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SPORTS & TV. The sight of Negroes playing major-league baseball, carried all over the nation by TV, has probably done as much for equality as most legal victories. Southern minor-league clubs have begun to hire Negro players. TV has had another effect on the South: it has carried to thousands of people their first sight of colored and white entertainers appearing together. Says one Negro teacher: "Why, stuff like that, coming into white homes, it's going to make the white man think, whether he realizes it or not."
These very American forces, constantly working on North & South alike, have driven racial discrimination and prejudice sharply on the defensive.
The North: Guerrillas on Main Street
What is it like to be a Negro and actively fight segregation in the North? Hascal Othello Humes, 30, is an A.B. from Columbia University, a former infantry lieutenant who saw combat in Italy. With his wife, he lives in a white neighborhood in Seattle. When they first moved in, the Humeses got threatening letters and obscene telephone calls, but they stuck it out. Humes has three jobs: he is studying for an M.A. in psychology at the University of Washington, he is a city policeman in the afternoon, and at night he is a bouncer in a mixed nightclub. His police beat is in a white section, and when some white people objected, his superior suggested that he ask for a transfer, but he quietly replied that he would rather resign from the force. After he goes off duty each evening, he reports for work at the China Pheasant. By closing time (5 a.m.), Humes has usually lifted at least one drunk (white or colored) well above the floor and carried him into the street. Humes says he does not often wonder whether it's all worth it. But when he does, he thinks of his wife and of the new baby she is expecting. If that doesn't help, he prays.
Humes's life illustrates the price the Northern Negro often pays for his state of semi-equality. As a citizen, the Negro in the North, by & large, enjoys full rights: everywhere except in the border states, he is equal in the schools and in most public services. His great fight in the last decade has been for simple, decent treatment in everyday life. In this fight, he has made marked but uneven progress.
Ten years ago, for example. Northern hotels and restaurants that would openly turn away Negro patrons were in the majority; now they are definitely in the minority. The facile old excuse—"Personally, I don't care, but the customers just wouldn't stand for Negroes to come in here"—has been proved empty again & again. The chief trouble is that the Negro can never be sure: he is in a constant guerrilla war, always half-expecting to be snubbed by this desk clerk or that headwaiter, or fobbed off with a gentlemen's-agreement type of spiel that all the tables have been reserved, all the rooms taken. Many Negroes prefer not to risk being embarrassed, stay away from predominantly white places. On trips, many prefer to drive all night, rather than take the chance of being turned down by a hotel.
But there are many wedges in the walls of prejudice: ¶ Telephone companies in the North, all white until a few years ago, now employ 5,000 Negroes.
¶ Denver