Play Fair!

At Lincoln School in Manchester CT, we were taught to wait our turn. No taking cuts! During recess, you couldn’t have all the good players on one team, so you had to have two “captains” choose sides. If a kid brought in candy to share with the class on his or her birthday, then everyone had to get a piece, not just friends. Everyone had to have a chance at being the hallway monitor and to wear the shoulder strap with the shiny silver badge while overseeing kids walking up the stairs. “Play fair!” was another way of expressing the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” There were some, both kids and adults, who didn’t always play fair, but they were the exceptions. In many ways it was a good time to be a kid, maybe there’s never been a better time for kids like me to grow up.

However, when I was a student at Lincoln School from 1954 to 1961, there were still segregated drinking fountains, movie theaters, and schools in other parts of the country. Segregation was not as obvious in Manchester, but the predominantly Black North End of Hartford, only nine miles away, might as well have been 900 miles for kids like me. This meant there had been only a handful of Black kids in my schools when I graduated from high school in 1967. Since Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers a few years before I was born, I thought nothing of Topps baseball cards featuring Hank Aaron and Willie Mays alongside Mickey Mantle and Stan Musial. Cultural tectonic plates were beginning to shift, but to the limited extent this was recognized, it was all far away, I was oblivious to most of it.

The homogeneity of my childhood town meant I didn’t witness significant examples of demonstrable racism. I believe this was because there was little of the threat people feel when in the company of others they see as different from themselves. Based on appearances, the majority of people in Manchester saw themselves as being much the same as their neighbors, both known and unknown. This made it easier to live in a community bonded by the assumption of a shared value system. Most of the people in my world believed if you lived your life according to rules grounded in fairness, you could expect most of the time to be treated fairly in return. So, on those occasions when I was not treated fairly in some way, I would see this, not as the way the world operated, but as an aberration in the normal course of events.

All this means that for many years of my life, it has been difficult for me to really understand the extent to which people who don’t look like me have been treated unfairly by society to the point of cruelty throughout our history. Actually, for someone who has lived as I have, it’s been next to impossible to fully comprehend such a life.