Black Lives, White Lives

Disciplines History United States History

About the Book

One evening in 1955, Howard Spence, a Mississippi field representative for the NAACP investigating the Emmett Till murder, was confronted by Klansmen who burned an eight-foot cross on his front lawn. "I felt my life wasn't worth a penny with a hole in it." Twenty-four years later, Spence had become a respected pillar of that same Mississippi town, serving as its first black alderman.

The story of Howard Spence is just one of the remarkable personal dramas recounted in Black Lives, White Lives. Not all of the tales told by the sixteen blacks and twelve whites interviewed are as encouraging; some are bitter accounts of failed promises, misunderstandings, and lost opportunities. Black and white, rich and poor, men and women, collectively they reveal in their own words the paradoxical realities wrought by three decades of tumultuous racial change.

Beginning in 1968, Bob Blauner and a team of interviewers began to record the words of those caught up in the crucible of rapid racial, social, and political change. Unlike most restrospective oral histories, these interviews capture "live" the intense racial tension of 1968 as people talk with unusual candor about their deepest fears and prejudices. The diverse experiences and changing beliefs of these individuals, most of whom were interviewed again in 1979 and 1986, become an extraordinary commentary on the development of race relations since the 1960s.

About the Author

Bob Blauner (1929–2016) was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and an author who taught, lectured, consulted, and wrote on race relations.

Reviews

"Black Lives, White Lives is a sociological study with a vivid face and a warm heart. Blauner was clearly won over by men and women who shared their lives with him and his readers."—Los Angeles Times

"A significant if often discomfiting contribution to our understanding . . . . If this book's interviewees had talked about race less candidly and naturally, if they had qualified their generalizations with the sophisticated caveats now required by polite society, we would be deprived of important insights. . . . In this book, free expression is a virtue, even when the viewpoint is lamentable."—Washington Post

''A rich and valuable reminder of how limited our progress has been since the late 1960’s.”—New York Times

Acknowledgments
Introduction

PART ONE 1968
SURVIVING THE SIXTIES

Integration or Black Power? The Great Debate

1. The Politics of Manhood and the Southern Black Experience
Florence Grier "My father was from Alabama"
Len Davis "Promised Land is just like the old plantation"
Howard Spence "I wouldn't want to treat anybody like I've been treated in Mississippi"
2. Whites on the Front Lines of Racial Conflict
Joe Rypins "Stokely Carmichael ain't no better than me"
Gladys Hunt "You break your neck to do something, and they give you a hard time"
Joan Keres "Sometimes you wish you were black"
Virginia Lawrence "I was the wrong color in my black man's eyes"
3. Four Black Women and the Consciousness of the Sixties
Florence Grier 'Tm tired of being scared"
Millie Harding "This is no dream world, baby"
Vera Brooke "Those that came from a different social experience I feared"
Elena Albert "Something happened in my childhood I've never forgotten"
4. White Backlash: The Fear of a Black Majority and Other Nightmares
Maude Wiley "They're afraid the colored people are gonna move in and take over"
George Hendrickson "The Congo nigger"
William Singer "We didn't have a great sense of racial awareness"
Bill Harcliff "It's just a strong apartheid on the street"
Diane Harcliff "The whole racial thing makes me burst with sadness"
5. Black Youth and the Ghetto Streets
Richard Simmons "White boys, they're always innocent"
Larry Dillard "I would like to kill a white man, just to put it on the books"
Sarah Williams "The marching and demonstrations is stupid"
Harold Sampson "Denying you the right to be a man"
6. The Paradox of Working-Class Racism
Lawrence Adams "They've got the right to have every human dignity that I have"
Jim Corey "If I can help a colored man without hurting myself, I haven't got anything
to lose"
Dick Cunningham "My oldest daughter married a black man"
7. Black WorkersN: ew Options and Old Problems
Richard Holmes "The Negro don't want to work"
Len Davis "The postal system has become a Negro-type job"
Mark Anthony Holder "Being a man is being part of the world"
Jim Pettit "These people had been treating me bad all my life, and I didn't know it"
Frank Casey "They call me an instigator"
Carleta Reeves "I'd come home bitching and yelling"
Henry Smith "This was my means of retaliating"

PART 'IWO 1978-1987
GROWINGQ I.DERI N THE SEVENTIESA ND EIGHTIES

The Ambiguities of Racial Change
8. "Still in the Struggle": Black Activists Ten Years Later
Howard Spence 'Tm going to protect this land"
Millie Harding "Dealing with the human issues"
Florence Grier "I haven't changed that much"
9. White Lives and the Limits of Integration
George Hendrickson "The man is a damn fool who won't change his mind"
Maude Wiley "That was such a strong time of change"
Virginia Lawrence "The world changed exactly the way I was going"
William Singer "We've turned life itself into a quota business"
Bill Harcliff "What I really do is live in a white neighborhood"
10. Black Youth: The Worsening Crisis
Richard Simmons "The American black man is a dying species"
Larry Dillard "Without [the Black Panthers], my generation would be a different
generation"
Sarah Williams "I had him and everything iust changed"
Jim Pettit "Two counts against me: I'm black and I'm gay"
11. Blue-Collar Men in a Tight Economy
Jim Corey "He's iust a boy, Daddy"
Dick Cunningham "Even Walnut Creek, it's integrating"
Lawrence Adams "The federal government and AT&T screwed up"
Joe Rypins "Smelling like a rose"
Mark Anthony Holder "Peoples of forty, they're no longer thinking about a race thing"
12. Men, Women, and Opportunity
Harold Sampson "I have not been able to achieve selfhood through the civil rights
movement"
Frank Casey "If they had gave me the green light"
Carleta Reeves "To grow and develop with the times"
Henry Smith "If I were a white guy . . . "
13. Keeping the Spirit of the Sixties Alive
Vera Brooke "The caring factor"
Joan Keres "The way that you view humanity and the earth, those are the main things"
Len Davis "My whole damn culture's gone"
Elena Albert "I as an individual will continue to resist"

Conclusion
Appendix: Methodology
Notes
Bibliographic Essay