Past Tense Present Tense

Journey of a White American

At this late stage in my life—I’m 82 and counting— it is important that I explain the evolution of my thoughts on race, as it will apply to many of my readers. I wrote the following essay as a 10- or 11-year-old student at Northside Elementary in Shelbyville about 1951 or so.

The Rights of Negro[e]s

Billy Ellis

Negro[e]s can go to the movies but must sit in the balcony. They can use our courts. They have their own schools, churches, and parks. They have their own hospitals. They can ride on trains and buses. They have their own restaurants and hotels. I[n] larger cities we use the same hospitals. I[n] Louisville they have their own parks. I think that if [we] get friendlier with them we won’t have as much trouble.

I then listed several “Prominent Negro[e]s,” including singers, baseball players such as Jackie Robinson, boxers Joe Louis and “Sugar Ray” Robinson, and some scientists, concluding with educator Booker T. Washington.

My final sentence was a telling comment of the shortsightedness of my generation: “The Supreme Court has upheld the civil rights of Negro[e]s.”

This all seems so childish today. And yet, it has taken 70 years of reading, listening, watching, working, teaching and thinking to produce what I am today.

I recall being around African-American farmers and workers at my father’s business, Ellis Welding and Brazing Co., on Clay Street in Shelbyville. My father always treated them equally with the more numerous white farmers.

I have written before about being a “helper” to a handicapped Black man, whose only name I knew was “Trout.” I begrudgingly assisted him when he crawled under our little frame house on Snow Hill outside of Shelbyville to dig out dirt with a grubbing hoe for what would become our basement.

I was 10 at the time, and my job was to remove the dirt that Trout laboriously pushed through an opening in the foundation. I would have preferred to be reading “funny books” under a shade tree. He would call, “Water! Water!” and I would—again, following my father’s orders—give the man cold water from a jug.

If and when I get to heaven, I hope to meet up with Trout and apologize for my ill-mannered behavior toward a poor working-class Black man. Perhaps we can share a cup of cold water together.

I recall the derogatory names for African Americans, the racist jokes, the separate rest rooms in the courthouse, and knowing that Blacks could sit only in the balcony of the movie theater. It was all part of the natural order of things, we thought.

The 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education slowly began to change America.

I graduated from a segregated school system in 1958 and attended Georgetown College, which desegrated near my senior year in 1962. I belonged to a Southern-style fraternity and had no African-American players on my football team. I attended a segregated Southern Baptist church.

Only—and I emphasize only—did my innocence of the racial dilemma in Kentucky hit me when I taught high school history and coached the 1962 Harrodsburg High School football team. About a fourth of the team were Black kids. I remember well being told at a famous Richmond restaurant that I could not bring all of the players in for a post-scrimmage meal on a hot August night in 1962. Twenty-two-year-old Coach Ellis became enraged. Welcome to the real world, Coach!

Later, we all were welcomed at a Jerry’s Restaurant. As we left the restaurant, some local white guys—clearly drunk—tried to create an incident, but Assistant Coach E.G. Plummer and I backed them away from the team.

One of my players on that team, Larry Barnett—who later served in Vietnam and enjoyed a successful career in education—recalled conversations he had with a Black classmate who was part of the transition to desegregated schools. “ ‘Larry, you will never know the fear that we had leaving Westside and coming to an all-white high school,’ ” one student said to him. “She gave me a perspective I had not dreamed about,” recalled Barnett.

Integration proceeded smoothly in some places and not in others. Busing in Jefferson County gained national headlines, as did the integration of neighborhood housing.

White and Black, we all have a story.

African-American student Aaron Thompson had a traumatic transition. In 1965, “I went from an all-Black three-room school, where the teachers cooked our lunch on the stove and [we had] an outhouse for a lavatory, to a newly constructed elementary school that had a cafeteria and an inside toilet,” he recalled. “Being from the county [Clay], there were only four of us Black kids in that school. In the first year of my new school, every day was a bombardment of racial slurs and threats of violence. Every day was a time I could expect to be held by boys in the bathroom while one would hit or spit on me. I could be expected to be accosted on the bus.”

Teachers protected the young boy when they were present. “Toward the end of my first year,” Thompson said, “I started to fight back, and I fought hard. I was a good-size kid, and I learned to use the size of my body to adjust to my new environment. Although the first year was a time of me being afraid, school became a place I conquered and loved.”

Now Dr. Aaron Thompson, the president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, he has had a long career in education. He did, indeed, come to love education and its benefits for all Kentuckians.

What is your story?