No, I am not proselytizing. I am recounting here the memories evoked by my reading of two books by Juan Williams, who recently received some unusual public attention, about which you can read under the preceding link.
The first book I read is This Far by Faith: Stories from the African American Religious Experience, which was made into a six-part series by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Religion and Music are partners in life and in this book. Since I was around six years old I have felt deep stirrings from hearing music referred to in it.
This is a popular song, rooted in gospel singing, that I responded to in my youngest years:
The second book is My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Voices of the Civil rights Experience. The thirty-three stories in this book are short interviews of people who were engaged with the struggle for racial justice, some directly, some peripherally. Most are fascinating, and all are uplifting to the spirit. This book, in addition to the first one mentioned, also encourages me to recount memories–not just about music, but about my own experiences and perceptions regarding racial and ethnic prejudice n America.
Please keep in mind that what I present here are tangential thoughts and memories; I do not attempt to capture the historical sweep and depth of these two books.
I never knew a Negro until age 14, at the beginning of my junior year at Lowell High school in San Francisco, just after the family returned from 5½ years in Brooklyn. His name was Grady Hayes and the remarkable thing about him, for me, was that he was not remarkable—he was a regular guy, someone I could easily talk with. I never met his family, but he said that his mother had a West Indian accent.
I felt, at a very young age, sympathy with the position of Negroes in American society. The major reason for this is from hearing my father’s stories about the inhumane treatment of Negroes in the southern United States, and from his deeply felt philosophical positions which led him to be an active member of the Socialist Labor Party (Democratic Socialist, not Communist) while we lived in San Francisco.
Also, my mother had felt the barbs of ethnic discrimination in her youth, as the only “Greek” in the Portland, Oregon neighborhood where she and her two sisters were foster children. (Her parents were born in Greece; her mother died in San Francisco when she and her sisters were quite young). Mom was very sensitive all her long life to ethnic slurs. When I was around age four or five, just after WWII had begun for the USA, I was disrespectful to a neighbor boy who was of Japanese ancestry. My Uncle Harry rescued me from the wild anger of my mother when she learned of this. The Japanese family disappeared soon after, probably to a “relocation camp.”
My extended family loved to listen to songs sung by Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson.
When I was around eight years old, just before we moved to Brooklyn, I took piano lessons from a wealthy woman who lived in Pacific Heights of San Francisco. She had a servant, a black woman. My three-year-old sister accompanied me and my mother to one of these lessons and upon seeing, for the first time, a black person, Diane innocently asked her “why is your face black?” My mother was mortified and I became quite alert to her embarrassment. I will never forget the woman’s calm and gracious reply: “it’s because God wanted me this way.”
Our small family lived in Brooklyn from New Year’s Day 1946 until the Summer of 1951. We were isolated from our extended family and all that was familiar to us in San Francisco and California. Mom, my sister Diane and I had only the radio to connect us with the rest of the world.
The radio was almost always on. It was tuned to a station that played “serious” music. I was enthralled when “Negro spirituals” were on the program, especially when Mahalia Jackson sang.
This was in 1954, at the end of the Korean “Conflict.” After general and technical training for over a year, I was assigned to an aircraft carrier as an electronic technician. I became part of team of 35 sailors who repaired and maintained the ship’s radios, radars, and other equipment.
Most of sailors in my division were from the south and southwest USA. Although all of us scored high in intelligence tests in order to qualify for our jobs, I was astounded to hear these young men utter the foulest words against Negroes. Being my father’s son, I mounted strong arguments against their prejudices, but to no avail. For those who even cared to engage with me, my standing was nil because “I had never lived around them.” My appeals to logic and general humanity fell on deaf ears, and I was becoming a nag. I finally swallowed my bile and accepted that I couldn’t make a difference. I had to live in close quarters with these fellows and work beside them.
Upon being discharged from active duty on the cusp of New Year, 1958, I enrolled in the local community college, got married and moved to Berkeley in 1960 to attend University. My wife and I became friends with a couple, John and Inca. John was a student at Berkeley and had also been in the US Navy. Inca had a job and was homemaker for their two children, Michael and Jenny.
John was a light-skinned Negro from a middle class family in the western US. Inca was born in Holland. Berkeley was one of the few places then where a couple in a “mixed marriage” could feel reasonably comfortable. John and Inca were tall people and their children were strikingly beautiful.
As the racial tensions and freedom marches in the South began to take shape leading up to the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, John began to feel “black” for the first time in his life. He dropped out of university and went to the South to participate in civil rights activities there. Upon his return to Berkeley John said his life would take a new direction. But, shortly afterward, in 1965, he was killed in a traffic accident in San Francisco. He was buried, as a military veteran, at Golden Gate National Cemetery, 10 miles south of San Francisco.
Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I have a Dream” speech in the summer of 1963, just after I had received my B.S. and started studying toward a graduate degree. I have listened to and read this speech many times, but not recently—until I read these books. In addition to the beauty and aptness of his oration, I see the threads of Negro church music in certain poetic phrases, repeated sonorously:
- “Now is the time.”
- ”We are not satisfied.”
- ”Let freedom Ring.”
- ”Free at last.”
From “American Negro Songs ” by J. W. Work:
“Free at last, free at last
I thank God I’m free at last…”
… to which Dr. King referred and quoted in the final words of his speech. It remains as thrilling as it first did, 47 years ago.
I have read recently Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. This is a great work of literature and scholarship in the ethics of Christianity, in which he was appealing to white ministers for sympathy to the cause he was leading.
I lived in and around the San Francisco Bay Area until 1979, when I took work in Alaska. These were tumultuous years, as persons my age will recall, especially around San Francisco and Berkeley. These were also seminal days for popular music, including the evolution of black church music into the mainstream. I was thrilled to discover I could still hear the essence of the Negro spirituals I enjoyed in my youth by listening to Ray Charles and, especially, Aretha Franklin.
In the beginning of My Soul Looks Back in Wonder is a poem, a variation on the lyrics to this song sung by Mahalia Jackson:
How I got over
How I got over, my Lord
And my soul looked back and wondered
How I got over, my Lord
The tallest tree in Paradise
The Christians call it tree of life
And my soul looked back and wondered
How I got over, my Lord
Lord, I’ve been ‘buked and I’ve been scorned
And I’ve been talked ‘bout as sure as you’re born
And my soul looked back and wondered
How I got over, my Lord
Oh, Jordan’s river is so chilly and cold
It’ll chill your body but not your soul
And my soul looked back and wondered
How I got over, my Lord
—
These two books have taken me on a soulful journey
through my memories (enhanced by Youtube.com), and through a reminder of recent history that should be revisited by everyone in the USA.
NOTE: The title for this article comes from my memory of the gospel song Give Me that Old Time Religion as I heard it on the radio in the late 1940s.
It was by way of Charles Davis Tillman that the song had incalculable influence on the confluence of black spiritual and white gospel song traditions in forming the genre now known as southern gospel. Tillman was largely responsible for publishing the song into the repertoire of white audiences. It was first heard sung by African-Americans and written down by Tillman when he attended a camp meeting in Lexington, South Carolina in 1889. (Source)
Posted by Ron Pavellas 
