Another formative memory of a boy who loved books and grew up under Apartheid
On this day in Nov 3rd 1958 I was a small child at T.H. Slater Elem. school in Atlanta Ga. I had been reading about the great capitalist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and how he had built libraries all over the country. My teacher Mrs. Williamson told me that the Atlanta main library was a slightly larger version of the buildings he had built in cities as well as small towns all over America. My father had given me the “nickname” “Professor” in 1954 because I had an early love affair with books.. I decided that I was going to go. I sneaked out of school early. And walked the long distance from the Carver Homes housing project to 126 Carnegie Way. Right across the street from Loew’s Grand Theatre, where they had the opening of the film “Gone With The Wind” about 20 years earlier. I walked up the stairs and into the lobby. I saw a white man wearing a gun talking to the clerk. I had never actually spoken to a white person before, unless you count the Polish death camp survivors that lived across the road from us. And my great grandma had told me that “Jews are not really white, but some of them think they are” I asked the man “where can I find books that Mark Twain wrote” …..he turned and looked at me and said “get the hell out of here you little nigger”….put it this way , he aggressively helped me back down the steps. I cried and walked the long distance home. I still have bad dreams about this story…About one year later in May 1959, Irene Dobbs Jackson—Spelman Professor and mother of Maynard Jackson, future Atlanta mayor was the first Black person to get an Atlanta Library card. That same year a bus we called the “bookmobile” began coming to our housing project every two weeks. My mother made sure that me and my older sister Rugenia were among the first kids to get Library cards….every two weeks I was always the first kid waiting for that bus. When I went back to Atlanta to bury my Mom in 1996. I found out that the old Carnegie Library ….a place I had come to know ever brick of and in high school spent hundreds of hours exploring had been torn down sometime in the late 1970s and replaced with a plastic looking piece of shit building……what a waste, I don’t talk about this much but I think it’s one of the most profound experiences of my life. I mean all the stuff in the civil rights movement that consumed me later, the Panthers and my going to Africa to fight in those anti-colonial wars..had to have come from something…this was not the only thing that drove that ….but it was big….an example of what’s in the book I have been too busy trying to end gun violence or maybe just too lazy to finish …I have been advised to continue writing here and let a later version of myself turn this into a published volume
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