I was born in Chicago and grew up on the South Side in a middle-class area. When I was in 6th grade, the first African-American student enrolled in my elementary school. When the first couple of African-American families moved into my neighborhood, a couple of people threw Molotov cocktails into a couple of houses and caused some destruction. Regardless, some African-American families remained.
By the time I was starting High School, 9th grade, 1959, “white flight” had progressed and the high school was by then about 90% African-American. I was very prejudiced of “N” people, because they were taking away my social life. I vehemently complained to my parents to move away, but they owned an apartment building and it would be difficult to sell it, so they remained. They did not embrace African-Americans. They just accepted the situation and behaved cordially to them. Having emigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1920s, they just mostly stayed to themselves and associated with relatives and their white friends. For me, at that time, racial prejudice was endemic within me. I hated those “N” people. It had penetrated within me.
I remember in my 1st year in high school, in a class when some of the African-American students were getting quite rowdy. The teacher stopped and asked them why they were so rowdy. One replied, “What is the use of education? I won’t ever get a decent job because I am black.” I was silent, but that memory remained.
My racial prejudice persisted until about my 3rd year in high school. The change may have started to occur, because many times in classes, we as students would start talking in class together about race and prejudice. We had some very interesting discussions and the teachers usually allowed us to talk freely. I can remember in one class when we asked if in the next 30 or 50 years if all this would change and would there not be the racial divisions that existed at this time. We wondered but could not come up with an answer to this conundrum.
So, around that time, my 3rd year, I started to say to myself that every person is an individual and I should ignore the color of one’s skin and accept a person for what he or she is. Eventually, I developed some good relationships with most students in my class and by my senior year, I was elected class treasurer, when the school by then was 95% African-American. I have attended some class reunions in Chicago and look forward to socializing with my classmates at the reunion.
Now that I look back, how much did things change since I was in high school?
There is more equal opportunity in getting employment, but most people at the top of corporate ladder are still white. African-Americans can move into white neighborhoods, but some white people I know still say that they do not want to live next door to an African-American family. Also, although redlining is illegal, it still occurs to some extent under cover. Schools in African-American neighborhoods still do not provide as high quality education as in white neighborhoods. Whites pretty much live with whites. African-Americans pretty much live with African-Americans. Lack of corporate investment and sub-standard schools in African-American neighborhoods are a couple of the major root causes of crime in those neighborhoods.
Black Lives Matter, because it is obvious to me that racial prejudice is still, to this day, endemic throughout our society. And I, by now living in a predominantly white neighborhood, am exasperating to some extent this situation.
Art Oster
Rossmoor
