“Don’t look at anyone, but don’t exactly not look at anyone, if you know what I mean,” advised our friend at the end of his instructions on how to get to the subway to midtown Manhattan.
Holding clammy hands, Ann and I stepped out on the cracked sidewalk and started west, nonchalantly chatting in an effort to hide our nervousness and in an effort to distract those around us from our white complexions.
The August heat on that day in 1969 was wilting. Few of the apartment buildings along the street had air-conditioning, so, in the steam of late afternoon, the residents of Harlem had moved to the front steps of the buildings or gathered on street corners to try to cool off.
Seeing two pale-skinned 20-somethings strolling down their street did little to lower the temperature. Racial tensions were high. In fact, the first of a series of what the media labeled “race riots” across the nation had begun in this very neighborhood only four years earlier after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed 15-year-old boy.
Ann and I had been married only six months and were on our first trip to New York City. We had been picked up at the airport by a friend from Indiana who was working in a Harlem drug treatment center. Rather than taking us directly to our downtown hotel, he stopped by the center for “just a minute,” but got absorbed into the work and decided it was best for us to take the subway.
Out of the corner of our eyes we could see the shocked faces of the people gathered on the building stoops — the sort of faces you see in old science fiction movies when the humans first get a glimpse of the little green Martians. While we feared catcalls or even physical confrontation, we were just greeted with silent, wide-eyed staring. Minds all appeared to be asking the question, “Why would two kids who look like they just climbed off a fruit wagon from Pumpkin Center, Indiana, have the nerve to walk down our street in the dimming light of late afternoon?”
We kept on walking, avoiding eye contact, the streets falling silent in our path — three blocks west, two blocks north, another block west. Then came the dark stairway that led down to the trains. More black faces, now in the dim light of the station platform. Feeling alone. Unprotected. Unsafe. Biases and untested assumptions, built from viewing the world through the lens of being “in the racial majority” since birth, built fear to almost the point of panic.
No one “like us” stood on the crowded platform. And when the train screeched to a halt in front of us and the doors jerked open, we could see no one “like us” in the packed subway car.
Through the first two stops, we stood holding the leather support straps, body to body with strangers from another world. Then two seats opened up directly across the car from each other and we sat down.
No one spoke to us and we spoke to no one. Ann’s seat was between two men, one of whom kept coming in and out of some sort of stupor, wobbling back and forth and then leaning into her. Finally, the man fell nearly into her lap and she had to push him upright.
As I started to stand up to go to her aid, at least exchange seats with her, I felt a hand on my arm. My head snapped in the direction of the hand, and I was face-to-face with two brown eyes as a voice above the rattle of the train said, “Let me exchange seats with your wife.”
For the rest of the trip we sat watching the man across the car — reading his folded newspaper in one hand as he held up his disoriented fellow passenger with the other.
Eventually the car began to clear out. The disoriented passenger stretched out on a series of vacant seats to sleep. The man who had shown such compassion and kindness got off a couple of stops before our destination. We never thanked him, although I made eye contact as he stood up to leave. I smiled and nodded my head. He returned the gesture and was gone.
Unlike many in our community, state and nation, I have little experience with being the minority, the suspected, the other in my everyday life. Being a white, native-born, male, I have only rarely found myself in such situations. I am generally accepted as the majority, by the majority.
Yet, the experience on that subway car gave me a brief glimpse of what being the minority means, the suspected or even the outcast. While I can never fully understand the feelings of those our society too often rejects just because they look, love, speak or worship “differently,” Harlem in 1969 did make a major difference in my world view.
And that stranger on the subway — who was the majority for a moment in a nation where he was a minority — left the greatest lesson of all: Life gives each of us many chances to overcome our “group-think biases” and treat others the way we want to be treated. We must grasp those opportunities and choose love.
Bud Herron is a retired editor and newspaper publisher who lives in Columbus. He served as publisher of The Republic from 1998 to 2007. His weekly column appears on the Opinion page each Sunday. Contact him at editorial@therepublic.com. Send comments to editorial@therepublic.com.
