City Of Pittsburgh Employee Id: Fill & Download for Free

A client where employees will not undercut, marginalize, or compete with contractors, to the point of getting them fired. Out of my 16 contracting positions in 12 years, 6 were bad that way. I studied them to determine how the bad ones could have been predicted and avoided. I found the answer is economic growth rate of the city, not the company. Worst were small towns and declining cities such as St Louis and Pittsburgh. Best were cities with high income growth. The reason is employees in slow growth cities are insecure. I developed a formula and applied it to all US cities. The highest rated are:Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CTCasper, WYNaples-Marco Island, FLSan Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CAJacksonville, NCSebastian-Vero Beach, FLWashington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WVSan Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CANew York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PABoston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NHBarnstable Town, MAHartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CTSeattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WAThe lowest rated major towns are:Greensboro, NC......Daytona Beach, FLOrlando, FLDetroit, MColumbia, SCTallahassee, FLKnoxville, TN .Salem, ORSt. Cloud, MNFayetteville-Springdale-Bentonville AR-MOAlbuquerque, NMChattanooga, TN-GALas Cruces, NMDayton, OHOcala, FLModesto, CAHagerstown-Martinsburg, MD-WVOgden, UTSouth Bend, INToledo, OHEl Paso, TXYoungstown,OHLansing, MILas Vegas, NVBoise, IDAnn Arbor, MIStockton, CAFresno, CAData source: Bea.govFormula: =((((E5-J5)/J5/7)+1)^6)*E5/54000 J is 2003, E is 2010The formula is computing per capita income six years hence, normalized around 54000It is interesting to note the places above NYC are projected to have higher income by 2016.The rule is do not take a position in a low-growth city.My 10 good contracting gigs were all in cities above 1.0; 5 out of 6 bad ones were in places below 1.0. The outlier was a bad one in Pittsburgh, which is barely above 1.0. A cursory visit would reveal it is a low-growth city. I don't know why its stats say otherwise.

1950s / 60s & Civil RightsNorfolk & the NavyI graduated high school in 1955 Milwaukee and joined the Navy. After Boot Camp and Class A Fire Control (Weapons) school in Bainbridge MD, I was stationed in Norfolk assigned to a Navy Destroyer. I soon discovered that the Bible Belt South did not live according to the Golden Rule, they had legalized racial segregation, supported enthusiastically by the Southern churches, enforced legally by the police, with violent hanging tree enforcement by the Ku Klux Klan, and they treated blacks or any non-whites ethnics terribly.Aboard ship, I had made friends with many sailors, including Blacks, and when we went to Norfolk, we would experience a totally segregated society. On the ship regardless of race we all got along fine but we could not hang together on shore. There were many Blacks living in Norfolk, and they were cordoned off into very poor areas of town. Norfolk's main downtown, 'Granby Street' and the entire city, with all of its parks and beaches, were available only for Whites. Blacks were allowed only in designated 'Colored' - run down - sections and a downtown area called 'Church Street' which actually had the character of a New York City street, colorful and full of its crazy itself. Even the rowdy East Main Street sailor Bars, known infamously throughout the world, were for Whites only. Bus stations, water fountains, hotels, taxi cabs, movie theaters, restaurants, city parks, swimming beaches, everything and everything were separated by race. The whites had all the best, the blacks - by law - all the worst. What fool invented this madness? What a sick bunch of idiots thought this one up. This can't be the USA! But it was and I would have to learn to deal with it!I didn't like the south. It was a dreary and dreadful place, segregated, filled with crazy Bible thumping haters, all Dixicrat conservative with bloody Civil Rights Battles going on. I spent my weekend liberties in Manhattan and loved the ambiance and personal freedoms. Liberty in Norfolk involved three streets - the Whites went to Granby and the World's most infamous East Main, and the Blacks went to Church Street. Norfolk has that dark dismal look of poverty and of a dismal stagnating prison about it. I didn't think anyone raised in the North would want to live here; it definitely didn't have that highly Technicolor warming appeal of the North. In the South, it was cheerless, where African Americans walk around stooped and looking depressed, as Jim Crow segregation laws and rampant racial prejudices enforced by a psychotic police force held them down.Life aboard a WW II DestroyerMy first months aboard my WW II Destroyer were a roller coaster ride. They had returned from an extended deployment from the Middle East but soon we were at sea constantly on Anti Submarine Warfare (ASW) exercises. ASW was a high, shooting the guns, was exciting too, but chasing down a submarine was the biggest "Cat and Mouse" game in town and it was fun what with the chase, the anticipation and closing in for the kill. We practiced on American submarines and were ever watchful for the Soviet subs tracking our carrier and chased them too. The gun system albeit accurate and deadly on a propeller driven aircraft, was World War II technology and it was not on Jet planes that could fire on us from outside our gun range.Like the crew of every ship afloat today, the compliment of a destroyer is a cross section of America itself. A Bosun's mate is a soda jerk from Detroit, and a machinist mate is a former factory worker from Pittsburgh and a fire control man, like me, from Milwaukee. There's a farm hand from Kansas who hadn't been more than twenty-three miles from home until he enlisted. There are Blacks from Southern cotton fields, and wheat farmers from North Dakota. There's a milkman from California and a dental student, a policeman and a nightclub operator from New York City. The destroyer life has made ex civilians real sailors. It was soon after World War II and we had many veterans on the ship. Like all other Tin Can sailors, I always thought the Cans were the best Navy duty a man could want.However, Tin Cans were a rough life, full of thrills and spills and anyone whoever rode Destroyers has earned my everlasting respect as to what navy duty is all about. One day, I was high lined to a heavy cruiser as an observer for a fire mission with the USS Iowa. Standing on the cruiser deck, I realized how tough the Destroyer sea duty was. While the cruiser was steady through the sea, my Destroyer was bucking and heaving, rising up 40 feet to the level of the carrier's flight deck and I could see the forward sonar dome on the bottom hull rise above the surface, then diving 90 feet below into the froth.There didn't seem to be much distinction between blacks and whites on the ship. It was during the Cold War and we were in it together, our guns being manned and ready by both black and white. Heck, James, the best bar room brawler I ever met, who saved my ass many times when I was on Military Police trying to break up Bar Fights in Europe, was black as the ace of spades, small but tough as a Red Oak, and scarier than a grinning Godzilla with gold teeth! Another friend of mine was a homicidal maniac dark colored Puerto Rican from Brooklyn who tipped the scales at around 5'3", had muscles in his breath and who I'm sure stayed up at night thinking of ways to dismember anyone who looked cross eyed at him and make it look like an accident. Other blacks were Cousins, he and I manned the Main Battle Gun Director together and Jack Hawkins who was the best three-inch gunner we had. We had tough blacks in Naval Infantry and when I was on desert patrol in the Persian Gulf, Eddie Duncan from Boston was my best friend and fearless war fighter, and he was a great gunner and could handle himself in hand to hand. I felt safe with him by my side.Yes, I had lots of black and brown friends while in the Navy even dated a few black girls who I met at Roseland when visiting New York City and never gave it a second thought, but I dared not admit that in the south and kept my mouth shut. There were no real racial attitudes on my ship, unless of course, you were an ignorant racist redneck looking for a dentist to replace missing teeth lost in a fight after throwing around the "N' word. Destroyer sailors got along and were ready to die for each other, well, except for those thieving scaly wags who begged off their shipboard responsibilities - black, white or any person, didn't make any difference, you were going to get your comeuppance. But when we went ashore in Norfolk on liberty we went to different sections of town as directed by Jim Crow laws. Maybe that was a good idea to keep the murder rate down when red necks harassed northern blacks and thought they could get away with it.It was like a Greek Tragedy, when a southern redneck dipshit used to bossing around passive southern blacks who were basically uneducated field hands keeping their heads down and mouths shut in the segregated south, calling them "Nigger" and having them grin and walk away, but when they tried that with a northern black from Brooklyn or Philadelphia with a "Don't Fuck With Me Retard" attitude, all hell broke lose. The northern blacks would grin too, and then proceed to change the religion of the redneck, or at least make him wear diapers for a week because a beer bottle got shoved up his ass. What did these southerners know about tough Red Dog Irish battling it out for big city territory with tough Blacks and crazy Puerto Ricans on the streets of Boston, New York and Philadelphia? My God, they were a trained militia capable of massive destruction on loud-mouthed racists. The same happened to those who called the Irish "Paddy" or Puerto Ricans "Spics." You got some recompense which usually was some violent action against your body and for sure, back on the ship, your toothbrush will find its way into a slightly used toilet to add flavor. I mean, didn't these ethnic name callers know that inner city Irish had no common sense, they loved to fight, drink and sing Irish songs (in that order).There was nothing to do in segregated Norfolk. How in the Hell can southerners live this way? Well, what they do is have private clubs, just for whites that also serve booze and have bands and dance floors. What was available for sailors was East Main Street and I know you heard this one before - "Most have the vice and inappropriate conduct in the Western Hemisphere was invented on East Main. When East Main was in full swing, all the breweries on the east coast worked three shifts… It raised the standard for hellholes. The world's infamous section of East Main Street was only (maybe less) three blocks long and lined with Bars on both sides of the street with names such as "Virginian," "Golden Palomino," "Rathskeller's," "Ship Ahoy," "Paddock Lounge," "Red Rooster" and etc. The Bars served only 25-cent lean draft beer.If a Bluejacket's couldn't find it on East Main, it had to involve gay penguins or nympho sea turtles.' Our typical liberty usually wound up on East Main Street. It was famous throughout the world, they wrote books about it and you could find every sin covered in every religion in the world, all in three or four blocks. The place was a veritable Kasbahs of Carnal Delight. The place was so bad; it didn't even register a blip on the Morale Richter Scale. East Main was right up there with Sodom and Gomorrah. It was the 'Black Hole of Calcutta' and the lowest level of the largest outhouse ever built. East Main was the K-Mart of whoredom. If you had twenty bucks and you couldn't satisfy any particular lust desire you were hauling down there, you had to be into something involving baby ducks and penguins.East Main was a five-star hell whole where you could buy passion in fifteen-minute increments from women whose panties went up and down like a tin can's signal flags, where you could drink cheap beer and pee in the street. Fleet sailors warned us recruits that sooner or later, we would be rolled on East Main Street. Just hope that she was kind enough to stick your ID and liberty card in your sock before she vanished with what was left of seventy bucks and your wallet? If Guinness had a record for the sleaziest bars per square inch, it would read. 'East Main, Norfolk'. They sold enough draft beer on a Saturday night to fill the New London diving tank, and most of it got pissed away in the adjacent alleys on the way to the bus stop up on Granby Street. While on East Main Street, it would often be our goal to drink a few beers at each bar, starting at the upper end of one side of the street, and drink our way down the street, then come up the other side. Needless to say I never successfully accomplished this goal. As a young man not used to alcohol, even though the beer was lean reduced to 3 per cent alcohol, I would get drunk before the round robin tour ended and wind up puking my guts out in an alley.After drinking ourselves silly on East Main Street, we were ready for some coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs. A [White only] Christian Mission offered these amenities if we would listen to their "save my soul," preaching first. One time we tried this and listened to well mannered young men try to convert us to being 'Born Again' with sweet talk and using words like "anointed." But it was for Whites only; anyone one else was going to Hell. I thought - Christians, Huh? To this day whenever I hear that "ANOINTED" word I get a nauseous chill up my backbone! The bus ride back varied in quality depending on the time you left, a late return meant ridding with a large group of sailors in various states of drunkenness with random puking. If you missed the last bus back to NOB which left around 2:00 A.M.We had the NOB Gym at our disposal and I as a fitness freak I went there often to work out. I met James at the NOB naval base gym working out; he was a small diminutive Black man muscled all to the core of his 150-pound frame, but he could do 250lb. presses like they were just ten pounds. If the gym had heavier weights, I bet he could do 300 pounds plus. I had done a little Golden Gloves and James was the best fighter I had ever met. I watched him before he gets into a sparing fight he stands there with his hands on his hips calmly observing, looking for what the opposition has to offer. I had expected somebody bigger and, frankly, more chiseled a square chin and all and machine-like, like those Hollywood charactures of tough men, but James looks remarkably ordinary and I sure didn't expect a Black man in this segregated South to be the best fighter around either. James was a killer, or he could be, but he played Mr. Nice Guy. One time at the base enlisted club we were lifting weights and he took his shirt off and all we saw were rippling muscles beneath his ebony Blacks skin. He was bench pressing more than 350 pounds and jerking 400 pounds.He had muscles and fast hands and must have been professionally trained in the sweet art of boxing. One of the Rednecks, who had been saying nasty things about Negroes, stopped and shut his mouth when he saw James, but we wished James had shut it with a right cross. James seemed to be passive and willing to take a lot of racial crap from racist Whites, something I would never have stood for, but I didn't really know what it was like to be Black in the South, where you got absolutely no protection from the police who would send you to long terms in jail no matter how justified you were in defending yourself against attacks from White racists.James is the Redneck's worst nightmare, as he can easily tear a new ass hole into men twice his size and with multiple assailants at the same time. Of medium height and build, he has an open, friendly face with laugh lines in the corners of his eyes and mouth and he looks "Nice and Friendly" When he walks over cat like, to say hello it's with a slight swagger that strikes me as distinctly military and damned dangerous. He smiles brightly as he introduces himself. I made sure to be friend him and little did I know then that I would meet him all over the Mediterranean saving my ass in bar fights. James became my friend and we had a symbiotic relationship, he rescued me from some real bad bar fights. He was one hellish street fighter and rescued me a couple of times when I was on Shore Patrol trying to break up a bar fight.We spent every week at sea. I myself was a cross between a good ole boy southern Red Neck and Classical liberal. I loved guns, hunting, and horses and was also classical music and was a Leonard Bernstein fan and loved his Broadway style music. In fact on my trips to NYC I went to lots of Broadway plays including his West Side Story. When we pulled along side another ship at sea for refueling, the music blared from their and ours speakers. It was usually some country - western thing but I liked the tempo of John Phillips Sousa march. I set our speakers to play John Phillips Sousa marching tunes followed by some hip Johnny Cash country music. When we refueled from a carrier, the Carrier's Marine Band stood in the lowered hanger deck and played tunes such as "Come to Papa Do" and the Marine Corps hymn. But we had speakers too, and on one occasion, we responded by playing the Army Air Corps song. What I really liked to do was educate sailors to some of the good stuff, so I set up a record player with classical music, Brahms, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Lizt, and my favorite, Tchaikovsky in the IC room, and played my classical music to large audiences from the mostly Southern crew, who never heard anything but shit kicking music. I even got the IC men to hook up and play my classical music on our ship's loudspeaker system when we went along side another ship for refueling. Believe it or not, it was always well received.In my early Navy days in Norfolk, when I didn't have a car or a ride for weekend liberty, I would take a Trailways interstate bus to New York City. When the bus stopped for bathroom or food in the South, we left the bus and parted company into separate racial facilities, but when in the North we shared all facilities together. If you were pissed off at Jim Crow and thwarted the segregationist pattern, like entering a "colored" rest room, you could be arrested and put in the local jails, where you would be treated horribly, being crammed into tiny, filthy cells and fed salt without water and sporadically beaten. In the South, the police didn't take kindly to whites that sympathized with the blacks. On one trip I met Mary Thomson, a young pretty Black girl who lived in Manhattan, and we became good friends. She was very smart and had a great personality and I wished I could date her when she visited her parents in Norfolk, but as things are in the South, I knew that was impossible. We could only breathe the fresh air of freedom when we crossed the Mason - Dixon Line.Once in the City, I would get a room at the YMCA in Times Square and explore the city, hitting the bars and night clubs like the Latin Quarter or Copocabana and the mid town dance emporiums, all places racially and ethnically integrated with beautiful women looking for hungry sailors. One of our favorite places was the Roseland Ball Room on 52nd Street. They used professional orchestras playing every kind of ball room music and even dance clubs from Harlem came down to jitterbug and swing dance with us. Sometimes I stayed at the decrepit and worn out Lincoln Hotel on Eighth Avenue and 44th Street. It was full of retired actors and musicians riding our last days sitting in the lobby and commiserating about the good-ole-days. It was perfect for sailors looking for a cheap room on weekend liberty in the Big Apple. We ate at Greek Diners most of the time, there was almost a classic quality to the New York diner experience - singing musicians/waitresses en all - and they are all over the City offering burgers, eggs and full meals at cheap prices. They all feature all-day breakfast specials, steaks, pork chops, southern fried chicken and of course, a bottomless cup of coffee, the real surprise about the menu here is that they offer every demographic - Jewish, Italian, Irish and everything else under the sun, including enormous desserts, all baked fresh on the premises daily.I loved Greenwich Village where folk music blossomed, where clubs and coffee houses showcased singers like Pete Seeger and Odetta and nurtured a generation of newcomers, including Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and Peter, Paul and Mary. Two of the most exciting American movements were calling Greenwich Village their home, the Abstract Expressionists, and the New York School of Poets was sharing the same bars, restaurants, and lofts. In the fifties, the most popular places were ice cream parlors, pizza parlors, drive-ins, bowling alleys, coffee houses and record shops. Pre-marital sex was considered sinful. "Going steady" was a stage young people took only if they were seriously on the path to marriage. Virginity was still a virtue in the fifties; and sailors on the prowl had to behave themselves. I loved the 1950's in New York City. I got to see the original West Side Story on Broadway and had coffee with the beatniks in Greenwich Village who read poetry out loud to jazz.At 20 years of age I had become a motorcycle bum. There were several Harley Motor Cycle Clubs in our Destroyer Squadron and I was invited to ride with them. I rode with my buddy as a passenger on his Road King for the next year before deciding I wanted the view from the front seat. There was a biker bar south of Portsmouth, called El Chico's that a bunch of us would frequent. A lot of the ragged civilians who drank there were members of the "Outlaws" motorcycle gang and some were real animals. My ride thru the El Chico's was one of my more exciting memories. Miss Vicky, one of better looking "Big Mama's" was tending bar that fateful day. It was a Saturday afternoon, warm and humid, and kind of quiet. Suddenly a first class Torpedoman told me, "You don't have a wild hair on your ass until you have ridden a bike thru a bar." It was a crowded place and like I said a lot of them were my shipmates. I burned rubber going out the door and left a 5-foot skid mark that lasted for a long time. I went sideways across the sidewalk into the street and zipped around to the bike parking area. The gate Marines later said it was a sight to see, one big red Harley come sideways out the door, rear wheel burning rubber, and a drunken sailor hanging on for dear life.We completed our shipyard duty and went to sea for shakedown. It was Friday evening, we had just come back from two weeks at sea checking out our weapon systems and conducting vigorous anti submarine war games, found the Soviets trying to interdict our battle group with their attack submarines, chased them across the Atlantic, suffered through never-ending General Quarters in cramped battle stations, through cold and rough 30 foot seas, were tired and salty, and now we were back in Norfolk at the D & S Piers. I had weekend liberty and was driving to New York City, and was loading my Cadillac up with sailors going in my direction. I had my "New York City" sign on my window and got a few and drove up Hampton Blvd. to Willoughby Spit, a peninsula at the end of Ocean View that operated a ferry service. This was also home to the 1690 foot long Ocean View Fishing Pier, which is the longest pier in North America. The main ferry route ran between terminals at the end of Hampton Boulevard near the Naval Base in Norfolk to what is now the small boat harbor near downtown Newport News.The ferry ride took half an hour each way and cost $1.25, plus an additional 20 cents for each passenger. The total daily traffic between the two locations averaged only about 2,500 vehicles. We waited in line as the cars lined up and finally boarded the S.S. Princess Anne Ferryboat. I found more sailors on the ferry and my Cadillac was loaded with five passengers all going to Time Square in Manhattan. We got off the ferry, picked up Route 17 through Virginia, Route 301 through Delaware, Route 40 through Maryland, then across the Delaware Memorial Bridge and onto the New Jersey Turnpike which was a 100 mile fast drive to the Lincoln Tunnel and Manhattan Times Square where I would drop everyone off. We stopped on a RT. 40 diner for a bathroom break and some food. The waitress came over and said they could serve the White sailors but not the Negroes sailors in our group.We were dumbfounded! Maryland was supposed to be north enough that you didn't have to worry about this crap, but Maryland was actually south of the Mason Dixon line, albeit a border state. I asked to speak with the manager and said something about sailors fighting for your country shouldn't have to go through this treatment.The manager enjoyed our disgust with him as he sneered and said smirking, no "Niggers" would be served. This incident was obvious to the other diner patrons who were looking at our discomfort, with approving grins on their faces and I heard those muttering things about Niggers knowing their place.I stood up and he put his hands on me. Well, I mean to tell you, we blew a shit fit. With a strong overhand right, I popped the manger in the face, broke his nose and definitely knocked out some front teeth whereupon he fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes. I tipped over the table, threw the chairs, and invited anyone else in the diner to stand up and get theirs. Now they weren't smiling but running scared. Bunch of cowardly bastards! We tore the place up! Those fucking God Dam Red Necks, we could have killed every one of them. Thinking the State Troopers would be on their way by now, we jumped into the car, sped onto the high way, and shouted "New York here we come." One thing you could say about New York, nothing like Southern segregation was practiced there. Not those Blacks didn't have a hard time anywhere they went, but in the South it was so blatant and cruel and enforced by the police. The lowest White Trash scum relished in giving Blacks a hard time knowing they would get away with it; this Redneck scum reminded me of the Waffen SS Nazis in Hitler's Germany. I bruised my hand hitting that racist fucker in the mouth . . . Next time I will use my marshal arts training, an open hand and use the heel into the nose.I was 5'11? 150 lbs in great shape and was trained in boxing, street fighting and some martial arts. I had been in lots of fights and always did well; actually I kind of like them. My Shore Patrol and Military Police duties had got me involved in plenty of bar fights and some very severe street fights with communists who were trying to kill me. You wouldn't think a skinny guy like would be so ferocious.I was at sea for 3 years fighting the Russians and sailing into more than 40 ports in the USA, Caribbean, Europe Mediterranean, Middle East, and the Persian Gulf. Once we pulled into Miami and I had two disturbing racial incidents. The first, in Miami Beach, was when a bus stopped right in front of me. I stepped aside and let an elderly colored (that was the term for black people at the time) woman gets on before me. The bus driver made the woman and me get off so I could get on first. The second was in Norfolk when I got on a bus gone to the back where there were plenty of seats. The driver came back and told me the buss would not move until I got into the white section where I had to stand because it was full. Southern trash! I hated these people and their bigotry.Norfolk & IBMI saw an add from IBM looking for an engineer in Norfolk's Star Leger newspaper and said "What the Hell? I interviewed, took dozens of aptitude, electronic, mechanical and IQ tests, which placed me they said in the top ½ of 1 per cent of all IBM employees - I had a 135 IQ. IBM offered me a job as a Main Frame Engineer. They had interviewed more than 250 candidates and picked me. Over the next seven years I spent 3 1/2 years in IBM school in Upstate NY and gained a reputation I could fix anything, angry customers or broke computers. During this time I got involved in Democratic politics, advocated liberal social causes, did voter registration for Jack Kennedy and met him in 1960 when he visited Granby High School in Norfolk on a presidential campaign visit and again when he visited the Norfolk Naval Base in 1962. I was promoted into Product Support and went on many assignments around the USA and taught various computer courses at IBM’s educational centers in downtown Washington, D.C. and Mid Town Manhattan. I was doing well with IBM and going to advance mainframe schools as new technology came out. I supported special events like the CBS Presidential Election, Kentucky Derby, Disney World and Cape Canaveral rocker shoots.I wound up sympathizing and getting involved in the Civil Rights movement, which caused great consternation among my friends at work, neighborhood, and church. I also became active with the Jr. Chamber of Commerce, Volunteer Fire Department, Masons, and hung out with the ‘Good Ole Boys’ deer hunting in Dismal Swamp and fishing on Chesapeake Bay. Although very successful at IBM, having won many awards, going on coveted special assignments and attending years of advanced IBM Main Frame training, I was never really happy with an organization that tried to mold your soul to their image of a Dudley Do Right good guy.If you loved IBM, sold them your soul and sang their Whip' in Poof songs, IBM loved you back. What IBM did not appreciate were strong individuals or energetic personalities and they hated renegades, entrepreneurs, and nonconformist . . . like me!I really loved my job albeit I had to fight the War of Northern Aggression a.k.a. Civil War all over again while I was in the south. With my manner speaking, it was no trouble for these racist Southerners to see I was from the North and they took special glee in baiting me, trying to provoke a reaction that would get me in trouble with my IBM bosses. With much diplomatic trepidation, I kept my mouth shut and did not make any comments they could take offense at, like their attitudes toward Blacks and race separation. Otherwise, I would have had massive amounts of grief from the ever-present racist red necks. Many of my assignments were in the north, particularly New York City, and race issues never came up.What you would notice as one traveled the South was the terrible condition of the Black people, being separated from White by legalized and police enforced racial segregation and treated like dirt. Blacks didn't have good jobs and didn’t live in nice neighborhoods and you only saw them working in the lowest form of jobs as labors, dishwashers, and street cleaners. When you went downtown, they were not allowed to work in the department stores or banks; all those jobs were reserved for Whites. No matter what education a Black person had, they couldn't get a good job, they would have to travel north for good employment and for any respect. Even the Black Doctors and Lawyers professional class lived so far outside town in the country they couldn’t be accused of spoiling a White neighborhood.When I moved to Virginia I hunted in Dismal Swamp; the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia / North Carolina and Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia (the biggest swamp in the USA), were both full of escaped slaves. Today’s inhabitants were descendants of escaped slaves and convicts, renegades, Indians, and those who wanted to be free away from white mans’ civilization. Today the swamp is filled with semi toothless, grinning, bib overall, gun toting, guitar playing, alcohol crazed swamp rats who raise pigs and corn stills on small farms on little islands living in tin roofed shacks with outdoor water hand pumps and two seat shit houses. They don’t have money and use the barter system, use mules and horses, have no vehicles, usually have at least six kids and get their hard stores from the General Store out on the highway. We got to them by Jeep and trekking. They have excellent swamp survival and bootlegging skills and take absolutely no shit from outsiders. Rule number one in the swamp is “Be Polite.” No AND” talk or disparaging remarks ever allowed. Rule number two is get permission. Rule number three is learning what the word “Respect” means. Or pay! In the hot, humid, fetid snake filled swamp water, where insects rule and are as big as you fist, where flesh eating swamp critters are everywhere and shot gun blasts are heard only for a few feet and disregarded. A disrespecting body will decompose into nothing, bones en all, in less than a week. In North Carolina there were hungry alligators too.We had a Black girl named Hattie Jackson working as a secretary in our IBM office. She was exceptionably beautiful and smart, but she had to live in the poor black section of town in terrible conditions because Blacks weren't allowed to live when their salary dictated they could afford better housing. Two of the accounts I took care of for IBM were the City Halls of Norfolk and Portsmouth. I listened constantly to the politicos on how they schemed to keep the Black man down. There was a Poll Tax and rigged tests you had to pass to vote. It asked impossible questions to ensure Blacks could not pass it. Of course if you were White, you automatically passed it, really didn’t have to take it. Unless you were a white racist, it was impossible to get elected in the South, as the populace feared racial integration and social modernity more than the plague. I thought most White Southerners were stupid and racist and I disliked racist types immensely.I belonged to the Sweet Haven Baptist church pastored by Reverend Wyatt and what a God-fearing, Bible-toting, sugary-sweet and loving bunch of racists most of them were, including Reverend Wyatt himself who was the worst racist of all, and a Baptist Pastor at that. They were all bible thumping died in the wool segregationists and hid behind the scriptures for the worst sins man perpetuated on another man. I heard all about Negroes was this; the Jews that, Yankees were worse for trying to change the South, and even the Catholics had special nasty names. Bible thumping - sweet scripture talking - bigots, it was a very hateful society. Again, I paid little attention to all these horrible attitudes.My Mid Western family all belonged to the Masons and I joined the Portsmouth chapter and did my various catechisms to become a Master Member. But my chapter didn't accept blacks, they said Black people weren't considered free born, but were slaves in the USA or had a slave history, so they didn't meet the free born requirement for membership in the Masons. Blacks joined their version of the Masons called the Prince Hall organization. I couldn't believe such stupidity and reminded them that in the ancient world, the whites were slaves to the Greeks and Romans. They didn't know what I was talking about. It was like I was in a different world of full of organized and accepted prejudice. During these formative years, I was involved in the Civil Rights struggle for Blacks and was disgusted with these ignorant views. I refused to be part of an organization that discriminated like that.It's wonder how small little happenings in ones life can endure major changes, but a good example was my learning how to rebuild car engines. I had this old 1948 Plymouth whose engine had conked out and I was going to try to rebuild it, learning as I went. I figured, "What could I lose, the car was junk anyway." I had the head off and was trying to get the pistons out and was over at the local Car Parts dealer getting some tools and asking for advice. Another customer standing there, a Black man, offered some expert advice, in fact he came to my house, but as was the custom for Black people coming to a White person's house, came to the back door. ("What" I thought) I learned that he was a Baptist preacher in Churchland living in a shanty town off of Route 17, which was not too far from my house on Hatton Point Road. I will tell you this that man knew his cars! That was the beginning of a relationship with him where I took him as my mentor in learning about car engine repair.One day I am at his shanty house getting some advice and sitting at his kitchen table having a cup of coffee. He asked me if I could take his teenage daughter to the grocery store to pick up something and I said sure. She got in the front seat and off we went it was only just around the corner at a shopping center on Route 17 in Churchland. As I pulled onto a highway, a State Trooper pulled us over. With his pot belly and strong Southern Accent, he said, "What are you doing with this Neegra woman in your front seat?" I explained I was taking her to the grocery store. "Boy, don't you know that you never ride a Neegra woman in your front seat, looks like your taking her out, and you know that is illegal in Virginia." "By the way, you talk funny, are you a god-damned Yankee?" This went on and finally he let me go after the girl got in the back seat. Do I have to tell you how I felt?The stores along Granby in Norfolk and High Street in Portsmouth, specifically, their lunch counters and the city itself was the site of a battle that also played out in dozens of other cities in the South. They were segregated and Blacks were forbidden to sit at 'White only' lunch counters. The fight pitted black college students and a few of their white peers against the city's white power structure and its downtown merchants over the right to sit down and eat lunch. One day I was going to service a Bank Proof machine on Portsmouth's High Streets second floor bank. I walked up to the entrance, which was right next to the Woolworth entrance. There was a sit-in going on and the Police Vans came with their dogs and started beating the demonstrators. I was standing there in my blue IBM pin stripe and they set the dogs on me and beat me with their batons. I was tossed into the van and pushed to the back, all the while being called 'Nigger Lover." Eventually I was sorted out as an innocent bystander and set free. It was that day I became an activist for civil rights.I joined the Portsmouth Jr. Chamber of Commerce and became quite active. There were many worthwhile causes we participated in. Meetings were held once a month and were accompanied with famous speakers. Being a Military town, many of these speakers were Admirals, but many were local politicians who openly advocated segregation in the face of the Civil Rights movement being conducted at the time. I associated with all the local politicos and military types. I got involved in many projects, like distributing Bubble Gum Machines throughout Portsmouth. The Chamber sponsored the local Miss America beauty pageant, which afforded me the opportunity to participate in several Miss America Pageants as a Judge and organizer. We had a meeting to discuss what we were looking for, young women with poise, looks and talent. So, what I was supposed to do was audition perspective candidates and sends them on. There were several ladies I interviewed, one was black and really had the talent and personality and figure.Then the organizers chewed me out - didn't I know that Ms America was for white women only? Those fucking racists really pissed me off - I had to tell the black girl she didn't qualify for the contest because she was black. I will never get used to southern racism. One time I made speech on an HUD project being considered for downtown Portsmouth on Effingham Street outside the Naval Hospital, which was nothing but shacks inhabited by poor Black people. Whites were against raising this ghetto and replacing it with decent housing because they did not want conditions for Blacks to improve. I was for the project and was threatened with a ride out of town and a beating by the Ku Klux Klan. I invited them to try it now and I was prepared to beat the Holy loving shit out of them on the spot but they declined and left saying they knew where I lived. I started packing my 25-caliber automatic or P38 then. “Fucking Southern White trash cowards!The March on WashingtonI was teaching peripheral course in IBM’s Washington, D.C. education center on August 28, 1963, when over a quarter‑million people—about two‑thirds black and one‑third white—held the greatest civil rights demonstration ever held and Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” oration. And just blocks away, President Kennedy and Congress skirmished over landmark civil rights legislation. I skipped classes to attend the event and since I left early, found a spot on the Washington Mall close to the speakers stand. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators walked down Constitution Avenue during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The March on Washington represented a coalition of several civil rights organizations, all of which generally had different approaches and different agendas. The stated demands of the march were the passage of meaningful civil rights legislation; the elimination of racial segregation in public schools; protection for demonstrators against police brutality; a major public‑works program to provide jobs; the passage of a law prohibiting racial discrimination in public and private hiring; a $2 an hour minimum wage; and self‑government for the District of Columbia, which had a black majority. Nobody was sure how many people would turn up for the demonstration in Washington, D.C. Some traveling from the South were harassed and threatened. But an estimated quarter of a million people—about a quarter of whom were white—marched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, in what turned out to be both a protest and a communal celebration. The heavy police presence turned out to be unnecessary, as the march was noted for its civility and peacefulness. The media, with live international television coverage, extensively covered the march. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King evoked the name of Lincoln in his "I Have a Dream" speech, which is credited with mobilizing supporters of desegregation and prompted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The next year, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.Jim Crow – Mississippi StyleThe American Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and 1960s represents a pivotal event in world history. The positive changes it brought to voting and civil rights continue to be felt throughout the United States and much of the world. Although this struggle for black equality was fought on hundreds of different “battlefields” throughout the United States, many observers at the time described the state of Mississippi as the most racist and violent. In 1955, Reverend George Lee, vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership and NAACP worker, was shot in the face and killed for urging blacks in the Mississippi Delta to vote. Although eyewitnesses saw a carload of whites drive by and shoot into Lee's automobile, the authorities failed to charge anyone. Governor Hugh White refused requests to send investigators to Belzoni, Mississippi, where the murder occurred. In August 1955, Lamar Smith, sixty-three-year-old farmer and World War II veteran, was shot in cold blood on the crowded courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi, for urging blacks to vote. Although the sheriff saw a white man leaving the scene 'with blood all over him' no one admitted to having witnessed the shooting” and “the killer went free. Mississippi's lawmakers, law enforcement officers, public officials, and private citizens worked long and hard to maintain the segregated way of life that had dominated the state since the end of the Civil War in 1865.The method that ensured segregation persisted was the use and threat of violence against people who sought to end it. On September 25, 1961, farmer Herbert Lee was shot and killed in Liberty, Mississippi, by E.H. Hurst, a member of the Mississippi State Legislature. Hurst murdered Lee because of his participation in the voter registration campaign sweeping through southwest Mississippi. Authorities never charged him with the crime. A coroner's jury, held in a room full of armed white men, the same day as the killing, acquitted Hurst. Hurst never spent a night in jail.” Rifle wielding white Citizens Council member Byron De La Beckwith from Greenwood, Mississippi gunned down NAACP State Director Medgar Evers in 1963 in his Jackson driveway. Perhaps the most notable episode of violence came in Freedom Summer of 1964, when civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Scherer left their base in Meridian, Mississippi, to investigate one of a number of church burnings in the eastern part of the state. The Ku Klux Klan had burned Mount Zion Church because the minister had allowed it to be used as a meeting place for civil rights activists. After the three young men had gone into Neshoba County to investigate, they were subsequently stopped and arrested by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price. After several hours, Price finally released them only to arrest them again shortly after 10 p.m. He then turned the civil rights workers over to his fellow Klansmen. The group took the activists to a remote area, beat them, and then shot them to death. Dittmer suggests that because Scherer and Goodman were white the federal government responded by establishing an FBI office in Jackson and calling out the Mississippi National Guard and U. S. Navy to help search for the three men. Of course this was the response the Freedom Summer organizers had hoped for when they asked for white volunteers.BirminghamCivil Rights were afoot and then came along Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister, who was a driving force in the push for racial equality in the 1950's and the 1960's. In 1963, King and his staff focused on Birmingham, Alabama. They marched and protested nonviolently, raising the ire of local officials who sicced water cannon and police dogs on the marchers, whose ranks included teenagers and children. The bad publicity and breakdown of business forced the white leaders of Birmingham to concede to some anti segregation demands. King adhered to Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence. In 1955 he began his struggle to persuade the US Government to declare the policy of racial discrimination in the southern states unlawful. The racists responded with violence to the black people's nonviolent initiatives. Martin Luther King dreamed that all inhabitants of the United States would be judged by their personal qualities and not by the color of their skin. In April 1968 a white racist murdered him. Four years earlier, he had received the Noble Peace Prize for his nonviolent campaign against racism. The battle lines are drawn in Birmingham, Alabama, that was, in 1960, "probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States." Although the city's population of almost 350,000 was 60% white and 40% black, Birmingham (as most southern cities) had no black police officers, firefighters, and sales clerks in department stores, bus drivers, bank tellers, or store cashiers. Black secretaries could not work for white professionals. Jobs available to blacks were limited to manual labor in Birmingham's steel mills, work in household service and yard maintenance, or work in black neighborhoods. When layoffs were necessary, black employees were the first to go. The unemployment rate for blacks was two and a half times higher than for whites. The average income for blacks in the city was less than half that of whites. Significantly lower pay scales for black workers at the local steel mills were common. Racial segregation of public and commercial facilities throughout Jefferson County was legally required, covered all aspects of life, and was rigidly enforced. Only 10 percent of the city's black population was registered to vote in 1960. The Civil Rights plan called for direct nonviolent action to attract media attention to "the biggest and baddest city of the South," with a variety of nonviolent methods of confrontation, including sit-ins at libraries and lunch counters, kneel‑ins by black visitors at white churches, and a march to the county building to mark the beginning of a voter‑registration drive. Most businesses responded by refusing to serve demonstrators. Some white spectators at a sit‑in at a Woolworth's lunch counter spat upon the participants. A few hundred protesters, including jazz musician Al Hibbler, were arrested, although Connor immediately released Hibbler. President John F. Kennedy later said of him, "The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln."My Personal Issues with SegregationI met Bettie (my wife) in 1967 while teaching a computer course in Stamford, Connecticut. At Audio Tape. Bettie walked into my class with this red skirt and the biggest smile, grinning ear-to-ear, and swishing in like a Hollywood debutante on the Red Carpet. When she smiled at me my heart went pitter pat and a huge chemical reaction occurred within me and she took me by storm with her looks, appearance, personality, and obvious sexiness. Bettie obsessed me and every day I went out of my way to talk to her. I wanted to see Bettie and prayed she would call. In fact, when she called, I was praying, Bettie, please call now. Just then the phone rang and it was Bettie. I asked her to come over to my room. When she got there, I immediately hugged and kissed her and it was the most beautiful experience of my whole life. We immediately fell into a passionate and loving relationship and saw each other whenever we could, which were very often. I would make special trips to Stamford to see Bettie and we would meet in New York City. While in Washington, D.C. My baby was the love of my life! Bettie and I have been together ever since we met.Later, along with a retired Navy man from Florida, I went to 6600 schools in Minneapolis for 8 months. . Jim was a real hateful segregationist who never stopped ragging me about my personal relationships with black people. He never stopped calling black people “Niggers” but I remained clam in his presence. So many Southerners I met were haters and racists, and I avoided them like the plague. This 6600 school was quite a feather in my cap as many of the instructors wanted this assignment because it was the latest technology and would guarantee a great future with Control Data. I was chosen because of the course development and creative writing I had already done. I also had written several training manuals that were published throughout Control Data. The 6000 series of computers were then the largest and fastest computer in the world and designed by Seymour Cray who was the foremost computer designer in the world.One day, JD Bronson, one of the other instructors from Virginia, an avid segregationist and first class bigot of blacks, Jews, and Hispanics, made some very nasty comments about Bettie, my girl [later my wife], pointed his finger at me, said I was a “Nigger Lover” and called Bettie that “black Nigger bitch” and dared me to do something about it. I almost killed him then! I knew just how I was going to do it too with a hand strike to his throat and then watch him suffocate on his own blood. But sanity won and I just turned away from him and stormed away afraid for what I was about to do. I was exploding with anger and was capable of violent actions against Southern segregationists.Control Data was opening a new School in Manhattan and they offered me the job of Main Frame instructor and I jumped at it. Living in the south was a losing battle for me and I went gladly to my Shangrila. New York in 1968. The moving truck came, packed me up and I transferred to Manhattan the same day Martin Luther King was assassinated. The King assassination riots, also known as the Holy Week Uprising, was a wave of civil disturbance which swept the United States were the greatest wave of social unrest the United States experienced since the Civil War. His death led some people to feel angry and disillusioned, as though now only violent resistance to white racism could be effective. Mrs. King, my next-door neighbor and the black couple told me later downstairs from me, that black rioters broke into my apartment looking for an easy kill, but that morning I had left for New York. What luck on my side . . . but the whole area was torn down, Burned, and all stores broken into and cleaned out. I left Washington and drove to Manhattan and got a room in the Holiday Inn. Bettie came to see me often, she was my love and I missed every minute away from her . . .Life was good! I was in heaven! I was in Manhattan teaching Grad School in Greenwich Village.P.S. The south has changed and no longer suffers those old racism ways.

Civil Rights in the SouthMy ThoughtsI grew up in the 1940s Midwest in Milwaukee, a very diverse and liberal town, moved to Norfolk with the 1950s WW II Destroyer Navy and stayed there for seven more years working for IBM as a mainframe engineer at the Naval Base. I got involved in church, community affairs and politics. All elected officials in my neck of the woods and throughout the South were predominately conservative 'Dixicrat' Democrats. In fact, I don't think there was any elected Republican's to be found anywhere in the 1950s South. This was back during the Jim Crow separation of the races period, known as the (Plessy vs. Ferguson) separate but equal doctrine declared the law of the land by a 19th century Supreme Court. Most (Northern) Republican and Democrats at that time spoke out against the institutional Jim Crow southern racism that existed, and they were usually the one that treated their Black employees with dignity and respect. They were mostly Yankee religious folk, Catholics and Jews, who played a big part in the upcoming 1960s Civil Rights movement. Southern Democrats were the conservatives and northerners were the liberals of the (1950s) times.Politics was very confusing back the in '60s. In the South, it appeared that all the Democrats were extremely radical based on race (keeping the black man down), they were the White Citizen Council, Klansmen, sheriff's, mayors, Evangelical Pastors, etc. All touting the racial separation message and by Ku Klux Klan force if necessary. My parents were Republicans and I thought of myself as a Republican because all the bad racist guys hated Republican's. They especially hated Eisenhower after he sent troops into Little Rock to integrate the schools. The 1950s were extremely volatile years, new ‘Normal’ was created, and between the Social Revolution and Civil rights, the country was being torn apart.Southern Democrats were taking the ultra conservative side, especially on race, but Northern Democrats were taking the progressive approach and I decided that I wanted to belong to the same party as Robert and John Kennedy who were talking about support for Civil Rights, the Space program, and an invigorated manufacturing development in the USA. I went door to door in hundreds of Norfolk and Portsmouth homes and did Voter Registration for him for the 1960 Presidential election and learned that white Southerners were saying that because Kennedy was a Catholic the Pope would run the country if he got elected. I had some good debates with people I talked too! I learned that politics for most people was not about informed knowledge on issues but was based on emotionally built (false) stereotypes and prejudices. You actually heard southern Evangelical Pastors and the established media rant against Kennedy, saying all kinds of ridiculous prejudicial things with no shame. I loved Kennedy and actually met him when he came to Norfolk to thank his supporters. He was nothing like the racist Democrats in my region; and his message did not resonate very well with southern Democrats who were switching to the Republican Party en mass because of Democratic support for Civil Rights. So, in protest to (Northern) Democratic support for Civil Rights, the South had almost completely switched to the Republican Party based on its fight against racial integration. The Republican Party, one the bastion of civil rights, had become the "The Southern Strategy” pandering to racists. The South had declared “the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther king were communist, and the federal government was fascist for trying to desegregate the South. This regressive cultural continued for many years to come and even intensified into the current 'Cultural War' within the USA . I never regretted the choices I made. I joined the right party and my first vote for president went to Kennedy and my second to Lyndon B. Johnson.The 1950s NavyThe 1950s Navy was full of grizzled war veterans, a rough and tumble organization that loved to fight. It was soon after World War II and we had many veterans on the ship. Phil was a career Navy man who was a first class gunner’s mate. He had served during World War II in the Pacific on heavy cruisers and had been in many major battles, including Guadalcanal, the Saipan Turkey Shoot, Leyte Gulf and Okinawa. He had several cruisers sunk beneath him one being the Indianapolis, just after they delivered the atomic bomb to a B29 Squadron. I would listen for hours to Phil war recounts in detail, what it was like to live thorough horrific sea battles and the carnage from fires and explosions as your ship takes hits from bombs and torpedoes. Especially horrifying was trying to survive in the water as your ship sinks and you have to battle oil fires and man-eating sharks. His stories of the Indianapolis sinking and resulting long stay in the water with sharks eating survivors were brutally terrorizing. The Navy was an exciting and rewarding life but it was also dangerous. During our 1957 Mediterranean Cruise, we picked up 22 pilots who crashed in the sea on take off or landing. If they survived the crash, they would be floating in their life preservers or rafts and we'd pick them up. We'd go alongside their carrier and hi-line them back and the carriers would give us several gallons of ice cream in gratitude. Life at sea could be boring, or full of exciting devil dares thrills, and always life defying escapades filled with near death experiences and sailors broke the routine up doing different things. Movies help a lot to break up the grind and hectic life to normalize shipboard life. Like every navy ship large enough to rig up a movie screen, the Destroyer shows motion pictures in the mess hall or on the fantail. For diversion, some men start up country western bands and sing along before the movie starts. They may never get a Broadway showing, but it is immensely enjoyed by all. I set up a ship’s library, classical record center, was the ship’s photographer and cruise book editor.Life lessons are taught too. In one particular week in Athens, the highlight of the week was my realization of the universal man. It was late in the night and we were hanging out at a bar when it hit me. There I was completely surrounded by so many different cultures. Everyone in the room was enjoying a simple game of ping pong; there were two Swedish girls planning their next attack at the table, jabbering in Swedish; there were five Spanish guys making some kind of comments to one another in Spanish; there was one drunken Frenchman and his dog and he would not stop pestering people to dance; there was one hilarious Chilean who could make you giggle just by looking at him and listening to his contagious laugh; there was a Dutch girl who could translate and understand four different languages. And last, there was us, the three American sailors. This is what traveling is all about. I remember standing there simultaneously hearing at least three different languages, yet only half of the people could understand the native dialect of the others. Through translations and gestures we communicated and enjoyed the company of one another. Experiencing this makes me wonder why people would ever want to fight. I have come to the conclusions that people of different cultures and races may have diverse religions and rituals, but we are all human. We all have similar thoughts and emotions. To judge someone on their ethnicity would be ignorant. I am happy that I decided to join the navy, travel and experience all this first hand.Introduction to the SouthIt was 1956 and I was in the South now assigned to a Navy Destroyer in Norfolk which was an ugly and mean city. Was this what the south was like I asked? I found everyday social life was very different from my home of Milwaukee. While Milwaukee was an open minded working man’s society, liberal and socially generous, with thousands of things to do, the South was backward and low brow nasty, with nothing to do and racially legally segregated. If you had to make a comparison between good and evil, the south was definitely evil. Us northerners wondered how anyone could live here in this colorless and dull witted society, hypocrites - full of Bible belt evangelical religion but hateful to the core. Whereas in Milwaukee segregation between the races was social and very much class oriented, here in the South the races were separated by law which was vigorously enforced by the police and they seemed to relish harassing Blacks, military or civilian. By civilized Milwaukee standards, these southern police were psychopaths, escaped guards from Nazi Germany prison camps. Any type of non whites, including Asians, Puerto Ricans, Caribbean's, etc., didn’t get any respect and were treated terribly. If your skin was darker, you were legally separated into a lower class and discriminated against. Even the Jews, just like my childhood buddies from my old neighborhood, were held in low esteem and treated like garbage.The week I arrived in Norfolk, the State of Virginia closed down most of its public schools to avoid racial integration, and they remained closed for the next two years. Based on Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court had ruled that the South had to integrate its schools. Virginia refused to comply; instead, they set up private schools for whites across the state and established "Massive Resistance" to any integration plans from the Federal Government whom they hated. What are these Southerners? Evil incarnate or just misguided and stupid? I would never understand them! Aboard ship, I had made friends with many sailors, including Blacks, and when we went to Norfolk, we would experience a totally segregated society. On the ship regardless of race we all got along fine but we could not hang together on shore. There were many Blacks living in Norfolk, and they were cordoned off into very poor areas of town. Norfolk’s main downtown, ‘Granby Street’ and the entire city, with all of its parks and beaches, was available only for Whites. Blacks were allowed only in designated ‘Colored’ - run down - sections and a downtown area called ‘Church Street’ which actually had the character of a New York City street, colorful and full of itself. Even the rowdy East Main Street sailor Bars, known infamously throughout the world, were for Whites only. Bus stations, water fountains, hotels, taxi cabs, movie theaters, restaurants, city parks, swimming beaches, everything and everything were separated by race. The whites had all the best, the blacks - by law - all the worst. What fool invented this madness?! What a sick bunch of idiots thought this one up. This can't be the USA! But it was and I would have to learn to deal with it!The south was racially segregated under Jim Crow laws, Civil Rights were looming to remove that horrible stain of sin on our history, but the south was fighting back with violence and murders against blacks and whites who supported racial integration. During 1956, a group of Southern senators and congressmen signed the “Southern Manifesto,” vowing resistance to racial integration by all “lawful means.” The week I arrived in Norfolk, the State of Virginia closed down most of its public schools to avoid racial integration, and they remained closed for the next two years. Based on Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court had ruled that the South had to integrate its schools. Virginia refused to comply; instead, they set up private schools for whites across the state and established "Massive Resistance" to any integration plans from the Federal Government whom they hated. What are these Southerners? Evil incarnate or just misguided and stupid? I would never understand them! Aboard ship, I had made friends with many sailors, including Blacks, and when we went to Norfolk, we would experience a totally segregated society.On the ship regardless of race we all got along fine but we could not hang together on shore. There were many Blacks living in Norfolk, and they were cordoned off into very poor areas of town. Norfolk’s main downtown, ‘Granby Street’ and the entire city, with all of its parks and beaches, was available only for Whites. Blacks were allowed only in designated ‘Colored’ - run down - sections and a downtown area called ‘Church Street’ which actually had the character of a New York City street, colorful and full of itself. Even the rowdy East Main Street sailor Bars, known infamously throughout the world, were for Whites only. Bus stations, water fountains, hotels, taxi cabs, movie theaters, restaurants, city parks, swimming beaches, everything and everything were separated by race. The whites had all the best, the blacks - by law - all the worst. What fool invented this madness?! What a sick bunch of idiots thought this one up. This can't be the USA! But it was and I would have to learn to deal with it!March 12th, 1956 - The Southern ManifestoBy March 12, 1956, Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia had convinced 101 of the 128 congressmen from Southern states, representing eleven states of the old Confederacy, to sign "The Southern Manifesto on Integration." The document claimed that the United States Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racially segregated public education unconstitutional, constituted an abuse of power in violation of federal law. The manifesto accused the Court of jeopardizing the social justice of white people and "their habits, traditions, and way of life" and claimed that the Brown ruling would "[destroy] the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races," referring to the era of racial terror and a Jim Crow legal caste system that had been reality for most black Americans since the end of Reconstruction.Eight southern states - Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia - enacted their own versions of the Southern Manifesto, called "interposition resolutions," which tried to elevate the state's legal interpretation over that of the Supreme Court. These states also used legislative acts and voter referenda to enact tuition grant statutes that authorized state governments to fund privately-run schools in order to preserve racially segregated education.Norfolk Liberty - yuck - Pugh - ugh! America's Hell HoleEast Main Street was Norfolk's claim to fame. In the annuals of bad ass sailor towns, they wrote books about it and Norfolk's East Main Street was famous all over the world. You could find every sin covered in every religion in the world, in three or four blocks. It was a place established simply for the purpose of selling beer to stupid teenager white sailors, who passed it from mouth to kidney, to bladder, to urinal and finally into the Elisabeth River. All the while enjoying the convivial company of fat tattooed women with hairy upper lips. The place was a veritable Kasbah of Carnal Delight. The street was so bad, it way off the Morale Richter Scale. East Main was Biblical, right up there with Sodom and Gomorrah. It was the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta' and the lowest level of the largest pissy outhouse ever built.East Main was the K-Mart of whoredom. If you had twenty bucks and you couldn't satisfy any particular lust desire you were hauling down there, but you had to be into something involving baby ducks and penguins. East Main was a five-star hell whole where you could buy passion in fifteen minute increments from women whose panties went up and down like a tin can's signal flags, where you could drink cheap beer and pee in the street. Fleet sailors warned us recruits that sooner or later, we would be rolled on East Main Street. Just hope that she was kind enough to stick your ID and liberty card in your sock before she vanished with what was left of seventy bucks and your wallet? If Guinness had a record for the sleaziest bars per square inch, it would read. 'East Main, Norfolk'. They sold enough draft beer on a Saturday night to fill the New London diving tank, and most of it got pissed away in the adjacent alleys on the way to the bus stop up on Granby Street. Good-ole boys loved it and we civilized sailors hated it.The world’s infamous section of East Main Street was only three blocks long and lined with Bars on both sides of the street with names such as "Virginian,” "Golden Palomino,” "Rathskeller,” "Ship Ahoy,” "Paddock Lounge,” "Red Rooster" and etc. The Bars served only 25-cent lean draft beer. You did not order brand names in Norfolk and the Bars featured fat tattooed barmaids who would (if you were lonely) sit with you and listen to your sad story, however, the cost of listening was buying them a drink which consisted of ice tea at a cost of $1 which was equivalent to four beers and could those Bar Maids drink fast! Most sailors fell for this little game only once but there were some who never learned! While on East Main Street, it would often be our goal to drink a few beers at each bar, starting at the upper end of one side of the street, and drink our way down the street, then come up the other side. Needless to say I never successfully accomplished this goal. As a young man not used to alcohol, even though the beer was lean reduced to 3 per cent alcohol, I would get drunk before the round robin tour ended and wind up puking my guts out in an alley. After drinking ourselves silly on East Main Street, we were ready for some coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs. A [White only] Christian Mission offered these amenities if we would listen to their “save my soul” preaching first. One time we tried this and listened to well mannered young men try to convert us to being ‘Born Again’ with sweet talk and using words like “anointed.” But it was for Whites only he said, anyone one else like Blacks were going to Hell. I thought - Christians, Huh? To this day whenever I hear that “ANOINTED” word I get a nauseous chill up my backbone!One of the eateries we frequented on East Main Street was Eddie's Texas Chili. I usually ate chili somewhat on the mild side. My first time eating the mild chili, I said Holy Shit, what the hell is in this stuff, as a fire burned my mouth out? You could remove dried paint from your driveway and it took me two beers to put the flames out. Actually, it didn’t take me long to get used that mild stuff and soon I tried the next hotter chili which made my nose feel like it was snorting Drano. Well, everyone knows the routine by now; get me more beer before I ignite. Laughing, the Barmaid pounded me on the back, now, and my backbone is in the front part of my chest. I'm getting frog-faced from all of the beer. I felt something scraping across my tongue, but was unable to taste it. Is it possible to burn out taste buds? Sally, the barmaid, was standing behind me with fresh refills. That 300-lb. woman is starting to look HOT . . . just like this nuclear waste I'm eating! Is chili an aphrodisiac? When I eventually tried eating the middle hot chili, it made my ears ring and sweat pour off my forehead and I could no longer focus my eyes. I farted a misty smoke screen and four people behind me swooned and needed paramedics. I told the Barmaid that her chili had finally given me brain damage. Sally saved my tongue from bleeding by pouring beer directly on it from the 24-oz pitcher and I wonder if my lips are burning off. It really irked me that the other sailors asked me to stop screaming. Dang those Rednecks, my intestines are now a straight pipe filled with gaseous, sulphuric flames. I messed myself when I farted and I'm worried it will eat through the chair. Where’s the men’s room?Bar Fighting"Bar fights" are the most stupid sort of fights between angry people as they are liquored up and fight for the lamest reason or even perceiving the worse. Once I watched my loud‑mouth drunken destroyer sailor get beat up by a Coast Guard sailor he was making fun of, taunting him and saying the "Shallow Water Sailor" should give his bar stool to a real sailor. The smaller man cleaned his destroyer ass clock. After I got beat up badly trying to break up a bar fight in the Golden Palomino Bar on Norfolk's infamous East main Street while on my first Shore Patrol. Back in Second Division my friend, Ike, would teach me how to handle myself in Street and bar fights. Ike was a Squid sailor, tattooed, well built ladies man who looked Hollywood good in his uniform. You wouldn't know he was almost a professional fighter. I was in shape and did regular workouts, thought I was a tough guy, what with winning Milwaukee Street fights and defeating school bullies. I even did a little Golden Gloves - wasn't any good and got eliminated fast - my style was to attack fast and furious which against anyone good got you killed. Ike taught me that my brain was the best attribute in a fight, not my physical skills, plus I was skinny and weighed only 150 pounds, He said outsmarting the other guy and counter punching was the skill I needed to develop; it was all about the ability to think and having a sense of timing and distance. I learned first it’s better to talk my opponent down, if that fails, wait for him to attack me, then counter punch. It's all about brains over brawn. He told me not to get in the middle of a bar fight, "Let the bar fight winner go to the brig and the loser to the hospital. It worked . . . I still had my teeth after hundreds of bar fights. The bus ride back varied in quality depending on the time you left, a late return meant ridding with a large group of sailors in various states of drunkenness with random puking. If you missed the last bus back to NOB which left around 2:00 A.M. In the morning, you had to wait three hours before bus service resumed again at 5:00 A.M. It would get you back to your ship just in time for morning Quarters.The USOWhile in port in Norfolk, my buddies and I hung out at the Norfolk or Portsmouth USO, they were our home away from home, and frequented by many young ladies from the area. Dances were held ever week, ping pong and pool tables were available, and there were plenty of, pay phones, chess games, couches and chairs to wile away a lazy afternoon. During the weekly dances conducted by the Norfolk or Portsmouth Uses, I met many young and attractive girls whom I became friends with, but not romantically. I also met women during my weekend liberties in Washington, New York, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, but again, with no romantic affiliations. Sailors, especially if you could dance, would always meet nice young girls at USOs around the country.Leo’s Bar & GrillThe bus back to the naval base would stop right outside Leos’ First and Last Stop Bar which was just outside the Destroyer Submarine pier gate and it was usually our first stop after an exciting week of sea duty. Leo’s older son was an amateur boxer and one night brought Archie Moore into the place and introduced him around. Archie was light heavyweight world boxing champion between 1952 and 1959 and had one of the longest professional careers in the history of his sport. One of the most popular shooters was the "Tidy Bowl.” A Tidy Bowl is made with Blue Curacao and a splash of Pineapple juice, chilled, strained and poured into a shot glass. Mixed, then the bartender floated a raisin on the top. Sometimes the raisin floats and sometimes it would sink. Got so bad that the Navy guys were making bets on whether they would be a floater or a sinker. The little hole in the wall greasy spoon restaurant across the street from Leo's where I frequently finished up the night with a bacon and egg sandwich.“I Will Never Drink Again” Drunk as a skunk on 3 per cent lean beer, I ended up in the "Trade winds" where the SPs' (Shore Patrol) told one of my new found drinking buddies to walk me around the block a couple of times - after which I threw up on his shoulder. Soon, I was in the men's room puking my guts out, thinking I was going to die, and promising God if I didn't die I will never drink again. Welcome toNorfolk,VA. . . . Ugh!New YorkI didn’t like being stationed in Norfolk, a southern segregated Navy town full of evangelicalism, hate and racism, they were fighting the Civil Rights movement to the death, a Bible Belt town that didn't really believe in the scriptures, and one of the worst things is they didn't have real civilization like good Chinese take-out, but actually because it just felt mind-numbingly slow, full of under educated ignorant people in a town that was just boring. Segregation meant that there was nothing to do unless you went to private clubs for social activities and booze. New York had everything for everyone, no holds barred, and that was both good and bad - you had to be discriminating in what you choose to do because there were so much good and discontenting activities all around you in the streets of Manhattan. I guess that if you're a REAL New Yorker, born and raised here, you're going to be bored stiff anywhere else, places with few or no choices and limited freedoms and opportunities that could never match New York. The rest of the country seems like it's moving in slow motion on some heavy tranquilizers compared to New York.We were all young Navy men looking for love; go to sea for weeks chasing Russian submarines then come back to Norfolk looking to find that elusive femme fatale that must be somewhere nearby looking for a nice good looking young Destroyer sailor man like me. I soon found that not only was she elusive, but was non existent. Hell, we were in segregated and backward Norfolk, and they had signs around town that said “sailors keep off the grass," so where does a sailor go to meet women in a dry and segregated backward place where there are no dance clubs or night clubs and only a few dingy fast food restaurants with lousy Pizza. So, we went to Manhattan for weekend liberty searching for feminine companionship in Times Square - which we found in spades . . . The Big Apple was alive with all kinds of women, dance clubs and spicy night club adventures.In my early Navy days in Norfolk, when I didn't have a car or a ride for weekend liberty, I would take a Railways interstate bus to New York City. When the bus stopped for bathroom or food in the South, we left the bus and parted company into separate racial facilities, but when in the North we shared all facilities together. If you were pissed off at Jim Crow and thwarted the segregationist pattern, like entering a “colored” rest room, you could be arrested and put in the local jails, where you would be treated horribly, being crammed into tiny, filthy cells. Fed salt without water and sporadically beaten. In the South, the police didn't take kindly to whites who sympathized with the blacks. On one trip I met Mary Thomson, a young pretty Black girl who lived in Manhattan, and we became good friends.She was very smart and had a great personality and I wished I could date her when she visited her parents in Norfolk, but as things are in the South, I knew that was impossible. We could only breathe the fresh air of freedom when we crossed the Mason - Dixon Line.Once in the City, I would get a room at the YMCA in Times Square and explore the city, hitting the bars and night clubs like the Latin Quarter or Copacabana and the mid town dance emporiums, all places racially and ethnically integrated with beautiful women looking for hungry sailors. One of our favorite places was the Roseland Ball Room on 52nd Street. They used professional orchestras playing every kind of ball room music and even dance clubs from Harlem came down to jitterbug and swing dance with us. Eventually, I bought a 1952 Cadillac Deville and ran a Taxi service to New York, dropping sailors off at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 49th Street or Penn Station on 34th Street. Going back, I just sat in front of the Port Authority bus terminal with a sign and pick up sailors who are all around looking for a ride back to Norfolk. They paid my expenses plus a profit and it never cost me a cent for my New York trips, in fact, they helped me pay for my Cadillac.I had some friends from New York and they took me to their homes for weekends; Ted, my Jewish friend, lived in Mount Vernon and I went there many times. His dad, a German immigrant with one leg thanks to medical experiments in Hitler’s Jewish concentration camps, escaped anti Semitic Germany and opened an 8 X 15 foot newspaper and candy stall on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx; he put his children through college on his earning and bought a big house in Mount Vernon. Ted and his family loved the performing arts and they took to many performances at the Ballet, Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera. We attended works by Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, The New York Philharmonic, The New York Ballet, and the Metropolitan Opera. It was all a great a great education for me since I had never been exposed to such entertainment before. Sometimes I stayed at the decrepit and worn out Lincoln Hotel on Eighth Avenue and 44th Street. It was full of retired actors and musicians riding their last days sitting in the lobby and commiserating about the good-ole-days. It was perfect for sailors looking for a cheap room on weekend liberty in the Big Apple. We ate at Greek Diners most of the time, there was almost a classic quality to the New York diner experience - singing musicians/waitresses en all - and they are all over the City offering burgers, eggs and full meals at cheap prices. They all feature all-day breakfast specials, steaks, pork chops, southern fried chicken and of course, a bottomless cup of coffee, the real surprise about the menu here is that they offer every demographic - Jewish, Italian, Irish and everything else under the sun, including enormous desserts, all baked fresh on the premises daily.On one of my trips to New York I had a guy in my car who grew up on Coney Island and he said if I drove him home to Coney Island in Brooklyn he would treat me to a weekend on Mermaid Avenue and all carnival stuff that go with it. Herb told me about growing up on Coney Island that it was the best place hang out . . . Every thing was there on Mermaid Avenue; the Coney Island rides, The Cyclone Roller Coaster, Nathan’s, Steeplechase, the beach, the fishing pier, the Lowe’s on Surf Avenue, the Parachute Jump, the Wonder Wheel, Cotton Candy, Jelly Apples, Buttered Corn, Shatzkin’s Knishes, Faber’s, Playland, The Magic Carpet Fun House. We had Delis, Pizza Joints, Diners, and Italian Bakeries, Chinese restaurants, luncheonettes, Ice Cream shops and department stores.” Herb took me there and we did it all.New York City was a major port of call for freighters, cruise ships, and foreign navies. Consequentially, it had many bars geared to the tastes of salty sailors and our favorites were unlike no other watering holes or dens of iniquity inhabited by seagoing men. They had to meet strict standards to be in compliance with the acceptable requirement for a sailor beer‑swilling dump. The first and foremost requirement was a crusty old crossed anchors tattooed gal serving suds. She had to be able to wrestle King Kong to parade rest, be able to balance a tray with one hand; knock sailors out of the way with the other hand and skillfully navigate through a roomful of milling around drunks. The establishment itself had to have walls covered with ship and squadron plaques. It had to have the obligatory Michelob, Pabst Blue Ribbon and "Beer Nuts sold here" neon signs. An eight ball mystery beer tap handles and signs reading: "Your mother does not work here, so clean away your frickin' trash." "Keep your hands off the barmaid." "Don't throw butts in urinal."The bar had to have a brass foot rail and at least six Slim‑Jim containers, an oversized glass cookie jar full of Beer‑Nuts, a jar of pickled hard-boiled eggs that could produce rectal gas emissions that could shut down a sorority party, and big glass containers full of something called Pickled Pigs Feet and Polish Sausage. Only drunk Chiefs and starving Ethiopians ate pickled pigs’ feet and unless the last three feet of your colon had been manufactured by Midas, you didn't want to get any where near the Polish Napalm Dogs. Liberty bars were home and it didn't matter what country, state, or city you were in, when you walked into a good liberty bar, you felt at home. They were also establishments where 19-year-old kids received an education available nowhere else on earth. You learned how to make a two-cushion bank shot and how to toss down a beer and shot of Sun Torry known as a "depth charge."While many of our high school classmates were attending college, we were getting an education in the rolling seas in the North Atlantic or the exotic ports in the Mediterranean experiencing the orgasmic rush of a night cat shot, or the gut wrenching on a pitching deck. Our fate was the hours of tedium, experiencing the periodic discomfort of turbulence, marveling at the creation of St. Elmo's fire, and sometimes having our reverie interrupted with stark terror from crashing seas. But when we came ashore on liberty, we could rub shoulders with some of the finest men we would ever know, in bars our mothers would never have approved of, in saloons and cabarets that would live in our memories forever.Long live those liberties in the Caribbean and in the Med.! They were the greatest teachers about life and how to live it. And who can forget what Manhattan is most famous for . . . Swing Dancing. THERE are swinging parties in Manhattan nearly every night. The trick is in knowing where to find them. We have been to Swing 46 which is sandwiched between a Blarney Stone and a liquor shop on Eighth Avenue just south of Penn Station and up four flights of stairs was a scene invisible to most New Yorkers. Wild and sweaty, loud and crowded, it featured scores of smiling, ever-shifting couples energetically executing the kinetic choreography of the Lindy Hop, the Charleston, the jitterbug, the Balboa, the collegiate shag. Another great place is Sofia's at the Edison Hotel. The unwritten rule of these dance parties is to say yes to anyone and to smile regardless of what your partner does.Should I Ship Over?I was doing well in the Navy, was leading Petty Officer of Weapons (Fox) Division, had just passed Petty Officer First Class (E6) test and would get it if I reenlisted. I really liked the Navy military life and enjoyed my weapons electronics job, but I found out that my rate was so critical and hard to fill that I would have to spend six more years on my present Destroyer. I wanted a heavy cruiser like the Des Moines which would mean that my First Class Petty Officer Rank would provide lots of privileges as heavy cruisers had decent living quarters and hit more foreign ports since the bigger ships carried the Flag (Admiral) and they were always getting prime duty like world cruises. The old World War II Sumner Class Destroyers I served on are a rugged existence, life was constant sea duty, and after already doing three years at sea standing watches, going through thunder storms and hurricane rough seas, and general quarters chasing Russian submarines it was enough - I did visit twenty countries though! At that time there was no shipping over bonuses or incentives to reenlist, so I decided to get out of the Navy. I got a job as a main frame engineer with IBM, traveled the USA in all kind of interesting assignments and spent my career in ultra exciting Manhattan and taught grad school in Greenwich Village, . . . but many times I wished I stayed in the Navy . . . I loved it so!- 1960 - 1961 -IBM First Territory - Rural - Two State - Five CityAfter finishing first in my class and being trained for six months on all the IBM Unit Record equipment, I was given a two state, five-city territory consisting ofNorfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Franklin , and Elisabeth City, NC. I had the Commercial and Government customer accounts to maintain, consisting of every type of IBM Unit Record equipment. These machines were mechanical monsters and I excelled at diagnosis and repair. However, my biggest compliments from IBM came as a result of my customers’ relations ability and organizing skills in managing a large installed base of equipment spread over a very wide geographic area. In the morning, I would arrange service call response so that I could make one round robin trip and take care of all my customers. I was very self-sufficient and never once had to call for support and because I was able to fix any problem myself, I was soon sent too more training on Bank Proof machines - the machines that sort out and stamp bank checks as canceled. Every couple of months I was sent to more training on various punched card machines, sorters, collators, printers, and tabulating equipment. I really loved my job albeit as I traveled these small Southern towns, I had to fight the War of Northern Aggression a.k.a. Civil War all over again. With my manner speaking, it was no trouble for these (Redneck) Southerners to see I was from the North and they took special glee in baiting me, trying to provoke a reaction that would get me in trouble with my IBM bosses. With much diplomatic trepidation, I kept my mouth shut and did not make any comments they could take offense at, like their attitudes toward Blacks and race separation. Otherwise, I would have had massive amounts of grief from the ever-present racist red necks. What you would notice as one traveled the South was the terrible condition of the Black people, being separated from White by legalized and police enforced racial segregation and treated like dirt. Blacks didn't have good jobs and didn’t live in nice neighborhoods and you only saw them working in the lowest form of jobs as labors, dishwashers, and street cleaners. When you went downtown, they were not allowed to work in the department stores or banks, all those jobs were reserved for Whites. No matter what education a Black person had, they couldn't get a good job, they would have to travel north for good employment and for any respect. Even the Black Doctors and Lawyers professional class lived so far outside town in the country they couldn’t be accused of spoiling a White neighborhood.Life in NorfolkBack in Norfolk the South is segregated . . . And Mean! Since the Civil War, Southern institutions had made segregation and Jim Crow laws part of the main stream social and economic landscape. It was standard Southern thinking and tradition. I felt that many Southern white people supported segregation because their DNA was basically racist from four hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow, and even in these modern times, they were trained from childhood to believe in race separation based on White superiority. It was ingrained in all their evangelical religious, political, educational, and government institutions. Racial segregation and White superiority was in their bones and yet they were born again Christians . . . what a farce!Norfolk was a southern town and fighting to the death the struggle for Civil Rights. After all, they said, it - segregation - was in the Bible! We had a Black girl named Hattie Jackson working as a secretary in our IBM office. She was exceptionably beautiful and smart, but she had to live in the poor black section of town in terrible conditions because Blacks weren't allowed to live when their salary dictated they could afford better housing. Two of the accounts I took care of for IBM were the City Halls of Norfolk and Portsmouth. I listened constantly to the politicos on how they schemed to keep the Black man down. There was a Poll Tax and rigged tests you had to pass to vote. It asked impossible questions to ensure Blacks could not pass it. Of course if you were White, you automatically passed it, really didn’t have to take it. Unless you were a white racist, it was impossible to get elected in the South, as the populace feared racial integration and social modernity more than the plague.Getting Involved in PoliticsI was interested in politics and hung around the powers to be just to see how things got done and thought maybe I could make a difference in improving the plights of Blacks and modernize the South. When Jack Kennedy came on the scene running for President, I got involved even more. I supported Jack Kennedy for president and was actively doing voter registration inNorfolk and Portsmouth during the 1960 presidential campaign. It was interesting going door to door and asking for support from Southerners, who mostly didn’t know anything about Kennedy and typically voted for the most White, conservative, Anglo Saxon [WASP] candidate that supported segregation. I can't tell you how many times I heard "I am not voting for no Catholic or no damn Yankee!" Another thing I heard was "We switched to the Republicans in this family since Kennedy started talking about giving Civil Rights to them Neegras!" It was my first time getting involved with southern voters and I couldn't believe how ignorant / stupid and racist they were. I was at the political rally, when a chilly November morning in 1960, four days before Election Day, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy visited Norfolk on one of only two campaign stops in Virginia. Arriving at Norfolk Municipal Airport in his private airplane, "The Caroline," Kennedy traveled by motorcade in a bright red convertible to the athletic field at Granby High School, where I met him and he addressed a crowd of more than 12,000 supporters and I at the biggest political rally Norfolk had ever seen. Kennedy obligingly shook all our hands and signed autographs, then made a short speech before returning to the airport to fly to Roanoke.Free MasonsIn Milwaukee, my Grandmother was an Eastern Star and my uncle was a Mason. I belonged to the DeMolay during my high school years, was an officer and participated in the Annual Shriner’s Circus as a clown. So when my Virginia Dismal Swamp hunting and Chesapeake Bay fishing buddies wanted to sponsor me for the Portsmouth Masons, I said OK. The Freemasons, also known simply as Masons, is a fraternal philanthropic organization with lodges in almost every community of the world. Masons come from every profession and religious background. Joining the Masons’ benefits’ you in many ways. Members of the brotherhood take care of each other in difficult times. They also build lasting friendships in the community. Many prominent members of the founding generation‑‑George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and indeed 13 of the 39 signers of the Constitution‑‑had been members. I was investigated and accepted and did my various catechisms to become a Master Member. But my chapter didn’t accept blacks, they said Black people weren’t free born, but were slaves in the USA or had a slave history, so they didn’t meet the free born requirement for membership in the Masons. Blacks joined their version of the Masons called the Prince Hall organization. I couldn’t believe such stupidity and reminded them that in the ancient world, the whites were slaves to the Greeks and Romans. They didn’t know what I was talking about. It was like I was in a different world of full of organized racism and institutionalized accepted prejudice. During these formative years, I was involved in the Civil Rights struggle for Blacks and was disgusted with these ignorant views. I refused to be part of an organization that discriminated like that. After a few years I quit. . I almost had my 32nd degree too but it is what it is!- 1962 - 1966 -Second Territory - Norfolk Naval Base -Life at IBMWhereas I didn’t run into any Blacks working in computer rooms in my two states - five city rural territories, the Naval Base was inundated with Black computer operators and I quickly learned that the IBM culture had very negative feelings toward Blacks and the Civil Rights movement and were quite open with their racist attitudes. I had developed several friendships with Black computer operators that were highly resented by other IBM employees and naval base personnel. One day in the Naval Base cafeteria I sat at the Black lunch table to finish a conversation where I was analyzing a computer problem with a Black operator. Within the hour I was called down to the main office on 21st Street where I was told in no un certain terms to stay away from Blacks on any personal basis. My boss reminded me I was in the South and my ‘Yankee’ orientation was not going over well with the whites at the naval base. The moral compass in the South was off track and I felt I was in the land of the Devil and didn’t think I would stay here long for I valued and needed personal freedom for myself and others. But I wondered what IBM would do to my career. But as it turned out, IBM sent me on special assignments to the North many times, including teaching peripheral courses at the 8th Avenue Educational center in Manhattan . I learned to really like Manhattan for it exemplified the land of freedom to me and I volunteered for any temporary assignments there.IBM sent me to more schools and like the first one; I continued to finish first in every class. Every day, there were pop quizzes and weekly there were lengthy tests. Weekly grades were averaged and class ranking was posted. There was great praise heaped on those who stayed in the top three of the class. I finished first in my first IBM school and was able to finish in the top three of any of the dozens and 2 ½ years of IBM school I eventually went too. Being a top student, and being responsible and trusted, able to fix computers and get along with customers well, kept me coming back to more IBM schools and going on special assignments. IBM rewarded their best people with more education on their newest technology and entrusted them with their most mission critical assignments.But I continued to have problems with IBM over my liberal view of race relations. My boss chewed me out several times because I was considered to be too friendly with Blacks at the Navy Base. This highly upset some whites who called my office complaining, saying “I was a disgrace to the White race, “explaining “after all the South was segregated and I was exhibiting a friendly attitude toward Neegras.” Being a Northerner, I told Harry that I didn’t believe in racial segregation and Harry always told me, “When in Rome act like the Romans do.”Life in the 1960s SouthThe Civil War is like a mountain range that guards all roads into the South: you can’t go there without encountering it. Specifically, you can’t go there without addressing a question that may seem as if it shouldn’t even be a question - to wit: what caused the war? One hundred years after the event, the Confederate Flag still flies south of the Mason Dixon line and southerners don't think the Civil War had anything to do with slavery - regardless that Jefferson Davis and all the seceding states stated slavery was the reason for the war. It was the 1960s and African Americans were waging epic struggles for civil rights that altered white Southerners’ worlds that reacted with hostility. They feared social and political change, and grappled uncomfortably with the fact that their way of life seemed gone for good.The “Southern way of life” encompassed a distinctive mix of economic, social, and cultural practices — symbolized by the fragrant magnolia, the slow pace of life, and the sweet mint julep, a popular alcoholic beverage. It also contained implications about the region’s racial order - one in which whites wielded power and blacks accommodated. Centuries of slavery and decades of segregation cemented a legal and political system characterized by white dominance. By the 20th century, “Jim Crow” had become shorthand for legalized segregation. Massive inequalities marked every facet of daily life. Blacks always addressed whites as “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” though whites seldom bestowed such courtesy titles on African Americans. Blacks labored in white homes as nannies, cooks, maids, and yardmen. Whites expected docility; black resistance seemed unfathomable.Through the long years of slavery and segregation, white Southerners produced and absorbed cruel stereotypes about African Americans: that they were unclean and shiftless, unintelligent and oversexed. Blacks became either clowns or savages, with no area in between. Whites often defined themselves — their status, identities, daily lives, and self-worth — in relation to these concocted notions about African Americans. If blacks were submissive and infantile, whites were strong and dignified. Blackness meant degradation; to be free was to be white. The civil rights struggle threatened to hoist African Americans up and out of this social “place” that whites had created for them. White Southerners would find blacks in their schools and neighborhoods, their restaurants, and polling places. Many whites feared this vision of the Southern future. Many white Southerners came to believe that African Americans abided - and even enjoyed — their roles as second-class citizens. When the civil rights movement tore through the South in the 1950s and 1960s, it exposed the falsity of such beliefs. At long last, African Americans voiced their discontent and demanded dignity. Black rebellion clashed so sharply with white perceptions that many disbelieved their own eyes. And as grassroots organizers led a mass movement for black equality, whites rose up in resistance.The U.S. Supreme Court, with its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, ensured that Southern schools would become the first battlegrounds. The court ruled that segregated schools stamped black children with a “badge of inferiority,” and that Southern states must integrate their schools “with all deliberate speed.”Southern politicians denounced the court ruling. In language that played upon whites’ underlying racial fears and stoked contempt for the federal government, senators such as Harry Byrd of Virginia claimed the court had overstepped its bounds. White Southerners tried to circumvent the order, and rallied to beat back desegregation at every turn. Local leaders and businessmen organized themselves into Citizens Councils, groups that visited economic reprisal upon any blacks — or whites — who dared advocate integration. In 1957, a federal court ordered integration of the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools. Nine blacks were selected to enroll in Little Rock’s Central High School, but Governor Orval Faubus blocked the students from the schoolhouse door. After initial reluctance, President Dwight Eisenhower mobilized a battle group of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to enforce the court order by escorting the “Little Rock Nine” to class. When several African-American teenagers finally arrived at Central, they encountered a vicious white mob.Parents jeered the incoming students and the federal marshals who protected them. Enraged white Southerners deplored a scene they thought had died with Reconstruction: that of federal troops protecting blacks’ civil rights in the South. Millions of white Southerners found champions in politicians such as Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, who both cultivated and exploited for political gain a deep anti-civil-rights sentiment. In his 1963 inaugural address, Wallace declared: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He became the very picture of white resistance. Members of the Ku Klux Klan — a violent organization driven by racism, anti-Semitism, and nativism — persisted in a similar delusion: that the bloodshed they inflicted could postpone the day of racial equality. In 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, Klansmen bombed a black Baptist church and killed four girls. The next year, Klansmen in Philadelphia, Mississippi, murdered three civil rights workers and buried them under an earthen dam. Such gruesome violence sickened many white Southerners, and rifts emerged within the white South. Still, a majority desired the same end — a return to the nostalgic days when blacks doffed their hats to whites and acquiesced to their roles in the segregated Jim Crow order.The Civil Rights Act integrated businesses and public facilities. Suddenly, whites had to serve blacks in their stores and dine beside them at restaurants. Such changes shattered the rhythm of white southerners’ daily lives. Many whites denounced the “Civil Wrongs Bill,” holding that such federal laws imperiled their own rights. They clung to the notion that rights were finite, and that as blacks gained freedom, whites must suffer a loss of their own liberties. On the precarious seesaw of Southern race relations, whites thought they would plummet if blacks ascended. Throughout black-majority areas, the Voting Rights Act granted African Americans a stunning new power. In these citadels of the old slave south, where whites were outnumbered by a ratio of almost four-to-one, blacks voted some of their own into political office. In several rural locales, like Macon County and Greene County, Alabama, African Americans suddenly wielded political power. Before the civil rights years, few whites could have conceived of such transformations. By the 1970s, the previously unthinkable became political reality. The civil rights movement forever altered white Southerners’ everyday lives, upended their traditional attitudes about blacks, and, in some towns, shifted the balance of political power. It stripped the veneers of docility from African Americans and invested them with a new dignity. Life seemed unrecognizable to many white Southerners. Confronted with a reality they had barely contemplated, some whites retaliated with any weapons at their disposal. Others attempted to avoid the upheaval; they tried to maintain cherished ways of life even as the ground shifted beneath their feet. In the end, evasion proved impossible. While whites fought the civil rights movement with varying strategies of resistance, few escaped its long reach.The Ku Klux Klan advocated white supremacy and employed terrorism and violence against African Americans, Jews, Catholics, and others. Extremism on one side often handed victory to the other. The Klan’s horrifying violence pricked white America’s conscience and, ultimately, moved the nation closer to passage of epic civil rights legislation — the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. When President Lyndon Johnson, himself a native Texan and a Southerner, helped usher the legislation through Congress, white Southerners felt betrayed.In the end, the civil rights movement transformed the South and the nation. As it changed Southerners’ lives and minds, some whites felt they had been liberated — freed from the mandate to degrade and oppress, free from the roles they assumed in the constricting racial hierarchy. Into the 21st century, however, racial inequality continues to haunt American life. Black Americans remain disproportionately impoverished, imprisoned, and undereducated. Yet many ghosts of the Jim Crow South have vanished. After the civil rights movement, African Americans could attend integrated schools, they ran for — and won — political office and they lived with a dignity that the culture of Jim Crow had denied. These changes also seeped into white Southern life and reshaped its very contours. The civil rights movement pushed Southerners, black and white alike, further along the path toward racial equality.The south is several dichotomies, it had lots of unredeemable racist red necks (not all red necks were racist) who ran around burning crosses and wearing white hooded sheets terrorizing and murdering blacks and whites who sought the integration cause; they are stupid types, uneducated, violent and hateful and they seem to run things. It has middle class whites who let the racists do their thing and are afraid of racial integration and fight it in every way they can, voting for segregationist governors and legislatures who expose lots of hate talk; and then there are the very few who realize the south is wrong about segregation and will pay a price for it later on, but think integration has to move slow since there is such a great divide between black and white. Interestingly, all go to the local evangelical church, profess being conservative Christians, and use scriptures to justify their racism, violence and efforts to keep the south segregated. The south is the Bible belt, southerners are serious about religion, but it hasn't made nay difference in their moral character, but has made the situation worse since southerners use the bible to justify their nasty racial beliefs and actions. The south is also about hunting, fishing and boating. Everyone has a collection of guns and many carry pistols. It's an easy life, normally with little stress, things and Negroes are in their place, and society is organized, simple, and not pretentious. There is no night life since the south is dry, no liquor allowed unless you know a boot and they seem to be in every neighborhood. There were no big national type circuses, but there were plenty of those carnivals and side shows coming to town and setting up in a local grassy field - all seating segregated of course, but they were very popular. Most of the big entertainers stayed up north to play to integrated audiences, but sometimes a famous black performer (Ray Charles) would come to a black church and perform. The south was totally without the sophistication of the north, they were at the bottom of American civilization but that is just the why they wanted it. They constantly complained about Yankees and how they think, their big cities with subways, sky scrappers and night clubs frightened them, and all that racial mixing stuff at work and in the clubs just appalled them.Living in a legally racially segregated (de jure) society was like being imprisoned in a dysfunctional and poorly maintained county jail headed by a vicious and corrupt warden. To keep a dog on a leash, you have to hold the leash and both ends suffer psychotic damage, albeit one end more than the other, it is a degrading experience for both ends. White southerners couldn’t comprehend they were putting bars around their own existence, lowering their own standard of living with racial segregation, and after all, the Blacks were basically no different from them. It wasn’t like you were comparing rocket scientists with ditch diggers; everyone lived basically the same lives, talked the same lingo, ate the same foods, listened to the same music and went to drum beating apostolic churches. What were these White Southern idiots doing? Were they crazy? But as stupid as it sounds, racial segregation was widely supported by White southerners. A local Norfolk T.V. broadcast newsman who lived behind me, Leroy Van Camp, and Reverend Wyatt from my Sweet Haven Baptist, said the Civil Rights movement was a Communist conspiracy and the Federal government was Fascist for trying to desegregate the South. News TV Broadcasters would actually say that crap on the evening news. And worse, Rev. Wyatt’s sermons constantly preached that Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were communists and the Lord was the ‘Great Segregator.’The South was more than a hundred years behind the North in terms of industrial development and municipal civility because of their racist polices, no corporations or immigrants wanted to be there, and the South was actually in a state of great social anarchy and was economically poor compared to the North. The world was asking, “Were Southern Whites just simply stupid in addition to being racist?” “Do these ignorant Red Necks really think they were better than the Blacks?” Well, at least they have the White part of Heaven to look forward too. In time, I became more concerned with the Black struggle as the civil rights movement rippled through the South and eventually got involved in demonstrations, but mostly I just spoke up at meetings. I got into tremendous trouble for these actions with IBM and my family. My wife had classic southern sympathies and all my friends were racists both at work and in church. Because of my empathy for the Black struggle for equal rights, I was slowly and surely ostracized from any close personal relationships.For the second time I sat at the Black table to finish a conversation I was having about a computer problem and the shit hit the fan. Within the hour I was called down to the main office where I was told in no un certain terms to stay away from Blacks. My boss said there were to be no conversations with Blacks and definitely not to sit with them at their table in the cafeteria. I was told I was a disgrace to the White Race. I told him to fuck himself. My career at IBM looked like it was on hold, or maybe that is one reason IBM sent me on so many special assignments up North. Later, I found out that some of the IBM customer engineers were complaining to IBM management about my friendly relationships with Blacks. They complained I treated Blacks with too much respect, like they were equal. You were supposed to talk down to Blacks, and say things like “COME HERE BOY.”At that moment I was ready to leave IBM and get out of the South! Often, it looked like my career at IBM was on hold, or maybe over. My coworker said, “Read your Bible, white men were not to treat blacks equally.” Even some of the blacks were saying to me, “What is wrong you man, you are not up North!”1963 - The Year of TurmoilBirminghamCivil Rights were afoot and then came along Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister, who was a driving force in the push for racial equality in the 1950's and the 1960's. In 1963, King and his staff focused onBirmingham,Alabama. They marched and protested nonviolently, raising the ire of local officials who sicced water cannon and police dogs on the marchers, whose ranks included teenagers and children. The bad publicity and breakdown of business forced the white leaders of Birmingham to concede to some anti segregation demands. King adhered to Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence. In 1955 he began his struggle to persuade the US Government to declare the policy of racial discrimination in the southern states unlawful. The racists responded with violence to the black people's nonviolent initiatives. Martin Luther King dreamed that all inhabitants of the United States would be judged by their personal qualities and not by the color of their skin. In April 1968 he was murdered by a white racist. The battle lines are drawn in Birmingham, Alabama, that was, in 1960, "probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States." Although the city's population of almost 350,000 was 60% white and 40% black, Birmingham (as most southern cities) had no black police officers, firefighters, sales clerks in department stores, bus drivers, bank tellers, or store cashiers. Black secretaries could not work for white professionals. Jobs available to blacks were limited to manual labor inBirmingham's steel mills, work in household service and yard maintenance, or work in black neighborhoods. When layoffs were necessary, black employees were the first to go. The unemployment rate for blacks was two and a half times higher than for whites. The average income for blacks in the city was less than half that of whites. Significantly lower pay scales for black workers at the local steel mills were common. Racial segregation of public and commercial facilities throughoutJefferson County was legally required, covered all aspects of life, and was rigidly enforced. Only 10 percent of the city's black population was registered to vote in 1960. The Civil Rights plan called for direct nonviolent action to attract media attention to "the biggest and baddest city of the South," with a variety of nonviolent methods of confrontation, including sit-ins at libraries and lunch counters, kneel‑ins by black visitors at white churches, and a march to the county building to mark the beginning of a voter‑registration drive. Most businesses responded by refusing to serve demonstrators. Some white spectators at a sit‑in at a Woolworth's lunch counter spat upon the participants.A significant factor in the success of the Birmingham campaign was the personality of its contentious Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor. Described as an "arch‑segregationist" by Time magazine, Connor asserted that the city "ain't gonna segregate no niggers and whites together in this town [sic].” He also apparently believed that the Civil Rights Movement was a Communist plot, and after the churches were bombed, Connor blamed the violence on local blacks. Birmingham's government was set up in such a way that it gave Connor powerful influence. In 1958, police arrested ministers organizing a bus boycott. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) initiated a probe amid allegations of police misconduct for the arrests, Connor responded that he "[hadn't] got any damn apology to the FBI or anybody else,” and predicted, "If the North keeps trying to cram this thing [desegregation] down our throats, there's going to be bloodshed." In 1961, Connor delayed sending police to intervene when Freedom Riders were beaten by local mobs. The police harassed religious leaders and protest organizers by ticketing cars parked at mass meetings and entering the meetings in plainclothes to take notes. The Birmingham Fire Department interrupted such meetings to search for "phantom fire hazards.” President John F. Kennedy later said of him, "The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln."The Sit-InsState and local ordinances known as Jim Crow laws in Southern states prohibited interracial interaction in most areas of public life: restaurants, schools, courtrooms, buses and trains, movie theaters, even reform schools and of course - dating and marriage. Starting 50 years ago students across the South decided to change that. The tactic became known as sit-ins, and in 1960, tens of thousands of students across the South were doing it — protesting racial discrimination that had scarred their parents, risking their futures to try to ensure a better one for their children. Within days, sit-ins were happening all over the South.The tactic they chose was simple: They sat at lunch counters and waited to be served. The stores refused to serve them, and the students were arrested and hauled off to jail, sometimes after being beaten and spat on by white mobs. Sit-ins had been tried in more than a dozen cities starting in 1958 in Wichita , but none ignited passions like the one in Greensboro . By the end of February, sit-ins had taken place in 31 cities and in 71 by March, according to Branch. By October, sit-ins had occurred in 112 Southern cities.Fifty years ago, the stores along Granby in Norfolk and High Street in Portsmouth, specifically, their lunch counters and the city itself were the site of a battle that also played out in dozens of other cities in the South. They were segregated and Blacks were forbidden to sit at 'White only' lunch counters. The fight pitted black college students and a few of their white peers against the city's white power structure and its downtown merchants over the right to sit down and eat lunch. They held mock sit-ins, learning not to respond if attacked. Many black parents feared for their children's future — and their lives. Angry white youths heckled, beat and spat on them. They went to Woolworth, made small purchases, then sat down at the lunch counters and asked to be served. "We don't serve Neegras here." They waited, as other shoppers stared. The students sat for a few hours, then left. They returned again and again over the next two weeks, adding a fourth store, Grants, then a fifth, Walgreen's. For the white community, there was shock, anger, overwhelmingly negative feelings. The business community adopted a very steel-backed approach, rigid and very negative. Their numbers grew with each subsequent sit-in. After a few weeks, the city had decided to crack down and Portsmouth police arrested 81 students. However, after months of behind-the-scenes negotiations, Woolworth, Grant's, Walgreen's and Cain-Sloan served black customers at their lunch counters for the first time.The lunch counter of 1960 was the equivalent of fast-food restaurants today. Hamburger chains were just beginning to appear on the American landscape. Ray Kroch had opened his first McDonald's about five years earlier; Burger King had gone national just the year before. People wanting a sandwich or a hamburger popped over to the lunch counter of department stores, drugstores and five-and-dime stores to have a bite. But Blacks couldn't eat there! The South was as segregated by race as any city in South Africa during apartheid. The sit-ins were the real starting point of the protests of the 1960s.The Black Baptist PastorIt’s a wonder how small little happenings in ones life can endure major changes, but a good example was my learning how to rebuild car engines. I had this old 1948 Plymouth whose engine had conked out and I was going to try to rebuild it, learning as I went. I figured, “What could I lose, the car was junk anyway.” I had the head off and was trying to get the pistons out and was over at the local Car Parts dealer getting some tools and asking for advice. Another customer standing there, a Black man, offered some expert advice, in fact he came to my house, but as was the custom for Black people coming to a White person’s house, came to the back door. (“What” I thought) I learned that he was a Baptist preacher in Church land living in a shanty town off of Route 17, which was not too far from my house on Hatton Point Road. I will tell you this that man knew his cars! That was the beginning of a relationship with him where I took him as my mentor in learning about car engine repair. One day I am at his shanty house getting some advice and sitting at his kitchen table having a cup of coffee. He asked me if I could take his teenage daughter to the grocery store to pick up something and I said sure. She got in the front seat and off we went, it was only just around the corner at a shopping center on Route 17 in Church land. As I pulled onto a highway, a State Trooper pulled us over. With his pot belly and strong Southern Accent, he said, “What are you doing with this Neegra woman in your front seat?” I explained I was taking her to the grocery store. “Boy, don’t you know that you never ride a Neegra woman in your front seat, looks like your taking her out, and you know that is illegal in Virginia.” “By the way, you talk funny, are you a god-damned Yankee?” This went on and finally he let me go after the girl got in the back seat. Do I have to tell you how I felt?Sweet Haven Baptist ChurchI belonged to the Sweet Haven Baptist church pastored by Reverend Wyatt and what a God-fearing, Bible-toting, sugary-sweet and loving bunch of racists most of them were, including Reverend Wyatt himself who was the worst racist of all, and a Pastor at that. They were all bible thumping died in the wool segregationists and hid behind the scriptures for the worst sins man perpetuated on another man. I heard all about Neegras was this, the Jews that, Yankees were worse for trying to change the South, and even the Catholics had special nasty names. Bible thumping - sweet scripture talking - bigots, it was a very hateful southern society. Again, I tried to forget about it, to all these horrible attitudes. Something to live with while down South I reasoned. After all, it seemed the hated everyone not like them. But little did I know then that all this was burning a hole inside me and that it would explode later.Jr. Chamber of CommerceI joined the Portsmouth Jr. Chamber of Commerce and became quite active. There were many worthwhile causes we participated in. Meetings were held once a month and were accompanied with famous speakers. Being a Military town, many of these speakers were Admirals, but many were local politicians who openly advocated segregation in the face of the Civil Rights movement being conducted at the time. I associated with all the local politicos and military types.Ku Klux KlanOne time I made speech on an HUD project being considered for downtown Portsmouth, which was nothing but shacks inhabited by Black people. Whites were against raising this ghetto and replacing it with decent housing because they did not want conditions for Blacks to improve. I was for the project and was threatened with a ride out of town and a beating by the Ku Klux Klan. I invited them to try it now and I was prepared to beat the Holy loving shit out of them on the spot but they declined and left saying they knew where I lived. I started packing my P38 Luger then. “Fucking Southern White trash cowards!Ms America Beauty PageantThe Jr. Chamber of Commerce sponsored the local Miss America beauty pageant, which afforded me the opportunity to participate in several Miss America Pageants as a Judge and organizer. I found out that only White girls could participate even though the Black girls I had erroneously evaluated were more qualified.Civil Rights Movement AcceleratesThe 1960's were rolling down into the volatile Civil Rights Movement. I would be on the main streets of Norfolk and Portsmouth when the Blacks were claiming their rights for access to public facilities. The police would usually set the dogs upon them and swing away with night sticks. One day as I tried to enter a Bank in Portsmouth there was a street demonstration at the next door Woolworth concerning Blacks being unable to sit at the Lunch counter. The police came, set the dogs on the demonstrators, and swung away with their night sticks. I was caught in the middle and got hit by the police and bitten by the dogs. This experience got me really angry at racist Whites and I started to vocally take the sides of Blacks in the South. Soon, I had become a Civil Rights activist and would pay the piper for it too.Race, Politics, and ReligionThe Southern men I knew didn’t discuss politics, race or religion, nevertheless they were family oriented, religious and very patriotic. Most had military backgrounds and served in either World War II or Korea. They were matter of fact, down to earth realists who lived close to the land and spent most of their life fishing, hunting and drinking, typically working in low paid blue collar jobs. They didn’t try to live fancy, appreciated hard work and perseverance and loathed the welfare culture prevalent in the North. The South was racially segregated and they supported this separation of the races, but on the other hand, they never personally treated Blacks poorly. I could never understand this racial thing in the South and didn’t believe in racial segregation, thinking it was morally wrong and kept the South from acceptance in the modern world and keeping away industry, modern technology and good jobs. I like Black people and their culture and I worked for integration within my Jr. Chamber of Commerce Chapter and Sweet Haven Baptist Church and was often ostracized for the effort. My hunting partners knew of my sympathies and kidded me about being a Nigger lover, but it stopped there otherwise I would have gotten angry and taken them to task.March on Washington for Jobs and FreedomOn August 28, 1963, more than 250,000 Americans gathered in Washington, D.C., for a political rally known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Organized by a number of civil rights and religious groups, the event was designed to shed light on the political and social challenges African Americans continued to face across the country. The march, which became a key moment in the growing struggle for civil rights in the United States, culminated in Martin Luther King Mr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a spirited call for racial justice and equality. Many thought the event would descend into violence, but it did not. There were 5,000 police officers, National Guardsmen and Army Reservists present, but no marchers were arrested, and no incidents concerning marchers were reported. The march was the culmination of the civil rights movement, and it is credited for helping spur lawmakers to pass the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.I was working TAD at the Treasury Department and went to the march. It was a mind bending terrific experience! I stepped out of the building and made my way to 16th street. The first thing I saw were hundreds of black men and women with an occasional white person linked arm in arm forming a row stretching curb to curb across the street. They came row after row after row with no end in sight, and they were in unison chanting a lilting one word song, “Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, and Freedom!”The melody is in my memory even today, and occasionally over the years I have burst into the compelling chant: Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, Freedom. I looked into the faces and eyes of those forming each line, passing as it were in review. I wondered who they were, where they came from, how far was their journey, why were they really here? Each person was different and yet each line was the same with their expressions positive and exuding a pleasant demeanor and happiness in the moment. I began to move upstream beside the flow of humanity and walked along the mall all the way to the Capitol. People were lining the street on both sides of the march. Everywhere I saw a sea of people and parked empty buses. I wanted to see everything, to absorb the moment, to try and understand what was going on. I went from the Capitol back along the mall and wandered among the throngs in the general direction of the Washington Monument looking for where the focus was for this day. I looked at the people individually and collectively, never feeling the least bit uncomfortable as I moved among them until at last I found myself on a rise of ground. So I stood there, literally in the shadow of the Washington Monumenton a warm summer’s day, and saw the crowd focused on the men clustered before the microphones toward the Lincoln Memorial. I remember being struck immediately by the sea of faces and the variety of people and signs: civil rights organizations, labor unions young and old. I believe that the march started somewhat abruptly as we headed toward the Lincoln Memorial. I remember singing, chanting, holding hands with strangers - a sense of great joy and optimism.I had reached the Memorial somewhat early and remember watching the program from the left side of the reflecting pool as you face the Memorial. The speeches and songs all blur together for me. I remember Marian Anderson, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul, and Mary and Joan Baez singing. The speeches run together. I'm pretty sure that I heard John Lewis, A. Phillip Randolph and Walter Reuther, although I could not say what any of them, other than Lewis, one of my heroes, said. I remember the songs, and those who sang that day, Mahalia Jackson, Odetta, Peter Paul and Mary, the Freedom Singers. I remember Joan Baez leading "Oh, Freedom," and "We Shall Overcome." The songs carried the message of the day. I was awed by the size of the crowd, and the feeling of celebration. We were young and old, black and white, teachers and students, religious leaders and trade union workers.I remember hearing Dr. Martin Luther King speak. How his voice, like the voices of the singers, filled me with hope, and a deep, abiding sense that change wasn't only possible, but inevitable. I listened as the man spoke. I didn’t know what the genesis of his message was, but I had heard enough sermons growing up in a Christian family to know I was hearing a great message, perhaps even a sermon. As I heard the concluding words, I knew what I was hearing would have impact, many aspects of which vibrated with the core beliefs of Christianity: love, brotherhood and sisterhood, equality and freedom for all. Some of the words I remember hearing with great clarity were: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”Those words immediately struck a chord for me, because we all have a dream, and part of the foundation of those dreams is our equality before our Creator. The following kind of jumped out at me as he said, “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” and the remarkable closing words, “And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.’”It was what I call a foundational experience. It was my first in depth experience with black America. It was very positive. In the years that followed, the news often featured things people were doing to change the status of black people in this country. Despite the opinions and prejudices that might have been held by anyone around me at the time, I always saw the black community’s struggle through the lens of that uplifting day in Washington. They were part of America , and they desired freedom. He held my attention to his last word.The conclusion of that great speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. brought completeness to my experiences that day, and I returned to the office in time to “quit” and walk to my hotel. The sights, sounds, and emotions of that day have remained with me over the years along with a certain amount of pride in the fact that, as Walter Cronkite would say in his 50s weekly TV show, “You were there.” Yep, me and Forest Gump! I was there! The next year, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.The march itself has had a profound effect on me. I continued in movements for racial justice, peace and equality. That day in Washington left me with a sense of optimism about the possibility of real change, a sense that has been challenged in recent years with the rise (again) of bigotry and hatred in the USA ...Historically, the March on Washington broadened the base of the civil rights movement. The March was not a Negro action; it was an action by Negroes and whites together. Not just the leaders of the Negro organizations, but leading Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish spokesmen called the people into the streets. And Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, white and black, responded. This response obviated the danger that the revolt would be an argument between Negroes and whites over a few jobs. It began the process of focusing attention where it belongs: on the problem of what kind of economic and political changes are required to make it possible for everyone to have jobs. The success of the March also put the Kennedy administration on the spot. Even newspapers which had opposed the March right up until the day it took place turned around afterwards and asked Kennedy to come through for us. But Kennedy cannot come through as easily as some people seem to think. For there is no way to satisfy the Negro and his allies under "politics as usual." Our demands cannot be met so long as the Dixiecrats maintain their political and economic power. And their power is maintained not only through the well-known coalition with Republicans, but through alliances and compromises with their fellow Democrats as well.When Dr. King was murdered, I was upset. It was senseless. He was a powerful, powerful speaker who knew how to use words to great effect. Looking back on it, his speech at the march on Washington was the first time I saw a real bridge between religion and politics. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was basically a pastor and had strong Christian beliefs, and he brought that into the political arena to help accomplish his goals.New York IBMersAs it turned out, I spent many years working for IBM traveling around the USA on special assignments, especially to Manhattan where the world’s biggest applications lived. New York IBM people were far different from the southern IBM types I worked with in Norfolk at the naval base. First of all, many of the New Yorkers were black, Asian, Latino, something that you wouldn’t see in the south for many years. Second, they were all ethnic, young and crazy, highly educated graduates from Ivy League universities where brains, having big city competitive skills, and where strong and agreeable personalities counted, something you would never see in the south, where being white, seriously religious and politically conservative was the standard mantra. Bless me, Lord I almost forgot, if you had lots of guns, hunted and fished, that counted too.One thing that is very different is the societal differences between the girls in the North and the girls in the South as many southern women (and men) are still fighting the war and blaming the north for all their woes. And talking about women, personally, I have noticed that women in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, etc. all have big hair and use perfume and heavy makeup, while in New York women tend to look natural, using minimal makeup, with little to no perfume and having small natural hair. I was discovering that women in New York can be really out there, wearing mini skirts and braless halters, but that doesn’t mean at all they are easy. They didn’t dress up like they were in a fashion show, but in more practical terms for a big city, being on subways and walking a lot on their tennis shoes. Northern women, in my growing experience, were very independent and professed to prefer "men to be men, and women to be women," which I suppose indicates a preference for traditional gender roles. They also liked well educated and well-employed men with a sense of humor. They didn't like bigots and religious freaks who tended to be weird preachy types with horrible judgmental attitudes. I thought they would never like southern women then.Race is a determining factor on why the south is so different than the rest of the USA, fundamentalist religion and ultra conservative politics are two more. I found in the north, education and career types were determining factors, basically corporate verses union jobs, and the mix of people in every career removed race considerations and no one thought of religion or politics - everyone just got along. And no one liked assholes, those pontificating types who rule their space with blasts of ideology crap depicting their spaced out views on the world. But there is significant North - South regional differences based on rural and urban life styles. When I lived in a rural community there was a jar of tea on my porch, the elderly attendant at the gas station filled my car for me, people talked to each other while waiting in line, people waved to each other on the road, shops and restaurants closed on Sunday, everyone looked out for each other's kids. When I moved to an urban setting in the same state most of those things disappeared.One good thing, I had been spending so much time in Dismal Swamp hunting deer and on Chesapeake Bay fishing with the boys that I had forgotten what a real New York bar was like. New York was nothing like dull dismal Norfolk.New York was a colorful universe, diverse and full of excitement. My first night in the City I took the F train to Greenwich Village and walked around. This was so different from Norfolk’s decrepit downtown streets. I marveled at the exciting street scenes filled with artists selling their paintings, small coffee shops with tables out on the side walk, thousands of interesting looking people walking around, and the hundreds of clubs/bars/restaurants that dotted the area where you could eat, dance, and engage in interesting conversations with intelligent people while drinking espresso in a street cafe.Every night I walked around Times Square, often I would take the F Train to the Village and walk around too. If we had known that the scrawny guy onstage at that Greenwich Village folk club might someday amount to something, I would have talked about it. It was Bob Dylan when Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg held court at house parties in Greenwich Village, or Andy Warhol at his studio, the Factory. It was the time when the hippies in Greenwich Village were the incubator for the cultural movements that shook the world. Walking around Greenwich Village you can experience both the Bohemian lifestyles of those long ago and the newly present boutique stores and cafes. I wondered around the Village looking for Jazz and street cafes where I could get an espresso. Several times I went into the au Go Go was which was an oasis for folk music, jazz, comedy, blues and rock. The club was the first New York venue for the Grateful Dead, and Joni Mitchell. Richie Havens and the Blues Project were weekly regulars.I found Washington Square Park , a place I would later have an office next to and have lunch in, and fell in love with the place. Some of the best memories are in this park. It's full of NYU students, political dissidents and demonstrators, and people watchers looking for a new adventure. Like talking to an old man dressed in all pink wearing a rubber pig nose. It’s always a must hang out spot for me every time I'm in the City. Get a couple of sandwiches from Mammon's, find a spot and absorb the scene. There are always people around -- students, musicians, artists, tourists, and NYers looking for a place to hang out and enjoy the sun. During the day the square is bustling with people and it's always fun to see what the theater majors at NYU are up to. It's a terrific people watching spot day or night when you're out with friends or with a date. At night, the park is mellower. The musicians are still out, creating a soundtrack. The music, twinkling lights and fountain lend a romantic backdrop for dreamers and lovers.Walking around Washington Square Park, I heard some really down to earth music blaring out to the street and I went into a place called the Monkey's Paw. It was filled to the brim with people of every type, every color, in all modes of dress. After I got a drink and settled in, I met this young and gorgeous Black girl who grabbed my arm, and led me off to a small sitting room where we talked. I was totally shocked! Never in a million years would the old South have a place like this. She was Black, and I was White. My God, they put you in jail for race mixing down South. It scared me to death, I expected the police to arrive any minute and arrest me. She laughed when she heard of my fears. Not in Manhattan, she exclaimed. Needless to say, it didn't take me long to give up my inhibitions and start thinking and acting like a New Yorker.The Roseland Ballroom is in New York City 's theater district on West 52nd Street. I love to dance and found my way to Roseland where a thousand people gathered, standing around listening to the orchestra, and waiting for something to be played they wanted to dance to. Girls were all eager to dance, and what surprised me, was the Ballroom expertise most of them had. The crowd was interring racial and many dances were like the dance styles made famous in the old Savoy Ballroom in Harlem . The music covered all genres, Guy Lombardo, Sammy Kay, with The Fox Trot, Waltz, Rumba, Cha Cha, Mambo, Merengue, and Tango. Dancers showed off fancy footwork and twirled until they were dizzy.After living in the south for years, I had acquired a slight southern Virginia accent (I had to for survival in Virginia ) and New Yorkers would refer to my Southern dialect as a “hick accent.” The first few weeks, these New Yorkers had fun with me, being the only southerner in the IBM group. Believe it or not, I really was a southerner in many ways too, besides working in high technology; I had more than twenty guns, became part of the southern gun culture, had lots of “Good-ole-boy” friends, and hunted in Dismal Swamp and fished on Chesapeake Bay for years. But indeed, the south was a strange and violent place to me and I did not like many aspects of its culture. They would regularly mimic me by yakking like a hillbilly and excessively using words like “y’all” and “Coke” to mock me. So I accused them of using the phrase “youse guys” all the time which takes a simple phrase and makes it complicated, it’s like they are all born with a natural speech impediment. It didn't seem to make any difference that I was one of those southerners who fought for social equality for the blacks and had been to the March on Washington last year to hear Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech.”Finally, I loved nothing more than when they asked the expected “Why do youse guys hate Black people?” Ah, all right, I had to admit it! Southerners used the term “Neegras” and were a little racist - some were really racist and mean too, it’s in their blood, goes back to slavery and Jim Crow, but they were not born wearing white robes and holding burning crosses. Only a few do that! I reminded them that it might be true that southerners are indeed more accommodating of blacks than Northerners. After all, the south has 85% of the black population, and Blacks make up about a third of the South compared too only about 1% of the North, consequentially, many Southerners have more real‑world contact with black folks. Northern whites have read about blacks and “had a black friend once,” but seldom interacted much with them.I loved New York and moved there in 1967 to teach grad school in Greenwich Village and later establish a computer career in engineering, sales and marketing.