While going through my father’s papers after his death in January, I came across a letter dated July 26, 1971 addressed to the director of the Florida Highway Patrol.
In the letter, a copy of which I’m guessing was sent to the director, Daddy wrote that he had been driving through Dixie County, Florida a few days before writing when he was pulled over by a highway patrolman who told him he’d been going more than 80 miles an hour.
He told the patrolman he was going 68.
“I tried to explain to him that I was using a cruis-o-matic control which was calibrated prior to my leaving Colorado and that it only varied + or – 3 mph,” the letter continued. “I questioned him about the speed time relationship and his calibration sequence. At this time he seemed to have become irritated and told me he was giving me a ticket and that the fine was $31.”
This was just a handful of years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act marked the beginning of the end of Jim Crow, and many whites were still resisting the idea that Black Americans were full citizens.
Five decades later I can laugh a little at the thought of Daddy, always eager to educate, trying to explain “speed time relationship” or “calibration sequence” to a highway patrolman in, literally, Dixie. But it’s also chilling to think of what could have happened. And what could happen even today to an audacious Black driver.
I told my late mother’s sister about the letter and she vividly remembered hearing about the encounter. She told me Daddy had been at the wheel of his new station wagon taking my mother, their parents, my sister and I – then 8 and 6 years old – from their parents’ home in Chattahoochee to Tampa to visit her.
When he was a boy in neighboring Georgia, Daddy had witnessed the aftermath of the lynching of two Black World War II veterans and their wives, one of whom was pregnant. He had seen law enforcement officers in the white mob that carried out those killings. He also had grown up hearing about the lynching of one of his grandfathers.
He must have been frightened for himself and his family that day in Florida. Daddy paid the fine in cash after the trooper threatened to arrest him.
I don’t remember the encounter. In his letter, Daddy describes the patrolman taking him from the car to speak to him, so their conversation would have been out of my six-year-old self’s hearing. I’m sure any conversations later about the stop also would have been out of my and my sister’s hearing.
Daddy made no request for redress in his letter, which he signed with a “sincerely yours.” It seems to have been written simply to inform. I found no response from the highway patrol director among Daddy’s papers.
I can hear Daddy’s voice in the letter, and note the careful grammar of a man whose school teacher mother used to return the letters he sent home from college with his mistakes circled in red ink. It was a reminder of all the times he modelled for me how to face racism: Be prepared, be excellent, be assertive. Be calm.
A few months after the funeral, I had lunch with an old friend of Daddy. As the friend reminisced, he asked if I’d ever heard about the time Daddy knocked out a Navy officer.
I had not.
I knew that Daddy had worked as a civilian workplace safety expert at Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego. The friend had worked at the hospital as well, and told me they once had an officer leading their unit whom everyone hated.
The white officer constantly picked at and criticized Daddy, treatment the friend who told me the story saw as racist.
The harassment culminated at a staff meeting one morning during which the officer stood over Daddy, who was seated, wagging a finger under his nose. Daddy reddened, then rose and struck the officer in the chin, laying him flat.
I was told that Daddy, a widely respected industrial hygienist, had friends throughout the hospital, among them the two-star admiral who ran the place. Daddy walked with outward calm from the prone officer to the office of the admiral, who told him to leave the hospital immediately and work out of another Navy facility until further notice.
Daddy spent the next six months at the alternative facility. When he returned, the officer whom no one liked had been transferred from San Diego.
His friend says Daddy never wanted to talk about losing his temper and resorting to violence. I’m sure he found it hard to forgive himself.
I think Daddy’s friend admired him both for doing the deed – hitting a guy everyone clearly thought deserved it – and for not wanting the deed to define him.
When we were little girls, Daddy signed my sister and me up for karate lessons. He joined the dojo as well and all three of sparred at tournaments. He told his daughters that we should know how to defend ourselves if we ever had to, but that we also must understand the importance of the discipline and self-control that serious martial arts teachers try to model.
Daddy grew up in a time when role models for Black men included the baseball pioneer who, according to his wife Rachel Robinson was always Jack, not the diminutive Jackie white sports writers called him. Jack Robinson, Georgia-born like Daddy, died of a heart attack at just 53. Surely his life was cut short by racism – the stress of being belittled and underestimated, of having to remain impassive in the face of taunts from the bleachers and from fellow players for fear of being labeled angry and violent – even though anger and violence were natural responses. The isolation of being separated from his teammates when he was barred from segregated restaurants and hotels or was bumped from airplanes while white passengers boarded. The novelist Edward P. Jones has observed that “a Black man’s work – tied so much to his being – could ultimately contribute to his undoing, no matter how well the job is done.”
As I read the letter to the highway patrol director and listened to his co-workers story, I marveled I had Daddy as long as I did.
And I was thankful.