Memory Bank Withdrawal

I meet regularly with a group of writers, but I’m not writing. When I start to write, my mind fills with news of the day. What is happening in our country comes across as uncaring and heartless: so many jobs lost in the name of government efficiency; so many lives disrupted through immigration policies; so many unsettling impacts on trade and commerce; so much government-funded research put on hold; so many threatened reductions in medical care, support for veterans, the poor and the elderly and above all the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Where will it end?

Having lived through the years before the legal end of “separate but equal” policies, I believed that as a nation, we were moving toward a goal of equality for all. I thought things were improving until a presidential decree ended DEI workplace protections. However, that attack prompted withdrawals from the old memory bank.

In 1949, I was in the last months of fourth grade when our family moved to New Orleans. There was a new school just a couple of blocks from our house, built during the “separate but equal” era that allowed states and local governments to make and enforce segregation laws. In Louisiana, the decision-makers built the new school to placate the Black community and discourage active lobbying for school integration. To get to my old, dilapidated school, I had to walk past the new school, the gates to the Beverly Country Club (rumored to be the “in” place for organized crime meetings), the Jefferson Parish secondary school where my brother went, and the Saint Agnes Catholic School.

I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t go to the new school — it seemed so unfair.

At that time, my dad was the superintendent of construction at the New Orleans Veterans Hospital. His specialty was hospitals, especially veterans hospitals. His job was to obtain the permits, secure the labor union contracts, get the job started, and then turn the job over to someone else and move on to the next new job. By the time I was 13, I had lived in 11 different places. It was a great way to grow up.

While living in New Orleans, some overheard conversations turned my attention to the social impacts of political decisions. Little pitchers have big ears, and my mom always had an open door, a fresh cup of coffee, and a closed mouth.

The first conversation that caught my attention occurred when our next-door neighbor, Carmen, started crying when telling my mom that her husband had been called up for service when troops were being sent to Korea. We moved on before that conflict ended, so I have no idea whether or not he returned. But I have often wondered.

The second conversation was between my mom and the preacher’s wife. She was distressed because her husband, who was an outspoken critic of the mob and the control exerted over local politics and labor unions, had been interviewed about the Kefauver Senate Hearings (1950-51). They were the first televised hearings and focused on the impact of organized crime on interstate commerce and communities. The preacher’s wife was upset because one of the men affiliated with Frank Costello (owner of the Beverly Country Club) had visited their home. The man offered two “carrots.” The first was that he would fund a new church if her husband would just shut up. The second was that he would see to it that his wife could have a lucrative singing career in mob-owned nightclubs. The man had ended his visit with what felt to her like a threat: “Do it for her.”

A few days later, my walk to school was delayed by a line of tinted-window limousines entering the gates of the Beverly Country Club.

I asked my Daddy what was going to happen and if we were going to be at war in the USA. His response was that he was sure the country would be OK because the mob had too much invested in it to let anything happen.

It was years later that I realized his opinion was probably based upon his experiences dealing with the mob-controlled labor unions in New Orleans.

In 1954, four years after my Louisiana school experience, the Supreme Court overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson separate but equal doctrine that applied to school segregation. Separate but equal had been in effect for 85 years, and allowed states and local governments to pass laws governing the use of public and private facilities: bathrooms, water fountains, trains, buses, restaurants, etc. Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 ended segregation in schools —on paper, that is. Old practices die slowly, so there were still segregated schools when I started teaching in Texas seven years later.

Another decade passed before discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin was outlawed in 1964. Fifty-seven years later, it was noted that the federal workplace did not reflect the make-up of the general population, so by executive order, there was a directive to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in hiring. Four years after that, Jan. 20, 2025, the White House terminated DEI by executive order on the grounds that it was wasteful and issued another order challenging birthright citizenship as written in the 14th Amendment of 1868.

Time marches on, progress is made one step at a time, but it seems that achieving that pie-in-the-sky level playing field is a bit further away than it was last year.

Just one more deposit into my old memory bank.

Award-winning humorist Carolyn Wiley lives quietly, for the most part, in Longbranch.