From The Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit, Oral History Project interviewing Thomas Williamson:

(For the whole oral history you can read it here)

 

Mr. Williamson:

We moved into Piedmont in 1952. Before then we lived in East Oakland. East Oakland now is all black, although at the time that we were there, it was a more racially mixed community. Piedmont was right next to Oakland. It was a much more affluent community. The range in Piedmont was pretty much solid middle, to very, very rich. It didn’t really have poor people in Piedmont, and didn’t really have very many working class, blue-collar people. My father was an army officer, so we were not wealthy, and we did not live in the sort of mansions that many of my classmates did. But, we had a perfectly nice four bedroom house.

 

So there were many challenges for my mother in terms of just, you know, how do you get groceries when you have three kids? So as a child growing up, I had a big basket on my bicycle. I would often be sent to the grocery store to get stuff. We all had to learn how to use public transportation, which some people think nobody in California during the 1950’s knew how to use the buses, but my mother certainly did. She said, “You don’t have to wait for the bus for long if you know what the schedule is. You just are there a few minutes ahead of time.” And, I am trying to remember how she used to get out to the place where she could buy groceries most inexpensively at the base Commissary. And right now, I have to go back and ask her how— when she wanted to really go buy a lot of groceries—how did she get back and forth to the Commissary. Because the buses that we took from Piedmont—we had to take three different buses to get out to the base. When we were a little younger, we had lived on the base. And that’s when my dad was, I think, before he went to Korea. Then we moved to East Oakland. Again, I think before he went to Korea, and lived there for a while. And then he went to Korea. And then, when he came back, we moved to Piedmont, which is where my mother still lives.

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Ms. Boone:

Same house?

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Mr. Williamson:

Same house that we grew up in. But she, well both of them, I think, are part of the greatest generation that doesn’t really get the notoriety and attention that has been focused on Caucasian members of the greatest generation. And I think it’s because we haven’t really had, I don’t know, a good book or a good movie about what an extraordinary challenge it was for black parents to be raising children in an America that was in the midst of beginning to integrate. In the 1950’s, especially in the South, but also in many northern cities, if you didn’t understand the written and unwritten racial laws, it could be very dangerous for you. I don’t know if you knew, in the 1960’s, there was a black kid who was looking for a summer job in Cicero Chicago. And he was killed just because he came up to somebody’s door and asked for a summer job. I think it was-- Cicero was a Polish neighborhood in Chicago.

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...The reason, in Piedmont, that we had got our house, actually, was that the former owner was a very interesting white guy, sort of iconoclastic white guy, Mr. Stotten, Rio Stotten. He didn’t like Piedmont, which was very conservative. It was a very conservative community back in those days. Very conservative. Primarily Republican community. He didn’t really like the environment there. So, I think in part, one of the ways he decided he’d get back at Piedmont would be to sell the house to a black family. (Laughter) So he fixed Piedmont with the Williamsons. (Laughter)

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...But my parents adopted an approach that—I think there were a number of African-American parents who were, who would move their families into integrated situations and concluded or believed that—if you started talking about race it will encourage your children to feel hatred toward white people. Particularly if you told your children the truth about how racist America was. So, they did not bring us up with explicit racial consciousness. They brought us up with the view that, “You are as good as anybody in this community.” That’s the basic value. And “We want you to take advantage of the schools, the recreational programs, to the fullest extent.” And “Do your best.” Now they didn’t say it in so many words, when they said, “Do your best,” you just realized even as a black child, that really meant that you had to do better than all the white people.

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In retrospect, I had this awareness that would play out in ways that, in retrospect, were unfortunate to have to deal with as a child. But, they are ways that shaped me a lot. For example, understanding that somehow, whatever I did, particularly if it was bad or deficient, would be attributed to all black people. Nobody said that in so many words, but you got that fairly early. When you outdid white people, they didn’t attribute that to all black people. Then they shifted to, “Oh, you’re an exception.”

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...Some kids never invited me over to their house, even though that was very normal for children in my community. My brother had an experience—I didn’t run into this directly—where he was invited to someone’s house, and when he got to their doorstep or their porch, the mother of George’s friend said, “Well, you can’t come in here. We don’t, you know, allow anyone black in our house.” You know when you’re a little kid that’s pretty crushing and bewildering. It’s like, “I didn’t steal anything from you and I didn’t beat up your kid. Why would you feel that I can’t come into your house?”

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On the other hand there were families that were very welcoming and warm. So that, I think it really didn’t make sense for me to develop a stereotypical view of white people. I knew a whole lot of white people. I knew how different they were, both toward me and toward each other. For some things I didn’t pick up on until later were just ironic, -- just remember it’s a small town. Piedmont is only twelve thousand people. It had three elementary schools, one junior high and one high school. This is really small town America. Twelve thousand people. In my elementary school, there was just one class of 25 kids. So that means in your grade you have twelve or thirteen boys and twelve or thirteen girls. That’s small. But that also meant you were aware of what happened to everybody. So when we were old enough to be Cub Scouts, all the boys wanted to be in the Cub Scouts den. But Jerry Goldstein for some reason didn’t become a Cub Scout. And it wasn’t until a couple years later I learned that the Den Mother, I think it was Donald Graham’s mother, he was a kind of pudgy, blond white kid, she was anti-Semitic and ironically, apparently did not object to a black kid being in the Den, but she would not let a Jewish kid join. Again when you’re in a little, small school and everybody knows each other and what you’re doing, you’re very conscious then of being left out of what the other boys are doing, because there is literally ten or twelve boys in the class.

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So we were embraced by the teachers in the school system. You know how sometimes you run into these teachers who-- they don’t seem to like children and you’re wondering, “Like, why are you a teacher?” The third grade teacher seemed like that to me. But particularly my second grade teacher, my fourth grade teacher, my fifth grade teacher—they didn’t seem to like kids too much either— and my sixth grade teacher she just loved the Williamson kids.

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In our little town, our neighborhood, your social life, if you will, for the boys revolved around being at the playground and that was when, in those days, you would have a college kid who was hired by the recreation department—or two of them, usually a guy and a girl—to be playground directors. They would help to organize activities. They would just watch over the kids to be sure nobody did anything really stupid. And if you got hurt they would take care of you. To a person, all of the playground directors were very supportive of me and my brother and my sister. The girls didn’t come down to the playground as much, but my brother and I pretty much lived there. To the point where if anything, there was kind of discrimination in favor of us in some instances. For example, once somebody stole twenty dollars from the purse of the female playground director. The police were called to the playground and they interviewed all of the kids who had been on the playground, except me because the director Joe Maroux had said, “There’s no way he did it.” So that was very different than the experience of black kids around America.

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...But, again, there were dimensions of the experience that were really quite positive and welcoming. But in some ways they were not the greatest training for getting ready to understand what was out there in the larger American society and understanding how most black people oriented to what was going on out there and understanding how most white people thought about you. So third grade, Brown v. Board of Education, would have been too early and also it didn’t result in any change in my situation. I had started in kindergarten in 1952. I think it was 1951. I think it was 1951 or ’52. But, for me, I showed up at school and knew the kids from being on the playground. And it didn’t really occur to me until maybe the fifth grade when there was this white kid who was maybe a couple years older who said, “They’re not gonna let you go to the high school.” I, by then, knew the civil rights movement was going on and there were these school desegregation issues. So everybody knew in ’57 there was an enormous amount of publicity around what happened in Little Rock at Central High. I don’t remember if I asked somebody or my parents about that remark. I didn’t like the guy who said it to me. And I didn’t trust him in other ways. And there was nothing else signaling that I wouldn’t be going to the junior high or the high school and there were things suggesting that some people were looking forward to my coming there. It was a small town, but if you were a good athlete, everybody knew about that, too. We played -- there were three elementary schools -- we, you know, we had a little league where we’d play against them. Other than this one guy, John Batalie, no one ever said anything like that and that was not an issue. But, I was becoming increasing aware that there were parts of the country where there were these—what seemed to me even as a little kid—these kind of savage, insane reactions to black kids coming to the same school as white kids. When you’re a little kid, it’s pretty difficult to understand why that would be a source of controversy and violence. You just wanna come to school.

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Now, at that time, I wanted to be like everybody else. I wished I had freckles and straight hair. I asked my mother if I could straighten my hair. Back then there were black entertainers and a lot of political figures, a lot of ministers, they would conk their hair. My mother said absolutely not. She said, “Are you crazy?” So I got the signal that was not cool. But, most kids, I think, want to be like their peers. And that was the world I lived in. I was coming to the realization I couldn’t be like everybody else and I had to start figuring out how to deal with being, you know, the only “Negro” in my class. Until I got to high school, we were the only black family in the community. The only other black kids in the school systems were my brother and sister for a while. There was one of my aunts, her children lived around the corner from us, but they moved out when I was in high school. We were the only black people.

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But at the same time, for example, when I finished with the Cub Scouts I joined the Boy Scouts, and by chance, the troop that I joined was run by a school teacher who was very resourceful and creative about the programs that he established. We had the largest troop in Piedmont. Most troops had 20-30, we had 100 kids in our 26 troop. It was really big. He seemed to recognized positive qualities in me very early. Even though I couldn’t swim, and in order to become, I think it was, a first class scout eligible to be a patrol leader, you had to have the swimming merit badge or something, he granted me a waiver because he wanted me to become a patrol leader. And it was also pretty clear to me that he wanted me to become the senior patrol leader, so that I was in charge of Sting Ray Patrol-- I was the scout, the highest ranking scout in the troop. And he was very good about teaching leadership skills. He would prepare an agenda, and we would consult about what would be on the agenda. To me, it seemed natural, because, by then, around the time I got started in scouts, Boy Scouts, my father had been able to arrange to get himself stationed back in the Bay Area. Being who my dad was, he wanted to make up for this time away. A lot of these scouting things—camping trips and whatnot, but mainly camping trips—you know, they asked dads to come along, but only a few come. My father never missed a camping trip. Plus he was an Army officer and so when he learned, you know-- he was a country boy and an Army officer, so camping was just second nature to him. He was a Lieutenant Colonel by then. So, people would refer to my father as just the Colonel.

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...I’m not sure if there was an election. I think the scout master decided who would be the senior patrol leader. But that was-- since my patrol had outdone the other patrols that wasn’t-- I don’t think that was a controversial issue in the community that I was operating in.

 

I think the first incident that really brought home just how strange and racist the society was, was when I was in the eighth grade. I ran for vice-president of the junior high school and was elected. You know, being a Williamson child, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal to be the vice-president, since I wasn’t the president. But I am not sure why I decided-- I probably figured there was some other kids that were more popular, so I’d have a better chance running for vice president. But to my astonishment, my election to be the vice president of Piedmont Junior High School became a front page story of the San Francisco-- in the San Francisco Chronicle, which was the biggest paper in San Francisco then. It was covered by the radio stations.

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...I think it’s pretty weird. I’m just the vice-president of the junior high school. But it’s clear this seemed quite remarkable to white America. And you also have to understand that Piedmont was known to be this very socially elite community. You have San Francisco society on one side of the Bay and then on the East Bay Side—Oakland, Berkeley, Piedmont—Piedmont was the place where there were debutants and coming out stuff. A lot of wealthy people. So yeah, front page of the Chronicle. On the radio stations. Probably would have been on the TV stations, but my parents wouldn’t, they wouldn’t allow me to be videotaped or photographed. And I came to understand fairly quickly why. Because after this publicity, we started to receive hate mail.

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