Trayvon Martin Case Reminds Julius Hunter of His Own Experiences With Racism as a Teen in St. Louis

The recent statements by President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder about veiled racism and racial profiling in America, in response to the Trayvon Martin case, reminded me of one of the scariest race-related incidents of my life. I was taken back to a sunny Saturday in 1962, when I was tooling around, just back from Smith Hardware in University City in my very first car—a black and shiny ’58 Chevy Impala. I found myself driving behind a wildly meandering westbound car on Delmar that appeared headed for Disaster Street. It was weaving so erratically that when it turned left at Hanley, it was a true miracle that it didn’t crash into everything on that corner. I thought I would follow the death-on-wheels car to report any catastrophe quickly from a phone booth. I followed cautiously as the car made it to a long driveway in Clayton. A mailbox was spared somehow, but the driver—obviously drunk or otherwise impaired—came to a stop after taking out a section of hedgerow and a flower bed.

I pulled over, stopped, and remained in my car. When a white-haired white guy managed to open the car door and literally tumble out onto the ground, the Good Samaritan in me hopped out of my car and moved quickly toward the fallen man. But I froze in my tracks when, from his rumpled position on the ground, he took one look at me, snarled, and let loose with a loud, slurred barrage of hateful, racially charged profanity. The drunk targeted my ethnicity; disparaged my color; assaulted my heritage; and challenged the legitimacy of my birth. The ugly, foul message was: “Black man, get off my property or I’ll kill you!”

As I beat a retreat with my heart pounding, I figured that the alcohol-soaked, vulgar racist must have thought I was going to rob him. After all, I was black.

I was born upstairs over a barber shop at Vandeventer and Delmar. It’s as hard for me to believe as it might be for you to learn that my room to roam as a boy was incredibly circumscribed, limited to certain parts of town. Blacks who weren’t working were not wise to wander into neighborhoods south of Lindell; north of Page; or West of Kingshighway. “Trespassers” would be quickly accosted by “territorialists” or by the police for being “out of our neighborhood.” We could be roughed up and followed till we crossed back over our borders.

When I was 8 or 9 or so, I was baffled to hear from relatives in the all-black enclave of North Webster that rather than allow “mixed swimming,” the City of Webster Groves emptied and closed down its swimming pool for the entire summer of 1951. When I was ready to go to high school in 1957, there were 11 public high schools in St. Louis, but for all intents and purposes, blacks were allowed to attend only two of them: Vashon and Sumner. I was proud to become a Sumner Bulldog.

When my best buddies and I would cruise around on a weekend night, our evening was always destined to feature interruption after interruption—from the police. You see, one friend’s car was only a couple of years old. It was apparently too new for four black kids to be riding around in. A typical Friday or Saturday night always included the same ritual. The cops would pull us over; make us get out of the car; order us most innocent of dudes to lean against a building and get frisked. (Ours was, by the way, a town where an unwritten law forbade a black cop from arresting white suspects, unless a white cop was present. That rule held until the late ’50s.)

My buddies and I would have loved to go to the giant Forest Park Highlands amusement park to hang out on a weekend night, but the Highlands did not admit blacks to any entertainment on its 14 acres of fun. We could vividly see the giant Comet roller coaster, tilt-a-whirl, and other carnival rides from the street, and we could hear all the loud screaming and laughing set to a cacophony of calliopes. But we couldn’t go in. At the time when the Highlands was under pressure to integrate, it mysteriously burned to the ground in the summer of 1963. I remember taking my girlfriend to park on Oakland Avenue and watch the entire place go up in flames.

My buddies and I could have taken in a first-run movie on a non-school night, so long as it wasn’t in one of the “white theaters” along Grand Avenue. Well, we could actually go into those theaters during just one week a year, in February. That ballyhooed special week in St. Louis was ironically called “Brotherhood Week.” Thing was, though, we knew if any black person in St. Louis went to these theaters at any other time, we could somehow “legitimately” be arrested and charged with trespassing. Why would we want to go into “their theaters?” After all, we had our own. The negro movie houses in St. Louis could guarantee us a second-run, third-run, or fourth-run movie.

Why didn’t you guys and your dates take an excursion on the SS Admiral, you ask? Sorry. Blacks were not allowed to be among the passengers on an Admiral cruise until after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law. And even after that, the Admiral secretly booked black patrons on Tuesday and Thursday nights exclusively, until it was called out on that violation of the law.

It’s so easy to try to close the book and close our eyes and ears to racism. After all, aren’t Hunter’s horrible stories ancient history? We can delude ourselves and rejoice in what we’d like to think is a new day in race relations. But what Obama and Holder and Hunter are warning is that we should not be lulled into thinking that today’s black teens are any more comfortable or safer on the street than we were. There may be four black kids tooling around this weekend in a car somebody thinks is too new from them. Black teens, who are supposed to be careful wearing hoodies, are still expected to stay on the reservation and out of certain territories. There are fences and school districts that want to keep black kids out. If the drunk who cursed me after falling out of his car is dead, there are lots of racists out there to take his place. And, unfortunately, there are some confusing, unclear racially tinged practices that can actually masquerade as law. Can you explain Florida’s “stand your ground” law to me once again? What about Missouri’s?

Commentary by Julius K. Hunter