Partly-shut Doors
My family has a complicated history with white privilege. My parents were the children of immigrants who had settled in segregated Tampa, Florida. Until my parents started school, their complete world was Ybor City, the Latin neighborhood, where Spanish and Italian were openly spoken and businesses were owned by other immigrants. As they grew up and started going back and forth between Ybor City and the rest of Tampa, my parents saw signs on certain businesses in Tampa stating, “No Dogs or Latins Allowed.” Being allowed to go to Tampa’s public schools did not open all doors, certain businesses could still keep my parents out. When my dad started school, he was punished for speaking Spanish to a friend. Dad did not know English, so not being able to speak Spanish meant that he was completely confused about what was happening in the classroom. Once he became fluent in English, he excelled in school.
My parents graduated from high school in 1941. Two of their stories demonstrate the narrowed, but not closed path that was available to them. Even though neither of my dad’s parents had the chance to go to high school, Dad was his high school’s Student Body Vice President his senior year; he had the highest GPA of any boy in their grade and had taken every advanced course in Math, Science and English. When he graduated, not one of his teachers recommended that he apply to college. Latin kids just didn’t go to college. However, most Latin kids were at least able to graduate from high school. The only African American high school in Tampa at the time, Middleton Senior High School, burnt down in 1940. That meant that Black kids in Tampa, including darker-skinned Cubans, were not able to earn a diploma and the opportunities that went with that degree; that situation continued for years until the school was rebuilt with funds from the WPA. I was in elementary school when I first heard this story and I was dumbfounded. I asked my parents why the kids from Middleton didn’t go to Hillsborough High School, where my parents went to school. Mom pointed out , “That was not allowed because our school was the White school. That’s why Martin Luther King is marching.”
Mom and Dad moved to Denver at the end of World War II. Several times, they would look at apartments to rent and suddenly be denied when the landlord realized that this nice, white couple had a Spanish last name. Some of the landlords would lie and say that they had forgotten that they had already rented the property, but others would say that they didn’t rent “to dirty Mexicans.” One landlord rented to my parents because he didn’t realize that Lopez was a Spanish name. As soon as he realized the origin of the name, he tried to evict my parents. Fortunately, the VA had regulations which protected veterans from eviction. Serving in WWII and the GI Bill were the great equalizers. It was through the GI Bill, that my dad was able to get a home loan, which allowed my parents to start building equity and escape discriminatory landlords. GI Bill benefits helped to pay for my father’s college education, allowing him to become an engineer and have a career that matched the academic potential he had shown in high school. African American veterans with similar qualifications were denied the promises of the GI Bill. That one bill opened the doors to the middle class for many returning veterans and their future children and grandchildren, but not for 1.2 million African American veterans: https://www.history.com/news/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-benefits
When I was talking with my Dad about these stories — he’s now 97 and still one of the sharpest people that I know, he said “I think the only way to create lasting change is through education, not just for Blacks, but for the racists, too.”
From the Historical Marker Database: https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=33695
