A jigsaw puzzle - racism, environmentalism, and the social conscience of an architect

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1989 by Malcolm Wells

HADDONFIELD, New Jersey, in the 1930s was a bedroom suburb of Camden and Philadelphia. All the daddies came back on the evening d b d b. trains. All the white daddies, that is. All the mommies stayed at home. And all the colored people - they were never called Negroes or blacks - stayed down at the end of Ellis Street. I never wondered why. They lived down by the south branch of Cooper River, the river that was always a murky green, and I never wondered about that, either.

The colored people did the menial work of the town. But I never wondered why. There was a little movie theatre in Haddonfield. It was called The Little. It had a tiny balcony, up by the projection booth, in which all the colored people sat. I always thought they sat there because they wanted to. They reached the balcony by a winding stairway that would have been a deathtrap in a fire. There was no other way out, and no one, apparently, ever gave it a thought.

Our high school was at least nominally integrated. The white-to-colored ratio must have been 50 to 1. The colored kids were generally regarded as inferior, dumb in school and suited only for the lives their parents led, down on Ellis Street. Why they didn't speak as well as we, or talk about careers, never occurred to me. I'm just glad I wasn't one of the ones who tried to be a tough guy by calling the colored kids - out of earshot - shines or smokes. Maybe they had names for us, too, but I never wondered about it.

WE ALL KNEW about slavery in America. We had learned that Lincoln was a great man for ending the practice. But that's as far as we went as civil libertarians. I never gave the subject another thought. None of us ever talked to the colored kids other than to trade a few wisecracks with them as we walked together for a block or two before they split off toward Ellis Street. The word integration was unknown to us but if it had been explained we would probably have said that it applied to our town. After all, we weren't like the people we'd heard about, down south, who forced "niggers" off sidewalks. We weren't prejudiced (another still-unheard-of word); we weren't anything. Life simply seemed normal to us. Things were pretty much the way they'd always been, as far as we could see. I never wondered about it.

During World War II, when I was sent south for military training, the first seeds of my social awakening must have taken root in me at the sight of the "white only" and "colored only" signs over the drinking fountains and the toilet room doors at Union Station, practically in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. They made the land of the free sound a bit hollow. And, as I traveled deeper into the south, all I'd heard about it came true. Colored people were ordered around like animals or, worse, treated as if they were invisible. Beyond that, however, they seemed to be no worse off than their northern cousins. Their roles were the same: laundresses and bootblacks, gardeners and scrubwomen. There were no colored men in any of the military units I ever saw. I never wondered why. The overt racism of the south did, however, move some of us damnyankees" to show off, to horrify our new "rebel" friends with lies about the way it was up north. They probably believed us, picturing an intermarried, integrated society as foreign to them as it was, in truth, to us. But we liked to rub it in. On a weekend pass we'd go into Atlanta and show off by visiting the colored parts of the city, stopping for Cokes at tumble-down grocery stores, laying it on thick, carried away by our phony northern egalitarianism, addressing the silent people as sir and ma'am. What they thought of such antics I cannot imagine, and I was too full of myself even to wonder about it. But our slumming came to an abrupt end one day when two white cops patrolling the area in a police cruiser spotted us on the street and reduced us instantly from tough marines to frightened boys. They lectured us without the slightest concern about being overheard by the silent dark-skinned people within earshot. "What you boys doin' down here? Tryin' to get yourselves killed7 These niggers'll slit your throat as soon as look at you. Get in the car." And that was the last we saw, or perhaps even thought about, colored people until long after the war, when things like Jackie Robinson's admission to major-league baseball reminded us again of the people who had been largely invisible to us as well.

BUT THAT WAS years later. In the meantime, I'd been discharged from the marines without firing a shot. And, having stumbled by accident into a job as office boy for a Philadelphia ad agency, I decided to go to art school and make my fortune as an illustrator. That career proved to be short-lived, and I can hardly believe, now, that I spent a whole year in that art school. All I remember are the weekly trips to the Philadelphia Zoological Gardens, America's oldest zoo. All my life I'd loved going there, and here I was, required to go there every week. It was wonderful. I never drew pictures of the animals but I clearly remember feeding them and - forgive me - teasing them mercilessly. I remember in particular the polar bear I visited each week. I found that if I rocked from side to side for a few minutes he would leap in my direction, belly-flopping into his dirty little pool, hoping to get me soaked. I did it mainly to impress the girls in the class, I suppose, but I managed only to impress that poor white bear. I have no way of knowing if my taunts really annoyed him or if they relieved his boredom but I never wondered about it then, just as I never wondered about the morality of caging the beast in a sooty city so far from the pole. It would be 15 years or more before the cruelty of such captivity would enter my consciousness, 15 years before Id hear the term "prison for animals." But by then, of course, I was ready to hear it.