Memories of Louisville, 1977 to 2020
Of the many tragedies and farces that unfolded yesterday— September 23rd, 2020— the events in Louisville were especially hard to take.
I didn’t say anything all day. I guess it’s time to open up.
I lived in The Ville, in the late 1970s. My friends and lovers there were the best. I had just turned eighteen — my friends took me to see Chaka Khan and Bobby Bland at the Memorial Auditorium for my birthday. Those sweet memories linger.
I moved to Louisville as a political organizer, primarily in defense of the city’s West End. The black community which was *under siege,* during the so-called “busing riots” — riots engineered by the KKK when the public schools were ordered to integrate.
The Klan painted their swastikas on every school and playground. No one stopped them. They ran the town. White parents made a big show of pulling their girls out of school, because girls don’t need an education, and you know … to “protect” them.
That kind of sick twisted preoccupation was the everyday conversation with Louisville’s white majority.
I couldn’t share a passing remark at a bus stop with another white person who didn’t assume I shared their racist obsessions, and would make some OUTRAGEOUS comment.
White people didn’t talk about the weather in 1977 Louisville; you were supposed to talk about … “them.”
It was outrageous by my Yankee Hippie standards. I was never under the impression that California is free of bigots, but I was shocked by my introduction to the South — the absence of any civic opinion outside the racist mainstream.
The only white people I met in Louisville, who weren’t spouting-off-their-freaking-mouth-racists, were other “pinkos” like me. When I arrived on the tarmac at the Louisville airport, a fellow organizer picked me up, and handed me a shotgun. — On the tarmac.
Some of you have heard me tell this story before.
I said, “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“If I were you,” he said, “I’d sleep with it.”
Sure enough, I met my first Klan member within a few days, the muzzle of his .357 in my FACE.
“Get your N—lovin’ Communist C— off this lot.”
Other more cowardly Klanners broke into my apartment, a carriage house on St. James Park, smashing the glass and painting the walls with threats, leaving dead rats in my bedsheets and the toilet. Yes. The toilet.
And of course, there was no point in calling the police or the landlord, because they thought I was in the wrong. I was told many times, I must be a “Yankee whore” to live like I did.
After all, in their eyes, I was a “n—lover” — a word I heard every day, said with the most vicious and beyond-the-pale insinuation.
These people are OBSESSED with “race” and sex in the ugliest of ways. There is nothing else at the bottom of it, nothing.
I’ve told many of you that my longtime interest in “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” memoir was drawn to an unusual climax in Louisville:
I had a side job as a banquet waitress for the University, and in a great pronouncement, the University President invited author Alex Haley to an honorary banquet at the height of the television fame of his book-turned-series, “Roots.”
(Haley was also, famously, Malcolm X’s collaborator on his memoir.)
The Courier-Journal covered the “scandal” of Haley’s invitation, as many said they would boycott the university for inviting such a man! The paper covered it with a straight face.
I was, of course, *stoked* because I would get to wait on Mr. Haley, and maybe get to have a word!
(I did, with the rest of the kitchen, and it was wonderful.)
Imagine my shock when I showed up for work that night, and all the other waitresses were missing! — they REFUSED to serve a black man. They were so proud of themselves.
The week before, I’d asked the other girls, “So what do you think of the latest Roots episode?”
Everyone was talking about it, it was the most watched-show ever.
One girl proudly spoke for them all: “My husband will not let me watch that show.”
That’s the way it was. That’s the way it is. Nothing has changed.
I felt like, when I was living there, they were still fighting the Civil War, that as far as the Christian white community of Louisville was concerned, until slavery was brought back on a fiery cross, they would not be satisfied.
Everyone was strapped. You didn’t go outside in group of black and white friends, or be seen in a mixed relationship or family, without carrying.
There was no 911, no one to call. There was no justice. There is no justice.
The city fathers’ attitude was that if a white person killed a black person, it must be justified, and that was that. That is that.
It was a violent, patriarchal-out-of-the-stone-ages, segregated, repressed bigotry free-for-all. And it still is.
So now it’s 2020. I’m 62. Four decades later. I didn’t keep in touch when I left. I was, looking back on it, damaged.
Everyone I was close to, left, even if it meant leaving family. If you were a “race-traitor,” if you were “uppity,” — if you wanted some freedom or dignity and you had the means, you got out.
We had some luck, some help, some velocity.
Others got high and tried to blot it out. Hiding. Trying to not be seen. It’s this: Living two separate schizo lives, appeasing the racists with your false front — versus your real, secret life. Sleeping with your gun by your side.
I’m sure many of you have stories of racist towns you grew up in, where there was no peace, no justice. It’s not like this situation is anything novel. What happened to Breonna Taylor, happens all the time. If you defy it, they come down on you with all their force. They are perpetually soaking in their dick-addled vengeance.
When I hear that there’s protest and anguish on Louisville’s streets today, even martyrdom, from the black community, from perhaps the few white allies who dare … well, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT.
What. Do. You. Expect.
If I hear one more pious politician remind us today that “violence is bad,” I will punch out a window. How dare they? They have never lived their lives under a gun and a lynching rope. They are liars and willfully ignoring everything that led up to this, the million days that preceded it.
Sometimes in the old days, I thought we moved the needle. Or today, I will have the same inspiration with friends, with allies, who see love and truth, and repudiate the ugly.
But yesterday, and today, have not been one of those better days. They are filled with human smoke and hubris. I know I’m not alone when I say, I don’t have the taste for it.