105: Take A Negro Home
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Here's an editorial from a newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi, the Clarion Ledger from October 6, 1957. If you want an insight into how Negroes in Chicago are trying to establish social equality, it begins. There are three paragraphs from an authentic report of a meeting of the Negro Improvement Society in that city, and then it quotes from the report. "To those who failed to attend our recent quarterly meeting, I can say you missed your real treat. At the last minute, we were able to get Mayor Daley, his speaker. He presented a very interesting talk. The highlight of it was the discussion of the forthcoming campaign, Take a Negro Boy Home Tonight, which all agreed was a fine step forward in human relations. It is to be inaugurated soon in the city's high schools. Mayor Daley told a city then advised by an outstanding sociologist that the vicious hates and fears rooted in racial prejudice and fascist bigotry could best be combated by closer and more intimate relationships between Negro boys and white girls. Therefore, this new campaign will encourage white high school girls to volunteer to take Negro boys to their homes for dinner and date them afterwards. These girls will get higher marks and other privileges for promoting interracial harmony as to show the white parents that it's all right to have these associations. Now we must all do our part. Make sure that Negro boys invited to the white folks' houses take a bath first and put on a white shirt. Then it will prove that he's a good companion for the white girls and socially acceptable. Please cooperate to make Mayor Daley's campaign a success. And then after that, the editorial continues. So that's the way they're trying to establish racial equality in Chicago. Equality with miscegenation, mixed marriages, wholesale adultery, bastardy and mongrelization. It is happening in Chicago. You'll be tried in Mississippi. The NAACP ever gets a foot in the door. Well, you know, the most interesting thing about this campaign, taking Negro boy home tonight, is that it is complete fiction. No such campaign ever existed in Chicago. And if it did, you know, it's unimaginable to any real Chicagoan that the late Mayor Richard J. Daley would have endorsed it. These kinds of articles appeared in southern newspapers, at least as far back as the 1920s. Lies made up by segregationist forces to scare white people about this threat, racial integration. And the lies worked for a while. And then integration came anyway, which brings us to today's radio program. Today we bring you two stories of people who tried in one way or another to bring a Negro boy home for the night. Act one is a story about intermarriage. Act two is a story about trying to take a kid out of the ghetto and put them into the Ivy League and why that's so difficult. From W.B.E.Z. Chicago and Public Radio International, it's this American life on Myra Glass. Stay with us. October 30th, 1966, hello home. Well, I went to have the time. This is a typical letter home from college. There's chitchat about a tire that needed to be fixed and senior class pictures, how much they should cost, and should she pay for better one so her grandmother could have a better one. And then slowly the woman writing this letter gets to the whole point of the letter. I went to a good play last night, Miss Alliance by George Bernard Shaw, a friend of mine was in it, but he wasn't any good. I went with Richard Robinson. Oh, a track runner, singer, dancer, all around good luck are religious and like by everyone. He's one of the nicest people I know and he's Negro. I had to tell you, I've never kept any secrets from you and this wasn't going to be one. I hope you're not angry. Even you would like him. No one minded. Bill Crow was there and real nice to both of us. I don't know why there has to be a racial problem anyway. I had so much better time with him than I do with Bob or David Keagle or Bill Crow or Roger Heckerman. And he treated me like a queen. Sad, isn't it? Please don't think I'm being a rebel. I love you both very
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