Racism- Part One

August 13, 2025- Wednesday

This is a four part series on my experience with racism.  

 “Look, Daddy! It’s a n----r!” Those were the first known racists words in my life. I was five years old. As the story was told repeatedly by my father, I said those words while walking along a sidewalk beside a large two-story building in a shopping center in Midland, Texas. The year was 1959. As Dad would tell the story, we were walking along when a black man passed us going the opposite direction of us on the sidewalk. I supposedly looked at the black man, pointed a small finger at him and made the declaration. I heard the exact same story from my dad several times through the years, and it seemed that each time he told the story, the bigger his snicker would be, accompanied by a sly, sneaky smile. At five years old, I had heard the pejorative term liberally while living in the recesses of far west Texas and repeated it at that moment without any hesitation or any sense of how demeaning the word was to a whole race of people. Also, it was not until that day I realized I said something that had an impact. I learned it was a phrase not to be used in the presence of black people. How would I know that at five years old? The same dad who would snicker about that story for the rest of his life, ushered me quickly down the sidewalk away from the black man that west Texas day. Dad told me to be quiet and quickly led me into the nearby store. Actions speak louder than words.  

Over the next several years, I began to learn the pejorative term was more than insulting. I began to learn it was basically an ultimate term of degradation. I learned it was more than a bad word. It was a bad word even though the term was used by most of the kids I knew and certainly most of the adults I knew. Over time, it became apparent to me, it was a word used by adults and it was used to separate the white people from the black people. It was a word used to denote superiority of whites over blacks.  

Not unlike most of the United States, people were divided in west Texas in 1959 based on the color of their skin. They were divided where the societal norms of the time told them to be divided. The schools were separated with whites having a majority of the newer and bigger schools and the black having their schools on their side of town, many times on the other side of town. Professions were largely separated also with a disparity in education and salary. It was a society based on color.    

I lived in the small west Texas town of Kermit. Kermit was a safe place for a kid to grow and learn about life. You basically had the run of the town, especially if you owned a bicycle.  Not unlike most other towns in west Texas, the white people lived on one side of town and the black people lived on the opposite side of town. In Kermit, the black people actually lived on the west side of the railroad tracks from where all the whites lived. Their churches were on the west side of town. Their schools were on the west side of town. Their lives were on the west side of town.  

When I was a small kid, there were days when my mom would take me with her when she needed to go to the grocery store. The store she preferred to shop backed up to those infamous railroad tracks on the opposite side of town. That was where I would see black people, on the other side of the railroad tracks. Society was much safer in 1960 Kermit. I would sit in the car waiting for Mom to finish her grocery shopping and I would watch the blacks on the other side of the tracks. I remember seeing a few bicycles being ridden but nothing like the number of bicycles that were in my neighborhood. I saw kids playing basketball and baseball. They were doing the same things I did when I was at home playing with all my white friends in my southern neighborhood.  

As I grew and was just a few years older, I enjoyed going to the public swimming pool in Kermit. The summers in west Texas can be extremely hot even though people like to say it is dry heat. Hot is still hot. Daily temperatures over one hundred degrees are very common, and you simply learn to live with it, and you learned to play in it. That is why the public swimming pool was so important. It was fun, school was closed for the summer, and the pool was cool. An entire afternoon could be spent with friends in the cool of the large pool with high diving boards on one end and very shallow water on the other end. Kermit was not a rich town, the population was around ten thousand, so there were few backyard pools where families could escape the heat. In fact, I do not remember seeing one backyard swimming pool much less hearing of a person who had one in their backyard.  

I was ten or eleven years old and very excited to be out of school for the summer. The summer heat was starting, and it was time to head to the public swimming pool. My family was in the family car one hot afternoon, and we drove by the open public swimming pool, and I watched the many kids already playing at the swimming pool. I asked my dad if I could go swimming. His response left me speechless and stunned. “You can’t go swimming at the swimming pool anymore. They are letting the ni---rs swim there now so you can’t go. They pee in the pool.”  I did not say another word about going to the public swimming pool ever again. I could not understand the abrupt change simply because the black kids were now allowed to go to the public pool. I knew white kids who peed in the pool. I was never allowed to go to the public swimming pool again.   

I had never realized the public swimming pool was a segregated swimming pool. As we passed by the public pool that day, I did not realize there were both white and black kids playing and having fun. Once my dad finished issuing his edict on my permission to go to the swimming pool, I immediately started counting the number of black kids at the swimming pool as we passed. My dad taught me about segregation and that it existed because the whites were better than the blacks. The thought had never occurred to me. That was the day I realized what racism really was and what it really looked like. My dad was the quintessential racist.   

From that day forward, I started seeing black and white. The main authority figure in my life told me in unequivocal terms and in strict behavior that whites were better than blacks and blacks did not belong in our part of the world. Our world means the white world. They could have their black world; it was on the other side of the railroad tracks.  There should be no interaction between the white world and the black world. I was not sure what I thought. I was ten years old, and I was being slapped in the face with racism.