They were not fazed by your race, but they didn’t try to ignore it, either. They were comfortable with you, which meant you could be comfortable with them. Occasionally, they would say something dopey like, ”It’ll be a while before I get a tan like yours,” but they never meant anything by it. They were good people wanting to be friendly.
Then there were the tolerators. They made out they were friendly. But really it was McFriendliness – a combo that came with a large order of patronising behaviour and an unhealthy portion of stupidity. Their favourite lines would always come at bus stops in winter: ”Bloody hell, it’s cold, isn’t it? Bet it’s not like this where you come from.” ”I come from just down the road,” you would reply, but they weren’t listening. They never listened.
Then there were the despisers, like the Norrises, a scrawny white family at number 10 down the street, who used to stand at the top of the road and shout ”Woggy, woggy” at us as we walked back from school. Sometimes, when they got too much, Pat or Wayne, my older brothers, would beat them up. But Mum didn’t like us getting into fights, because she knew that we would get the blame regardless.
Once, when the Norrises had gone too far, she called the police. I was about five, but I remember it well because it was the first time I heard the words ”ethnic minority”. The policeman said he wouldn’t ask them to stop, and explained his decision to my mother. ”I’m afraid that you are an ethnic minority in this area and you are going to have to put up with that kind of thing from time to time,” he said.
In general, Stevenage was a town of tolerators. And, while the despisers outnumbered the welcomers, it was never so bad that you couldn’t bear it. The despisers were despicable and the tolerators were tolerable. It was rarely dangerous, but always irritating. It meant that you could never forget, and were always on your guard.
When you are forced into a vacuum, you will take your oxygen from wherever you can. Without really knowing I needed it, I found mine several thousand kilometres away, across the Atlantic and on what was the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line. Barbados may have been where my mother came from and where many of my family remain. I may even have called it ”home”, but Barbados never surrounded me in the way America did.
Bajan culture does not exist on that scale. Apart from music (and most of that was from Jamaica), Barbados just physically couldn’t reach me in Stevenage, unless my mother went out of her way to put it there. The United States did not have that problem. From Spiderman to Pulp Fiction, via Elvis and Dallas, America’s icons have a way of becoming Britain’s, a truism for all races.
America’s dominance was especially strong among black Britons, because our numbers were so few and our own reference points so well hidden. From the turntable to the fashion store, black America became our influence almost by default. When I was about eight, we got a rabbit that we called not Thumper or Flopsy but Mohammad, after Muhammad Ali. At the age of four, I had a T-shirt that stretched over my toddler’s pot belly proclaiming that I could ”float like a butterfly and sting like a bee”.
Quite where my fascination with the South started I don’t know. It could have been with the televising of Alex Haley’s Roots, which I was forced to stay up and watch. My brothers and I could recite the lineage all the way from Kunta Kinte down to Haley himself. It could have begun when I was studying To Kill a Mockingbird for English O-level, or watching Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, or humming Shug Avery’s Sister. Or maybe it was BB King’s blues and Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit. Had I been born slightly later, or been slightly hipper, I could have gone for the East or West Coast, fired by hip-hop and rap. But it was the South that spoke to me urgently about the things I instinctively felt I was lacking – a sense of place and history.
I longed for the heartfelt affinity that both blacks and whites in the South seemed to have with their environment. They were Southerners and, whatever that meant to them, they were proud of it. Even those who were forced to leave would refer to it with a tender, bitter-sweet longing. I ached for that all-immersion sensuality that came with a rich diet, hot sun and a passionate faith, delivered in deep tremulous tones, either from the pulpit or the soapbox – or both.
As a student, I monopolised the television in my flat and watched every edition of Eyes on the Prize, seeing the civil rights era unroll in black and white, yearning for a time when political morality appeared that simple, and political activity was executed with such style and dignity. Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery, Little Rock and Jackson – each town was located in a very specific place in my imagination thanks to 1960s newsreels showing water cannons, vicious dogs and brutal cops turning on black men and women of around my own age. And there was one still photograph, of a group of civil rights activists called the Freedom Riders, that reached a place in my subconscious that I had not visited for many years.
When I was young, my mother was keen on sending me on trips with black youth groups. On one, when I was about 12, we went to the seaside in Brighton. I was sitting on my own by a window, reading a book, when the coach stopped at the traffic lights on the front not far from the pier. It was hot, the sort of unlikely heat that descends on English shores only two or three times a year. The beach, like the roads, was gridlocked with underdressed sunseekers, their skin red raw from overexposure.
On the other side of the road, about six skinheads – shaved scalps, bleached jeans at half mast, and 18-hole brown Doctor Marten boots – were walking in the other direction carrying cans of beer, laughing and shouting at each other, when one of them spotted us, a bus full of black kids, aged roughly between eight and 14, dressed up for a day out and stuck on a red light. Nobody else noticed them at first. The first one to see us had difficulty containing his excitement and even greater difficulty in making his friends pay attention. I saw him grab their arms, first playfully and then with urgency, and point. It took a while. I shifted over to the aisle seat to look down the centre of the coach and see if the light was anywhere near turning, and if the grown-ups had noticed them. They hadn’t. When I sat back by the window the skinheads were already on their way. By the time they reached the middle of the road they had started chanting. ”Nigger … nigger … nigger, nigger, nigger.”
Now the whole bus knew what was going on. Everybody had moved over to my side to see what was happening. The grown-ups at the front of the bus were striding to the back, telling everyone to return to their original seats. But rushing up the aisle, bringing their panicky voices with them, just made everything worse. Within seconds, the busload of boisterous kids about to get dropped off at the seaside had become a bustling, yelling house of panic on four wheels. The smaller children were starting to scream.
The light turned green, but we couldn’t move because there were still cars in front of us. The skinheads were upon us, bashing on the window, shouting, ”Nigger!” and trying to rock the coach. The look on their faces was not one of hate but sport. We were terrified, and they were enjoying themselves.
The first sight of clear road emerged, and the driver pulled off. For a moment, the skinheads stopped thumping but kept up their chant. But the lights were against us. Red returned just as we made it to the crossing. As they ran forward to continue their torment, the driver jumped the light. A car beeped, but he kept going …
The picture of the Freedom Riders did not force the dormant memories of that day in Brighton upon me like a thunderbolt, or drown me in a tidal wave of harrowing, emotional flashback. It drew them back slowly, as though through a filter that shut out my 45 seconds of isolated helplessness and allowed a sense of dignity and perspective to seep through. Before, I had been watching history unravelling in a faraway place. Now, it felt closer and more immediate.
The Freedom Riders were a group of black and white civil rights workers who set off from Washington DC on May 4 1961, to challenge the practice of racial segregation on interstate travel through the Southern states, which had only recently been outlawed.
In December 1960, the Supreme Court had ruled it illegal to enforce segregation on facilities such as washrooms and lunch counters for passengers travelling from one state to another. Before the judgment, each state could decide for itself. So a black and white couple travelling together from New York State to Virginia would have been able to get off the bus and eat together in New York (where segregation was not enforced) but not in Virginia.
The strategy of the Freedom Riders, according to James Farmer, who organised the rides, was to force the government either to uphold the law or to bow to the Southern racists. In his autobiography, he writes: ”What we had to do was to make it more dangerous politically for the federal government not to enforce federal law than it would be for them to enforce federal law. We decided the way to do it was to have an interracial group ride through the South. We felt we could count on the racists of the South to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law.”
On May 1 1961 six whites and seven blacks assembled at Friendship House in Washington DC to take part in the freedom rides, from Washington to New Orleans. This was the journey I decided to retrace on a Greyhound bus; a personal journey on a historic route heading for familiar places to which I had never been. I ”knew” it as a land of lynchings, blues and burning crosses. I had seen its battles unfold in black and white, and heard its speeches and screams from over the Atlantic. Now I needed to see it in colour and hear it up close. I had to feel the fear, taste the food and ride at the front of the bus. I wanted to breathe life into the legend of my formative years.
Orangeburg was the closest I came to the image of the South I had before I left. This majority-black town of around 13 500 has a main square watched over by a statue of a Confederate soldier and looks a little bit like a South African dorp. Just down from the square is the main street, where the bright colours of the old shop fronts have long since faded, and the pharmacists, cobblers and barbers are peppered among stores selling household clutter.
The sun was shining, people were walking slower than normal and everything looked a shabby, aging shade of poor. In the back of one of the largest shops, Freese’s, there was a lunch counter, where the waitresses seemed to know everyone who came in and the food was served hot enough to burn a hole in the polystyrene plates. The lady serving me in Freese’s thought my accent just about the funniest thing she had ever heard come out of a black man’s mouth. So funny, in fact, that she very nearly spilt my lemonade all over my burger and fries.
Later, I went to the All Star Triangle Bowl across town. In 1968, the owner, Harry Floyd, swapped his ”whites only” sign on the door for a sign saying ”privately owned” to keep the alley segregated but legal. When blacks asked him if they could use the bowling alley just one night a week, Floyd refused. Even though other parts of Orangeburg were already integrated, he thought he would lose white customers if he let blacks bowl there.
The bowling alley, which sits five blocks from the historically black South Carolina State College, became a focal point of discontent among students. The row on the night of February 5 1968 started after a group of black students tried to enter the alley and Floyd refused to admit them. Demonstrations outside the bowling alley led to confrontations with the police that in turn led to a stand-off outside the campus. Fires were lit and objects thrown. A banister hit a patrolman and knocked him out, feeding a rumour among other patrolmen that he had been shot. A squad of highway patrolmen then opened fire, and three young men – Delano Middleton, Henry Smith and Samuel Hammond Jnr – were killed. Another 27 were wounded.
The bowling alley still stands there, tucked into the corner of an L-shaped row of tumbledown shops. Inside, past the trophy cabinets, lies a huge vista of bowling lanes. The entire room was empty, bathed in a painfully bright artificial light. And I was handed my bowling shoes by Harry Floyd himself, a small, poorly shaven man with a cigarette and a brown jumper. As I took the shoes to my lane, I was at a loss as to what to do. I had not counted on his being there 30 years later. I would no more have expected him to be working at the scene of his own crime than I would have expected to be walking through the Alabama Capitol building and see George Wallace at his desk.
Professionally, I know the right thing to do would have been to go up and ask him for an interview. Politically, it would have been the right thing to do, too. But, personally, I could not stomach it. The fact that he was still there denoted a lack of progress for me. To my knowledge he has never apologised for what he did. The ”punishment” for his obstinacy was to allow black people to boost the profits of his bowling alley. I wanted to yell at him, spit in his face and trash all of his vending machines. And since I couldn’t do that, either, I turned around, put the shoes on the counter and walked out of the door.
The most segregated hour in the Southern week is 11 o’clock on a Sunday morning. That is when blacks and whites put on their best togs and go to separate buildings to worship the same God. Religion, throughout the US, is more segregated than housing, work or socialising, and nowhere more so than in the South. Paradoxically, religious belief is also one of the main things that unites blacks and whites. Almost two-thirds of Southerners are Protestant, compared with less than 40% of the rest of the country, and the bulk of those are Baptists. Almost half identify themselves as Evangelical or born-again Christians. More than 80% believe that both the devil and angels are real.
For someone who has had as little contact as I have with the church, this very public and pervasive affirmation of faith came as quite a shock. Still, every Sunday I shook the creases out of my smartest, rucksack- packed clothes, put on the one tie I had brought with me and stood among the faithful. The black churches varied in size and wealth. Some were tiny, with a congregation of maybe 50, which would come together in the kind of small, wooden building that looks precarious in a strong wind. Others were huge. One in Atlanta had policemen outside directing the traffic.
Most churches, no matter how small, had a decent-sized, well-rehearsed choir. Once or twice, someone would ”get the spirit”. In South Caro-lina, an old lady in a grey suit started doing something that looked like a cross between a moonwalk and the South African toyi-toyi. Then, when the notices had all been read out advising people of National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People fundraisers and church socials, came the bit I always dreaded, the time when the minister would ask the visitors to stand and introduce themselves. ”My name is Gary Younge and I am visiting here from London, England,” I would say. In the quiet of the church, my Stevenage accent sounded flat and grey, but to the worshippers it was as though I had just filled the font with champagne. They would all turn around and nod.
All of those Sundays I went to churches that were either exclusively black or had just one or two white people in them. They were not difficult to find. Ask any black person on the street and he or she will tell you. On the Sunday morning I woke up in Orangeburg, I had overslept and risen at 10.30, just enough time to find a clean shirt and wash and go. I asked the receptionist, a white woman, if she could direct me to the nearest Baptist church. She pointed to a place just around the corner.
As I raced down the road and panted up the steps, I realised that she had answered my question as though the issue of race had never existed in the South. She had sent me to a white church. This wasn’t all bad. I had planned to go to a white church at some time, not to grandstand but just to see what they were like.
I had been hoping to choose the day myself, but now the day had chosen me. I nodded a hello to the man at the door as though I go to white churches in the rural South all the time. He nodded hello back as though he knew that I didn’t. As I walked in, heads turned and stayed turned. The choir was singing the adagio from Organ Sonata No 5 by Rheinberger.
I wanted to leave, or at least plonk myself on the back pew, but the usher was having none of it. He walked me down about three aisles and made me sit in the middle. Those few paces seemed to take for ever, and when I sat down I checked to see that nobody had slipped a bone through my nose and a leather thong around my hips since I entered. That is what it felt like. From every angle, I could feel eyes on me – from the balcony, from left and right, even from behind, eyes that bored into my melanin and stripped me of everything that did not pertain to my race. I have never felt so black.
Orangeburg is 60% black, so the fact that black people exist was hardly a surprise to them. Whatever else I felt, I did not feel threatened or in danger. It was Sunday afternoon in a church. How hostile could they be? These were the pathetic and angry eyes of frustration and confusion. These were eyes that said: ”What are you doing here? You know the rules. Everybody knows the rules. We don’t go to your churches, and you don’t come to ours. Why are you doing this to us?”
Aptly enough, the theme for the sermon, by Reverend Bill Coates, was ”Surrounded”. He talked about his walk through a graveyard where his father and mother were buried, as well as his Sunday-school teacher and the man from the local store – a graveyard that I presumed had once been segregated and possibly still was. He was explaining how all of our values, and all that we know, stem from all of those
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that have gone before us, and the values
that come after we have died will be the sum of what we have inherited plus whatever we have added.
I thought about how that related to the South and its past, the whiteness of this church and my discomfort. I realised that many of these people grew up in this church, and their families had been in it for generations. They were no more likely to change their place of worship than I was to vote Conservative or join the police. Segregation, in this sense, was not so much about the systemic exclusion of one race or another, but a habit. A bad habit, but a habit nonetheless.
My thoughts were interrupted by a near disaster. I started to sneeze. In my rush to find a suitable pair of trousers, I had left all things that could have served as a handkerchief behind. Now I was sitting in fear that I might pebbledash the neck of the woman in front and, in so doing, set the cause for the integration of churches in Orangeburg back by decades. I imagined two white churchgoers discussing my visit a few years hence. ”We had a nigra in here a way back. A bald fella. Damn near sneezed the place down, he did. Ruined the collar on Mrs Wallace’s dress.”
In the name of racial dignity, I managed to keep down the next couple of potential eruptions that made their way to my nostrils. At the pulpit, the reverend continued. But this sermon was not interrupted by any ”That’s rights” or ”Say it, preacher”. There was no opportunity to stand up and introduce myself to the congregation. The organ music was beautiful but not moving. There were no drums or swaying. It was sedate and as classical as the organ’s silver pipes.
When the sermon was over, I rose with the intention of leaving as quickly as I could when a hand caught my shoulder. ”Welcome. I’m so glad you came,” said the woman behind me in an eager tone, as a hundred other eyes waited for my reaction. ”Thank you, I’m glad to be here,” I said, and her face relaxed a little. ”You’re not from here are you?” she said.
”No, I’m from England,” I said and heard my words repeated all around me. ”He’s from England.” ”He’s English,” I could hear people muttering as though my presence there had finally been explained. I was English. I didn’t know any better. Within seconds there was a mini-stampede of people coming to shake my hand vigorously and thank me for coming. As I climbed the steps to my motel room, the receptionist ran from behind her desk and called after me. ”Did I send you to the right church?” she asked. ”It’s just that right after I told you where to go I was concerned that maybe that wasn’t the kind of church you wanted,” she said rather awkwardly.
”Well, I wouldn’t know,” I said. ”I’m not from around here.”
In my daydreamy moments, throughout my trip, I had wondered what my life would have been like if my mother had come to America. I imagined myself in a parallel universe, with a Brooklyn accent, a New York attitude and hip-hop style. The possibilities in that life seem endless. I would have grown up with a choice of anyone from Michael Jordan to Henry Louis Gates Jr as role models, whereas in Britain we had to pick between Frank Bruno, Lenny Henry and Trevor McDonald.
Despite that, I was glad that she had moved to England instead. America is hot on success but tough on failure. If I had grown up as a young black male in America, I would have been more likely to go to college and get a decent job than I ever was in Britain. But if Ajani, my young cousin who lives in Savannah, Georgia, had grown up in Britain, he would have a longer life expectancy and be less likely to end up in jail.
Growing up as the child of an immigrant, I inherited a distinct sense of precariousness and vulnerability in Britain. I felt, in the words of black British author Andrea Levy, ”Never far from Nowhere”. But Nowhere, in America, without a welfare state and with an endemic gun culture, looks like a much more scary, chilling place than it does in Britain.
Driving north up the Mississippi Delta, I stopped for the night in the small town of Senatobia and pulled up at the Comfort Inn at around 9pm. There were only three or four cars in the car park, but the young white woman at the desk said there were no rooms. This was the first time that I had been turned away from a motel – even in Greensboro during homecoming weekend and the barbecue festival I had found a room. ”None at all?” I asked.
”No. We’re all booked up and not taking any more reservations for tonight,” she said. I was stunned; I didn’t want desperately to stay in Senatobia, but I was sure this woman was lying and I couldn’t work out what to do. I walked back to my car and put my Sidney Poitier hat on.
I knew quite definitely that people could do things like this, but I hadn’t expected that I could encounter such bigotry without having the foresight to avoid it, or without outsmarting it. As I’ve grown older and started earning more money, I’ve become bolder. I decided that it was the responsibility of people with either cash or clout to complain, so that the perpetrators did not simply assume that since black people are generally poor and powerless they would never fight back.
Back in my car, Poitier fedora firmly on my head, I decided the only thing to do with a situation that belonged in the 1960s was to try to expose it with a 1960s technique. I went to the petrol station over the road and called the Comfort Inn to ask if they had any rooms.
>From here, I imagined, the tale would go one of two ways. If the receptionist said no, then I would know she had been telling the truth, and that Mississippi’s problem was not that it had not changed but that the rest of the world did not trust that it had. If she said yes, then I would have a classic Southern moment, a personal illustration of how little things had really progressed, which I might cap by returning to the motel, demanding the room and watching her fluster.
As I dialled the number, I didn’t think of option three.
”I would like to make a reservation,” I said.
”Didn’t you come by here a minute ago?”
She recognised my accent. Englishmen probably do not pass through Senatobia that often. My ruse was heading towards a brick wall. ”Yes, I did,” I replied. ”But I didn’t believe you.”
I replaced the handset. It never happened like that in the movies.