Prejudice Without Pride

A Story of Evolvement Through RacismAs a child growing up, I learned about prejudice from my mother. I became prejudiced as a street cop working the inner city ghetto in NE Portland all through the 1960s. I overcame prejudice when I fell in love with and married a black woman and we had a son together. I experienced prejudice when raw eggs were thrown on my porch and a wooden cross was burned on our lawn, during our marriage in the early 1980s. This is a story about my evolvement through the fluid process of prejudice, getting lost in prejudice and then finding my true self again.

Thinking back, I can still hear my mother talking about “Jews” and referring to them as “those God-damned kykes.” I was about eleven or twelve-years-old and we lived in the Hollywood district of Portland Oregon, circa 1947. My folks were entrepreneurs; successful restaurant owners and well-respected in the business world and in our small community. I didn't understand what my mother was talking about, or why she was so upset because of the Jews. I was too young to figure it out or understand the deeper social connotations.

My mother, Clara, graduated from high school in rural Denton, Montana where she met and married my father SM, short for Shirley Mason, a name he felt self-conscious about and refused to use. Father never completed his education past the sixth grade. He was forced to quit school to help support his mother and three siblings after my grandfather abandoned the family, never to be seen again. Both my parents were highly intelligent though, able to successfully operate large businesses without a formal education, and really good all-around parents, supportive, generous, and wonderful providers.

As restaurant owners my folks employed several black people as janitors and dishwashers, but I learned early that we didn't “associate with the niggers.” After all we were white people and “we just don't do that” my mother had inexplicably declared to me one afternoon. My father never reiterated the hostile racial rhetoric that came from my mother. In fact, he just ignored Mother’s comments for the most part. It would be several years before I understood his reasons for avoiding the issue of race and never speaking of it even in casual conversation.

My father kept his opinions to himself and seemed to embrace a genuinely independent spirit of self-reliance. I remember Father saying. “I know how to run a restaurant. If I need a book keeper I can hire one. If I need a good lawyer I can hire one.”

His lack of a formal education never held him back and he always strove to do well and take on new challenges, such as building houses and renovating the numerous restaurants he purchased and operated over the years.

As I got older and became interested in girls, I was able to wrangle a date with a very pretty dark haired girl, named Julia, during the summer I turned thirteen. She lived next door to our home in the Hollywood district and we slowly became friends. The day of the date, we headed to the Saturday matinée at the nearby Hollywood Theater that always had the latest Westerns, with the likes of Roy Rogers, The Durango Kid, and The Lone Ranger. We were both happy and in good spirits as we took off walking together. She wore a full black skirt, pink sweater and bobby socks, I wore khaki slacks, a plaid shirt and penny loafers.

We began walking the few blocks from our neighborhood to the theater on NE Sandy Boulevard and as we walked, I tried to impress her. I began to parrot what my mother often said about the Jewish shop owners as we passed their shops on the street. Walking by shoe stores, tailor shops, and second hand stores, I announced, trying to sound informed, “All these stores are owned by the damned Jews!” Of course I used the proper derogatory tone I thought sounded like my mother's authoritative voice. “I'm a Jew,” Julia said quietly, stopping to turn and gaze at me with hurt eyes. Of course the bottom dropped out of my stomach. No amount of apologizing made any difference. Julia was hurt and our date was over. She turned around and began walking home, with her head down. I stood awkwardly, then followed, catching up with her and we walked the rest of the way home in silence. I'll never forget how embarrassed and remorseful I felt, wishing I could somehow make it right, take it back, go back in time and unsay what I’d just said. But I could not. In my innocence I didn't know anything about Jews except that they must be bad people if my mother Clara thought they were bad. Julia was the pretty girl who lived next door, with dark curly hair and large dark eyes, who I had I hoped to snuggle a little in the darkened theater but she never spoke to me again after that day, eventually moving away a year or so later.

Years later, a black teenager who worked as a part time dishwasher at my parent’s restaurant became my new buddy. During my teen high school years, Henry was the only one of my friends my mother did not approve of. I had to look at him really hard to see much difference between us, other than the color of our skin. Henry was fun to be around, witty, liked a good time and was interested in girls just like me. He had a car and we spent many evenings after working at the restaurant chasing around and looking for something fun to do.

We often parked on a side street in his neighborhood in the black district in north Portland near Albina Street. He would disappear up some darkened back stairs of a nearby residence, soon reappearing with two quart bottles of home brew. At one dollar each, the beverage was cloudy, the color of old urine, but tasty and strong after you got used to it. Very strong. Sometimes he would also return with a small pin-joint of marijuana rolled up in yellow wheat paper, also only a dollar. We smoked the weed and drank the brew and became good friends, always easy going and accepting of each other. We were doing something illegal, my black friend and me, but it was secret and fun, acting as co-conspirators enjoying our time together, getting wasted for an economical three bucks. We were simply two teenagers having fun and enjoying each other's company. After spending time running around with Henry, I was always able to sneak back into the house without my mother catching me or smelling the beer on my breath.

During this same time in my life my father took me to numerous concerts. He felt it was important for me to be exposed to music and was always on the lookout for tickets to concerts. Dad had played in a four-man band as a young man in Montana and was a frustrated concert pianist. Every entertainer of note that came to play in Portland found dad and I sitting in the good seats up front at the Portland Civic Auditorium. I specifically remember attending a Count Basie concert around 1953, as well as a Hazel Scott concert that year too. Scott was an extremely attractive black woman pianist and singer my father much admired. If there was a black entertainer coming to town, particularly a black female entertainer, he always purchased tickets. Significantly, there was never a bad word out of my father’s mouth about black people.

Years later, when I turned twenty, in 1956, I joined the US Navy. After extensive training in communications I was assigned to a Navy Detachment in Todendorf Germany. There were seventeen sailors in our small detachment, sixteen white men and one black man. His name was Joe, and he was from Baltimore. Joe and I became friends and drinking buddies over the two years I was stationed in Germany. I was happy to have another black friend to hang out with. There was no undercurrent of racial mutterings from any of the other white sailors, even though some were from the South and we all knew what that might mean.

The nearest place to drink and chase girls was Kiel Germany, about twenty miles from our base, and many evenings were spent with my friend Joe. My friendship with my teenage black friend Henry carried over to my Navy time with ease. Racism had still not infected my mind in any significant way and I treated Joe as I’d treated Henry, with ease and a natural affection that was uncontaminated by anything less than that.

There seemed to be no notice of race either among the German civilian population we encountered either, they were nonjudgmental, accepting and warm to Joe. The girls in town were friendly to all of us and Joe's color went unnoticed it seemed. Joe always had a girl on his arm and had no trouble getting laid. But things changed when the Cold War ended, and I came back home. My perceptions about race changed.

In 1961, when I was twenty five I joined the Portland Police Bureau. The atmosphere was different at the precinct, I was a cop now and things were not the same in my civilian life, from how they had been years before. My first day on the job, my coach, a man named Paul, pointed down Mississippi Street, “That nigger down the street's jay walking. We're gonna give that nigger a ticket” he said matter of factly, with no malice at all. I remember feeling surprised he would use the word so causally, to describe the man walking down the street. But it hit me. Boom. The tone was set. Somehow they weren’t like us. I thought of my friend Henry and my friend Joe and all the good times we’d had, how we had really seemed to like each other. I tried to reconcile this new message my coach Paul communicated to me. It was confusing, but I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be accepted by him. What I saw over the days and months ahead of me while assigned to patrol the black ghetto in North and NE Portland, reinforced the racist attitudes I came to slowly adopt from some, though not all of the officers I worked with. I was young, I was impressionable and I had complete faith in my superiors. They knew better than me, so they must be right about things like that, I presumed.

My patrol area was filled with drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes and thieves of every kind, variety and inclination. Everyone I stopped and talked to had a long rap sheet, a mug shot, or an arrest warrant. They also more often than not tended to have a knife, a straight razor or a pistol hidden on their body somewhere. Every patrol shift I observed the very worst in human behavior and the very worst in criminal behavior. This included regular stabbings, beatings, and shootings, as well as the chaos and discord that results from the grinding poverty and general despair of the district. I furthermore witnessed the regular, violent and heartbreaking abuse and neglect of small black children, which bothered me more than I cared to admit. The black folks I came across seemed to demonstrate a complete lack of interest in pursuing any formal education. Heroin addiction was rampant in my ghetto district, and that alone fueled much of the crime I investigated, such as burglary, robbery, purse snatching and violent assault. I was familiar with and routinely arrested six or seven active black heroin dealers who were well-known characters. They were active for years in the black districts and total parasites, living off of and preying on the misery of their own people. And all of the drug dealers were also pimps who kept their prostitutes addicted and as obedient to them as silent slaves with no mind of their own. 

I was a uniformed patrol officer for six long years, becoming a veteran cop working almost exclusively in the black ghetto of Portland, and it had its effect on me. I thought at times that my mother must have been right about black people because I could see they were dangerous, volatile and violent. They were the “undesirables” my mother sometimes spoke of, people to be avoided.

As I progressed in my police career, I moved my residence to the suburb of Gresham Oregon to be as far away from black people and the endless problems their crime caused in the North and NE districts. Yet I was whip-sawed, as I became undeniably attracted to the black women I saw working the clubs in those same problem districts. I was confounded by my attraction. I enjoyed watching the beautiful black female strippers that performed in the ghetto nightclubs, jiggling in their pink and red tassel pasties and G-strings, flirting with the white male customers and smiling seductively, their eyes full of promise. Looking back I can see it was their innate self-confidence that I found the most appealing. They seemed to know they looked great, they were fun loving, unapologetic and very confident in how they expressed themselves, either physically or verbally. 

I wondered what it would be like to have a black woman as a girlfriend. I wondered what it would feel like to make love to a black woman, with their smooth cocoa skin. I kept my attraction to black women a secret though, certainly from my mother and definitely from the other officers I worked the district with. I tried to rationalize my attraction away, as I reasoned that even though I was attracted to black women, they were after all black and from what I had seen over the months and years working the ghetto, potentially evil in their habits and proclivities. Naturally, the only black women I had been exposed to were the glamorous black women working the clubs as strippers, and not the more traditional young black women who worked in hotels, cafes or at the local professional laundries. Yet I knew I mustn't be the only white man attracted to black women. I noticed that nearly all of the “Johns” that solicited black prostitutes were Asian and white men. 

Perhaps all white men were secretly attracted to women of color. Was I alone or was I only one of many? The question remained unanswered and whirled around my mind in a vortex of conflict, desire and confusion for many years. During those years I watched girls like Thelma, Pam and Myra dance and jiggle in their outfits, while working at Van’s Olympic Room. It was exciting to watch their nubile bodies move to the music but I was very confused about what my feelings meant. 

Part Two, July 31, 2015

The racist environment of the law enforcement profession I was immersed in prevailed for quite a while. I was surrounded daily by men and women that shared these racist attitudes. We were white. They were black. We were the cops and they were the “niggers.”

Finally, after being savagely assaulted and nearly killed by a gang of five black men one night in the parking lot of Van's Olympic Room in the middle 1960s, after attempting to execute a legitimate arrest of an underage girl drinking illegally, I decided my mother had been right about black people all along. The ghetto was a dangerous place and it was easy to objectify black folks as belonging to only one bad group, particularly after being pounded on by five black men, an assault which put me in the hospital and kept me from working for a week. My nose was nearly broken, I had a gash in my eyebrow that required eight stitches, my ribs were black and blue, and my lower legs black and blue from being stomped by five men too cowardly to take me on, other than as a group of five men against a single man. 

Years later, after a long seventeen years in law enforcement, working for PPB, I retired for health reasons in 1978, and took a less stressful position as Security Director in a large downtown luxury hotel. At the Benson Hotel, I was thrust into a totally different racial environment. The hotel was a homogeneous collection of employees, many from different countries, with completely different cultures, social norms and customs. It was a refreshing change of pace for me and I came to see a very different set of values and behaviors exhibited by this diverse group of people. 

The head chef was from Switzerland and spoke with a heavy accent. His assistant chef was a Chinese American man married to a white woman. The assistant manager was born in Sicily and he too spoke with a strong accent. The manager of the Tiki lounge restaurant was of Chinese decent, a very nice man born in Honolulu. The two managers of the hotel's other luxury restaurant were a black woman and a Persian man. Many of the maids and housemen were Mexican or Asian. My attitudes on race softened in this fun, harmonious and respectful melting pot environment. I saw different people around me that weren't evil predators with criminal records, and didn't have a constant angle or warrants out for their arrest.

I felt like a jack-in-the-box suddenly released from the strict racial confines of my past understanding of race. I was popping up to observe a more diverse population, and live in a more realistic environment. It felt good. Perhaps my mother had been wrong, I wondered. 

Working at the Benson I was able to see numerous black celebrities, people of color who were successful and educated such as Gladys Knight and the Pips, Ella Fitzgerald, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. I came to realize my stereotype of poor black people who were out to prey on others was not what the bigger picture was actually showing me. Yes, perhaps my mother had been wrong, indeed.

As my racial attitudes softened and relaxed, my first marriage with a white woman ended in divorce after a twenty year marriage. She decided she was a lesbian, and left me for another woman. This was very upsetting at the time, but it did free me up and allowed me to take the thrilling step of entering into a relationship with a slim, beautiful black woman named Artent Thomas. 

I met Artent through a mutual black friend and was ready to fully engage my fantasy of having a beautiful black girlfriend. Artent was one of those women who are unforgettable. She was very thin, almost too thin, small waisted, with unusually large breasts and a very sexy attitude. Artent was a rich cocoa color, had short cropped hair, wore lots of Tabu perfume, bright red lipstick and favored pretty flowered rayon dresses with tasteful high heels. Her heart shaped face, with a small pointed chin was girlish, feminine and adorable. I fell in love with Artent within five minutes of meeting her.

I was not judged as Artent and I walked arm in arm across the lobby of the Benson Hotel. It was exciting. I felt heady when I was with her, the way you feel when you've had too much to drink, like breathing bubbles of fragrant champagne, moving forward and slightly delirious. Artent was gorgeous and she knew it. Heads turned whenever we walked into a room. The socially taboo, forbidden aspect of my relationship with Artent made it all the more exciting. At first it seemed almost like I was getting away with something illegal but I wasn’t. All I was guilty of was loving a beautiful, girlish and finally a very troubled woman who struggled with her own demons. 

After a few months, my relationship with Artent seemed more normal as we grew more serious. We agreed we should probably get married. Artent seemed surprised and hesitant when I mentioned it, as if she didn’t quite believe I was being serious, but after a while she warmed up to the idea. I understood her hesitancy. I was white, she was black. It made sense that she might think I was only humoring her but I was not. I was serious. I loved her and I wanted to be married to her. We talked about having a baby together, what our house would look like, where we would live. I thought a lot about the ramifications of a bi-racial marriage and what some of the difficulties would be, but I was completely in love with Artent. There was no way I could not marry her. 

All around me at the hotel there were several bi-racial relationships among my coworkers and they seemed to not only work but they seemed happy too. In time, Artent and I decided we were mature enough to handle marriage and going to the next level. To hell with what anyone else might think or say. We would be happy I promised her. Then we started talking about buying rings. 

When my mother found out though, she was definitely not happy. “Can't you find a white girl? What's the matter with you anyway?” she demanded over the phone when I called her to share the news. Well, no I remember thinking to myself, I can't find another white girl because I'm not looking for a white girl with their uptight attitudes and inability to have fun or an easy laugh. I wanted a black girl and Artent was the right one for me. After talking to my mother on the phone that night, I hung up with the confidence that everything would be alright and nothing would happen to change anything. 

Several weeks later, my relationship with my black fiancé Artent ended in a tragedy of racial intolerance and ultimately in the worst kind of racially motivated revenge.

Months before our own relationship had begun, Artent met a young black man named Maurice at a drug rehabilitation center. Artent struggled with drug addiction, like many people during the loose and wild 1970s and had attended a court ordered rehabilitation center where they met. There, Maurice became infatuated with Artent and pursued her. She was not interested in him, she told me later, because he made her nervous. I believe Artent could sense the violence in Maurice. Despite her indifference, he pursued her anyway until she finally left the program. Then only a few weeks later, after she’d completed the program, she met me and our relationship blossomed. For several months she didn’t see or hear from Maurice. Partly, this was because we had gotten an apartment together and he didn’t know where to look for her, but the grapevine in Portland is small and in time, Maurice found out where we were living. 

Before we could marry in 1980, I had to arrange a long needed surgery for a developing hernia that I had been struggling with for several months at the local Emanuel Hospital. I was forty three and Artent only twenty nine years old during our two short years together. After she dropped me off at the hospital she kissed me as I lay in the bed and told me she would be by the next day, with the car, to pick me up. She lingered in the doorway and blew me a kiss, disappearing down the hall. I never saw Artent again. 

While I was in the hospital, Maurice found Artent at our new apartment, where we had been living in the Lloyd Center district. He knocked on the door and asked to come in to our top floor Apartment at the Paramount Apartments, on North Broadway. He casually suggested they go to Seattle for the day and return later that night. He promised Artent he'd get her "some good cocaine" and show her a good time. And my Artent made the mistake of going with him, thinking she’d be back later that night to pick me up from the hospital. And then she made the mistake of telling Maurice of our upcoming marriage, once they had gotten to Seattle. A mistake which cost her, her life. Maurice was enraged at the thought of Artent marrying me, a white man, and they argued. Maurice insisted that she was "betraying her race" by marrying a white man, particularly a white man who had once been a cop. But she would not be swayed. She told him she loved me. And then she told him they needed to go back to Portland.

Instead, Maurice took Artent to Seward Park in Seattle and there he murdered her. He beat her face to the point of being unrecognizable, and then stabbed her twenty seven times with a large knife. He disposed of her body by dumping it in the bushes at Seward Park where she was found the next day. “If I couldn’t have her, then nobody was gonna have her. That white cop ain’t never gonna have Artent now, is he?” he bragged to the detectives after his arrest. 

After Artent didn't pick me up, I filed a missing person's report. The next day, I was contacted by Portland detectives, who had gotten word that a woman matching her description was found in a Seattle park. As Artent was not in regular contact with her family, it was up to me to go to Seattle and identify her body. Seeing her laid out on the table was a horrible experience. I was devastated. Not only in learning that my precious butterfly Artent had been so savagely murdered but also in having to drive to Seattle and identify her ravaged body. It was an absolutely devastating experience. Her body was covered in mud, blood and battered. She was unrecognizable. 

This black man murdered a black woman to keep her from marrying her white fiancé, a man whom she loved. 

My dream was denied and Artent paid with her life for loving a white man. More evil had occurred at the hands of a black man. This man, Maurice took her from me. A senseless and bloody murder. Had mother been right all along? My only consolation was that Maurice had thought to drive my car back from Seattle and park if in my apartment parking space. Naturally, the interior of the car was littered with his felony fingerprints. He was arrested in Seattle less than a week later and convicted of murder. 

After a week of constant weeping, I couldn't cry anymore. I felt numb, emotionally exhausted. I put together the few possessions in our apartment and moved to another place, trying to forget the cozy little apartment we had shared and all the love we had made there. For nearly a year, I coasted along, withdrawing into myself, not looking for a woman, confused at what fate had served up. My co-workers were sympathetic, they all knew the story. I had indeed been dealt a terrible blow, the victim of a love triangle murder that had burned racism into my being by the actions of a hateful man named Maurice. 

But sorrow doesn’t last forever, and my natural instincts gradually unfolded and returned to life. I wanted to find another woman to love. The friend who originally introduced me to my Artent told me she would like to introduce me to another black woman. This woman was newly arrived in Portland, transferred here by her job in Seattle; a college educated woman in her late twenties. I was hesitant at first about another black-white relationship, but agreed to meet this new woman. 

I was awestruck by her when we finally met, in my office at the Benson. Her name was Merilee and she was beautiful. I knew I looked good sitting behind my mahogany desk, with my Director of Security plaque on the door. We chatted while drinking coffee served by hotel room service at my request.  Her hair was shoulder length and hung down in a windblown wild and sexy way. Her dark eyes were luminous and sparkled when she spoke. She often broke into an easy smile showing perfect teeth. Merilee was a rich cocoa brown color, set off perfectly by the tight red dress she was wearing. I took me about fifteen minutes to fall in love with Merilee. With coffee finished and conversation languishing, we agreed to meet again for a real date.

I wondered if my mother would like this new black woman, who was clearly beautiful and educated. Merilee was everything my mother would have wanted for me in a mate except she was black and as she had never met Artent, I wanted my mother to meet my new girl Merilee. 

Within a year Merilee and I were married. We made telephone arrangements to marry at a wedding chapel in nearby downtown Vancouver Washington. Because Oregon has a three day waiting period and Washington State does not, we chose to get married in Washington to simplify matters. We made all the arrangements over the phone and on the appointed day, we set out in my car. When we arrived and the minister actually saw us, in that he saw I was white and my bride-to-be was a stunning black woman, suddenly and strangely we were told he could not marry us. The minister kept looking down at the sheaf of papers he had folded between the pages of a Holy bible. “There must be some mistake,” he said quietly, thumbing through the papers. They had somehow “overbooked,” he said awkwardly. Their schedule he insisted was too full and they could not help us. “Perhaps another day, sometime next month. Perhaps” he said looking down, embarrassed. 

But my pretty bride-to-be clouded up, screwing her face into a formidable threat. “Hell no!” she insisted assertively. “We paid in advance, we’re here now and you need to honor this agreement!” I focused a stern and uncompromising look at the minister too. “We don’t have time to wait,” I said as forcefully as I thought was appropriate. “We have a reception in Portland to attend! People are waiting.” Merilee and I pushed our way past the hesitant minister and walked boldly into the chapel. Finally, the minister sighed in defeat and decided to get it over with, following us.  As soon as the minister said, “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride,” I planted a good long kiss on my wife’s mouth, taking extra time, just to know the minister would squirm. Then as a married couple we were hurriedly rushed out the door. We received what amounted to a racial “bums rush” of a wedding, but it was over. We were legally married by the grace of God and the laws of Washington. My mother chose not to attend.

Part Three, August 5, 2015