A Father and Son Take Journeys So Different Yet So Alike

“In the era I lived through, we called ourselves ‘colored.’ We were proud of being colored. We turned the word into a badge of pride rather than an emblem of shame. It still is to me.”

--Earl Hutchinson Sr.

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At 96, Earl Hutchinson is slight and wiry, with an alert and nimble mind. He is a survivor, born in the Deep South--Clarksville, Tenn.--when blacks were not entitled to rights whites took for granted.

It was not until he was 61 that the Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation. Yet, in the face of overt discrimination, he had supported his family, forged a post office career and, ultimately, claimed a spot in the middle class.

His new memoir, “A Colored Man’s Journey Through 20th Century Segregated America,” is both an autobiography and a mini-history of the black experience in America over the last century. The story begins in Clarksville, in a part of town where white people seemed as far removed from young Earl’s world “as the sun and the moon.”

Like many blacks seeking a better life, the Hutchinsons moved to St. Louis when Earl was a youngster. Little changed when they crossed the Mason-Dixon line.

“We lived on one side of the street, and they lived on the other side,” he said.

St. Louis summers sizzle, but public swimming pools were off-limits to Earl and other black kids.

“We had to stand on the outside and watch the Caucasians swim.”

And, although his house was close by a school, he had to walk three miles round trip to a black school. That took him through a neighborhood where white kids would sometimes gang up on him, bloodying his nose.

“They’d holler, ‘Get the nigger!’ ”

That “was just the way it was,” says Hutchinson, sitting in his spacious, bright apartment in Park La Brea, recalling nine decades of life.

“We understood that,” he said. “I’ve never been bitter.”

It was his son, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, 54, a Los Angeles writer and radio talk show host, who’d grown up hearing the stories, who urged his father to put it all down on paper. “Next thing I know, he’s actually sitting down with his legal pad.”

The memoir is a family collaboration. The younger Hutchinson says he “helped bring a coherent story line and timeline to it,” and it was published by Middle Passage Press, an enterprise owned by his wife, Barbara Bramwell.

Forty-two years separate the two Earls, as do differing life experiences as black men. As a student at Cal State L.A. in the turbulent ‘60s, the younger Earl fought for a black studies program, joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Black Student Alliance, an activism of a kind unheard of when his father was his age.

At first, Earl Ofari was put off by the title chosen by his father for his book. He would never call himself “colored,” a term he views as both archaic and derogatory. But, on reflection, he thinks, “It’s perfect. That’s what they called themselves. Anything else wouldn’t make sense.”

‘Up Against the Wall’

Earl Sr.’s “that was life” attitude toward the discrimination he endured might seem to younger men too passive, too conciliatory. But to his son, he is a role model.

“He kept his family intact for a lot of years.” He hopes younger generations reading how an earlier generation of blacks “were really up against the wall, and came through” will ask themselves, “Why can’t I?”

In his own quiet but doggedly determined way, the elder Hutchinson effected change. Refusing to accept no for an answer, he forced the post office to promote him from an invisible back room job to window clerk. In the late ‘40s, using a go-between, he bought an apartment in an all-white Chicago neighborhood and moved his family in.

The next day, he recalls, signs appeared in the windows of the other houses on the street: “Unwanted occupant at 6357 Greenwood must go.” A log was thrown through their window, and their fence pulled down, but the family stood its ground.

Early on, Earl Sr. had learned survival. He was only 16 when his father, a laborer, just didn’t come home one day, deserting his wife and five children. Hutchinson says: “That was the last I would see or hear about him.” Food baskets and hand-me-downs from neighbors saw them through.

At 18, high school diploma in hand, he landed a job as a St. Louis postal clerk and five years later transferred to Chicago. His imagination had been fired by seeing blacks who’d made it there and come back to St. Louis “driving shiny new cars” and wearing expensive suits and jewelry.

But Chicago, he soon learned, was no “promised land.” There, too, neighborhoods were segregated, and tensions remained high from race riots a few years earlier.

One thing did live up to Hutchinson’s expectations: the vibrant jazz scene on the Southside. Hutchinson, who played “a mean trombone,” had dreamed of being a professional musician before opting for the security of the post office on the advice of his grandfather, who told him: “As long as the government’s going, they’ve got money.”

In Chicago, he did “a lot of nightclubbing.” Playing the clubs were Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Earl Hines, Bessie Smith, Sarah Vaughn, Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway. Despite Prohibition, there was “plenty of illicit liquor.” Sometimes, Lena Horne or Billie Holiday would come up from the audience to sing.

Chick Webb played the Regal Theater, which also showed all-black films such as “Harlem Is Heaven” and “Dark Manhattan.” It was at the Regal that Hutchinson saw the newsreel of track athlete Jesse Owens infuriating Hitler by winning gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He writes: “Everybody cheered wildly. We felt like we were crossing the tape with Jesse [and] standing on the victory stand.”

Moonlighting as a musician, Hutchinson “played anywhere you could get a gig,” including the Northside clubs owned by Al Capone’s brother. “We always said if you could pat your foot and whistle, you had a job on New Year’s Eve.”

One night, a white man asked the band in which he was performing to play “Dixie.” The bandleader refused, claiming, “That’s out of our repertoire.” But when the patron took out a gun and shot the drum, Hutchinson recalls, “We played ‘Dixie.’ ”

On the Southside, streets would be deserted during a Joe Louis fight. Hutchinson writes, “People would fight and claw to get a spot near a radio to hear a broadcast of Joe’s fights. The only other time the colored would huddle that close to a radio was when the ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy’ show came on.”

When Louis won a fight, people ran out of their houses shouting, shaking tambourines, ringing cowbells. Motorists honked their horns. The bars filled with revelers. “He was our hero . . . he made colored people feel that they were somebody.”

Negro baseball leagues with stars such as Jackie Robinson flourished. Hutchinson is still of two minds whether integration of major league baseball, and the demise of the Negro leagues in the mid-’50s, was a good thing, pointing out that Negro leagues had black owners, managers, coaches, trainers and scouts.

Picking Up, Moving On

When he was 32, well established with the post office, he married Nina Mae Brown, and their firstborn, Earline, who is now deceased, was born in 1938. Seven years later, Earl Jr. came along. At Nina’s urging, the family drove west in 1954 to look California over.

“It didn’t appeal to me,” the elder Hutchinson recalls, but the severe Chicago winter of 1960 changed his mind, and that year they returned to California to stay. (Nina died of cancer in 1973, and in 1976 he married his current wife, Kathy.)

Only 56 when he arrived in California, too young to retire, he began selling real estate. He still holds his license, goes to the office “when I feel like it” and enjoys Wednesday breakfast meetings of the Board of Realtors. While moonlighting in real estate, he was for seven years a clerk with the Department of Water and Power, retiring in 1970.

Earl Jr. finished high school at Dorsey, in Los Angeles, then enrolled at L.A. City College, an unfocused kid who soon found himself on academic probation. Then came his “epiphany,” in the person of a counselor who laughed at his ambition to attend UCLA.

“That,” he says, “spoke worlds about the expectations--this white counselor telling me: ‘You’re not college material. You’re not going to go anywhere with your life.’ ”

He went not to UCLA, but to Cal State L.A. and soon was among those demanding a black studies program. He joined activist organizations, but he was no radical. “Things like the Black Panther party, that was too dangerous.”

Despite the age spread, father and son are not as far apart philosophically as one might expect. Earl Jr. lives in the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw area, writes provocative articles for mainstream newspapers and on his weekly radio show, “Tuesday Night Live” (7 p.m., KPFK-FM) enjoys being politically unpredictable. A Catholic raised by a Baptist father, he has debated issues ranging from censorship of rap lyrics to Pope John Paul II’s failure to apologize for the Vatican’s wartime silence during the Holocaust. After listening to the latter, his father told him, “You need to lay off the pope.”

When Earl Jr. discusses his childhood, it is not as someone “looking back at it through adult political-social constructs” that didn’t exist. Yes, he went to an all-black grade school and, like his father, was banned from public swimming pools. “It was essentially a segregated world. It’s just the way it was. I didn’t give it any thought until many, many years later.” He remembers, rather, the good times--”We always had that good warm family thing.”

Unlike his father, who had to go to work after high school, he earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology, a master’s in humanities and a doctorate in sociology. Nor has he felt outright discrimination in the workplace. Today, he says, “there’s no overt denial of opportunity just because of your color, but oftentimes those opportunities aren’t there and you just happen to be of that color, so make of it what you want.”

Speaking Out for Change

He has chosen to channel his activism through his books and articles and his e-mail public action group, the National Alliance for Positive Action. He says, “All the marches and demonstrations--that’s a thing of the past.” The two things that most ignite his passion are media stereotyping of people of color and the narrow, noninclusive focus of the two major political parties.

He has been “absolutely consumed over the last decade with many of the racial and ethnic stereotypes, biases, that I’ve seen in the mainstream media . . . in terms of typing people of color in the most negative, distorted ways. My consuming interest has been exploding [these] stereotypes.” As for politics, he says, “I think there should be many parties. For democracy to blossom, you need a multi-party system. I’m also realistic enough to know it’ll never happen.”

He smiles. “As I’ve gotten older, I pick and choose my battles more.” Over time, he adds, his philosophy has become “more akin” to that of his father--”Just take it as it comes.”

Neither would choose to live life over as white men.

“I’m a colored person,” the elder Hutchinson says. “I never felt I was superior. I certainly never felt that I was inferior.” Given the same tools, he adds, he always felt he could compete with the best.

To Earl Jr., “The most exciting thing is being who I am. It allows me a unique insight into society.” But, he adds, there is a big difference between “wishing you were white and wishing society wouldn’t pigeonhole you because you’re black.” It grates on him that he’s put in “this little narrow box,” expected to write only on racial issues.

Neither man expects to live to see a colorblind America. Things are better today, yes, says Earl Sr.

“People are moving together. They understand life is life, people are people. But it’s still a problem,” he says.

His son says: “I think our gear is definitely stuck in reverse now. I see a reaction in this country, an insensitivity and mean-spiritedness in society.”

To him, integration is both a blessing and a curse. While opening doors for blacks, it also created a “gaping disparity” among blacks. Once, he says, “there were the doctor, the lawyer, the pimp, the whore living on the same block . . . now the doctor’s gone, the attorney’s gone. The middle class is gone. The blue collar [workers] are stuck right on that same block,” alienated and hopeless. He deplores the “I got mine, you get yours” attitude of many well-off blacks and believes blacks “must assume responsibility for our own destiny.”

Earl Sr. says, “When I was a kid, you were raised by the whole neighborhood. If you threw a brick, you knew your father was going to come down and you were going to get it.” He adds, “We didn’t have babies back in my day at 16. I took my kids with me everywhere. Today, they drop them off here, drop them off there, anybody who’ll take them.”

For a book signing at Earl Sr.’s church, President Clinton sent a letter lauding Hutchinson Sr. as “a strong and dedicated champion of social, economic and political equality.” Which, in his quiet way, he was.

Reflecting on his journey, he smiles and says, “When I was in St. Louis, I was colored. When I got to Chicago, I was a Negro. When I got to California, I was black. But I’m still brown.”

His hope? That “someday we would be known as just Americans. I’m asking no more, no less.”

Beverly Beyette can be reached at [email protected].