My auction buddy Janet pulled forth a recollection that even back then should have been unbelievable. We were standing on the sidewalk last weekend at an estate sale in a blue-collar neighborhood at the bottom end of Philadelphia.
When she came to the city more than 30 years ago, she recalled, black people couldn’t come into this South Philadelphia neighborhood. In fact, they would have been run out of it by the folks who owned the neat twin homes with postage-stamp backyards like the one we stood in front of. Janet got an amen from an auction-regular, another black woman who had stopped midway in previewing items on a table.
As Janet spoke, an image popped into my head from my first year in the city: It was a newspaper photograph of a large group of white residents thickly crowding a street outside the home that a black family (or mixed couple, I can’t remember which) had moved into. I had just arrived from North Carolina, and this gathering was something I expected to see in my native South, not in the city of brotherly love.
The estate sale was also in a blue-collar neighborhood of people of Italian heritage. Former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo was apparently a friend or hero to someone in the house because one of the auctioned items was an autographed photograph of him that sold for about $3. Later, the auctioneer got bids on some Rizzo jewelry (with his likeness, I presumed).
Rizzo prided himself during the 1960s on being a tough law-and-order police chief who butted heads with the Black Panther Party affiliate and later as a mayor who wasn’t necessarily seen as a friend of the black community. Interestingly, some months ago, an auction-goer gave me a 1972 black and white newspaper photo of black male Panther members stripped naked in a Rizzo police raid.
Our on-street chat at the auction was one those matter-of-fact conversations that black folks sometimes have that is more than just matter-of-fact. On the surface, it has the lightness of talking about the weather, but the wrongness of the situation cuts deep inside us, in a place that doesn’t draw blood but anger. We know that we should be able to walk without hindrance on any street in any neighborhood that we want. But in reality, even today, that’s not always the way it works.
That has been very clear in the case of Trayvon Martin, who was killed a month ago because someone decided that he looked and acted “suspicious.” The 17-year-old was walking back to the home of his father’s fiancee from a store in a gated community in Sanford, FL, when he apparently met up with a town-watch captain named George Zimmerman. Zimmerman, who was armed, has said that he was attacked by Martin and defended himself.
The killing of the unarmed teen has outraged many people, sparking demonstrations in several cities across the country against the shooting, the police handling of the case and the lack of an arrest, among other issues. I think most of us are angry because this young man was walking along a street, minding his own business, not bothering anyone – and he ended up dead. Our minds won’t accept that, because it makes absolutely no sense.
Martin’s killing smacks of a modern-day lynching. It reminded me of the country’s shameful history of lynching, when thousands of black men lost their lives for no plausible reason at the hands of vigilante citizens who got a wink and a pass from the law.Their lifeless bodies hung from trees like the strange fruit that Billie Holiday painfully sang about and opportunists photographed and printed for sale on souvenir postcards that now turn up at auctions. It’s 2012, not 1912, and we were shocked to see that such lawlessness had endured.
During his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 1991, Clarence Thomas wrongly accused his detractors of conducting a modern-day lynching of him. It was a hyperbolic statement aimed at silencing his critics, because he was far from being lynched, even rhetorically. He wasn’t killed but instead went on to become a chief justice on the nation’s highest court.
At the estate auction last weekend, we were not fearful about being on that street in that place. In fact, we saw black people drive down the street and slow down for a quick peek at the goods on the sidewalk – just like everyone else – and there were a handful of African Americans bidding among the regulars we knew from other auctions. We never felt unsafe; in fact, I’m sure some of the regulars would’ve come to our defense if we did.
I knew nothing about the family who lived in the house (which itself sold for $214,000); maybe they were among the neighbors who would have welcomed us into their home rather than chased us off the streets.
Someone in the house loved jazz because there was an eclectic mix of albums, from Alice and John Coltrane to Miles Davis to Harry Belafonte (more calypso than jazz). Interspersed in the collection was the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers,” the Doors, Simon and Garfunkel, Barbra Streisand, Linda Ronstadt, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” Most of the albums were from the 1970s.
For me, anyone who loved Marvin Gaye – and for Janet, Alice Coltrane – had to be good tolerant people.
