A Lesson in Tolerance

My father grew up in the rural Deep South during the Depression. His family was desperately poor, with his father supporting his wife and eight children as a tenant farmer. A tenant farmer was a step up from being a sharecropper, but it wasn’t that much of an improvement. During his childhood, the family moved frequently, to many different tumble down shacks in various parts of the county, following the available work.

Given such a background, considering the time, place, and circumstances of his childhood, one would have expected him to learn and internalize racist attitudes, as is commonly seen as being typical of Southerners. But that would have been a completely mistaken assumption.

My father was a highly intelligent man, something my grandparents recognized in him at an early age. At this time and place, it was customary for an oldest son to quit school at the earliest opportunity in order to help support the family. But at great sacrifice to themselves, my grandparents made sure he graduated from high school. They knew he was destined for better things.

After a stint in the Navy during World War II, my father was hired by a major oil corporation, got his bachelor’s degree going to college at night on the GI Bill. He eventually rose to several different managerial positions within various divisions in the company.

During his career, he did all in his power to make sure that black and female employees under his supervision were treated equitably, many times acting as mentor. Because I’d been born and raised up North, I had the usual perception of all Southerners being redneck racists. I was curious why my father was so different from the stereotype, and so I eventually asked him.

He told me that when he was growing up, there was only one tenant farmer family in the area who had a car, a black family. Every Saturday, the man would take all the white women into town to do their weekly shopping. In return for this, the women’s husbands would work helping the black man in his fields, as they could not afford to give him gas money.

This friendly, neighborly cooperation made quite an impression on my father, something he never forgot. It may have been a small thing, but it made all the difference in the world to him.