2

The Education of a Ditch Digger

I had never thought of going to college, but the GI Bill made education affordable, and clearly an educated man would advance more quickly than one without a diploma in the postwar world. However, because I was discharged from the Marines in August and most schools started in September, I thought, Too late, can’t get in. Then my stepmother, Lottie Lee, changed my life. She was a college classmate of the fellow in charge of veterans’ affairs at Howard University, Dr. Carroll Miller, and she insisted that I apply to Howard immediately. “I can get you in,” she said, and I believed her. My grades were good enough to gain entrance into that esteemed institution, and Lottie Lee got it done in three weeks, which I thought was a miracle.

I was not the only young person she helped. In fact, there was strong support from many men and women in my Trenton neighborhood who, though not necessarily our teachers, were friends of the family—the extended family—and helped counsel us toward higher education. At one point in time there were nearly forty students at Howard from Trenton. Successful students were a source of great community pride.

This surely was different from the attitude of our high school counselors, who most often directed African American students toward service jobs. The most enlightened of them encouraged some few of us to be nurses or teachers, but college and then medical or law school was outside their idea of reasonable career paths for black youth. Every generation preceding mine—and I am not just talking about the high school counselors in Trenton—was directed away from higher education. The result was that many people who might have thrived intellectually and economically never had the opportunity to succeed. Nor did their children, or their children’s children, have that opportunity; the effect was exponential. Most of my friends went to college, but there were some left behind, and they did not fare as well as their intelligence might have allowed. Hilmar Ludwig Jensen Jr. (Junky Joe) had entered Howard University a year before I arrived. Les and Bill Hayling mustered out of the service earlier than I and were there already as well. Fred Schenck, who was younger, arrived a year later.

The GI Bill took care of tuition and books and provided a $75 monthly stipend for room and board and other expenses. I planned to live on campus, referred to as “the Hill,” in Cook Hall, where the rent was $17.50 a month. However, the administration, in its infinite wisdom, decided that because I was a veteran I was too old to live with freshmen and therefore had to reside in one of three vet dorms—Wake, Guam, or Midway—out in northeast Washington, DC, off Benning Road. The fact that I was nineteen didn’t seem to factor into their thinking. My rent in Wake Hall was $30.50, and a trolley pass, which I now needed to reach the Howard campus, cost $4.50, so my monthly total was $35—or precisely twice the amount I thought I was going to be paying. This and other factors caused me to have month left at the end of my money.

Money was an issue throughout college. I had a roommate junior year whose father was an undertaker in Americus, Georgia. I figured he was very wealthy, for he wore a suede sport jacket. Most of us were dirt poor. A few of us were coming home one day when we saw my roommate in a little convenience store playing pinball. Now, you don’t win anything playing pinball. If you do real well, they let you play an extra game or two, but it’s a money-taking, not a money-making, venture. So there he was playing pinball. And eating cashew nuts! We raised hell. We were eating pancake batter and water, poor as hell, and he’s eating cashew nuts!

I developed a taste for representative democracy while at Howard. Because we were more mature, or had faced enemy fire, or had already lived outside our parents’ homes, the veterans’ concerns differed slightly from those of the rest of the student body. There seemed to be a constant rift between the veterans and the regular matriculants, and the student council was the forum in which it was adjudicated. I appeared before them several times with three or four sheets of paper rolled into a baton that I waved extravagantly. “I have in my hand,” I’d proclaim, “the proxies of seventy-five veterans!” and then would proceed to browbeat the council until I made my point or got my way. Now, the pages were blank—I had no proxies whatsoever. What I did have was the informed sense of the men in my dormitory; I knew what people had been discussing, I knew what we wanted, and I was determined to do right by them. I was relatively successful.

My time at Howard wasn’t devoted entirely to rhetoric and student government. When I was lucky enough to study freshman English under Alice Jackson Houston, my world changed. Alice Jackson Houston was a Virginia woman who was intensely serious about the English language, its grammar and usage. She tolerated no deviance from the proper form. Subjects were to fit their predicates, tenses were to be consistent and inviolable. She was mathematical in her precision and eloquent in her diction, her speech was impeccable, and I responded to her every word as if it were the gospel. I had been a reasonably good conversationalist until then. I wasn’t given to excessive use of street slang or wild linguistic invention, and I wasn’t so formal that anyone made fun of the way I spoke, but under Ms. Houston’s tutelage I became a true traditionalist.

Her bible was The Macmillan Handbook of English, a highly detailed primer. Chapter 2 in particular, “The Sentence,” with its components “Grammatical Patterns” and “Rhetorical Patterns,” held my commandments.

One might say that correct grammar is like a pair of trousers: when a man has them on, no one notices him, but when he does not, he will be painfully conspicuous and embarrassed among people whose opinion he values.

From that time on I have been supremely aware of what is correct and what is incorrect English. One would get drummed out of Alice Jackson Houston’s class if one said, “between you and I”; the preposition “between” takes the objective case personal pronoun “me,” not “I.” When I hear this mistake coming from newscasters or public figures or anyone who can influence popular usage—when I hear it from friends!—I cringe. When I hear someone say, “Everyone is entitled to their opinion,” I know—because Alice Jackson Houston taught me—that the correct usage is “his opinion” (or more recently “his or her opinion”), and I am very apt to correct the error. I understand that language is a fluid thing, changing with the times and generations. When one knocks on a door and is asked, “Who’s there?” the answer now is “It’s me.” You will find only one in five thousand who will say, “It is I.” However, since the first day I set foot in Alice Jackson Houston’s class, I have also understood that this fluidity should not be confused with a lack of standards. There are rules!

More than fifty years later I spoke to Alice Jackson Houston’s son on the phone. He was a judge in the Washington, DC, area, and he seemed hesitant, as if asking, “Why are you calling me?” She had died in 2001, and I wanted to pay my respects. I said, “I just want you to know what your mother did for me.”

Whether or not it was stated directly, Howard students all knew that to succeed in a white world one would be required to present and comport oneself in accordance with white community standards. African American culture, then and now, has its own unique and expressive outlook and lexicon that stand outside the white mainstream. My generation had integrationist, not separatist, aspirations. Speaking unimpeachable English, I felt, offered not only the rewards of intellectual propriety but the added benefit of easier entrance into the halls of wealth, power, and respect. These were the goals of a college education, and I pursued them.

Which is not to say I was a grind. For the first year and a half on campus my motto was “Don’t let your education interfere with your recreation!” My sophomore year I roomed with Fred Schenck and James Roderick Purdy at 2222 First Street. We called ourselves “the Three Aces at the Four Deuces,” and we were a partying crew. If it was wet, we drank it. Freddy in particular liked to put it away. We had the music going, there was dancing. You hadn’t been to Howard if you hadn’t partied at 2222 First Street.

Fred was a lot of fun, and he could cook. We were still living on the $75 a month provided us by the GI Bill, and Fred managed it brilliantly. Aside from bacon and eggs and the occasional steak, he usually found some corner of the food budget for enough sugar and flour to make a coconut layer cake. (His summer working at a bakery was paying off.) I was an appreciative eater and taught Fred the glories of the cake sandwich—two pieces of cake with another piece of cake in the middle!

The next year we lived at 52 Seaton Place with Les and Bill Hayling, who were in professional school. By that time I had discovered mathematics. The precision and structure of the discipline appealed to me, and I was good at it. I spent a lot of time on the telephone, solving problems with other math students. Fred says that if there was any social value to having a telephone in our room, it was lost by my study habits. When I discovered that one had to have a concentration in some area in order to graduate, I found I had more math credits than any others, so I continued on that path. I did not have a strong idea of what career I might choose. I did not seem to have the vision or foresight required to be an engineer or architect; I just wasn’t that good. I liked order and the need and ability to find creative but concrete solutions to specific problems, so I became a math major. Dr. David Blackwell, the head of the Howard math department, was an inspiration. He had received his PhD from the University of Illinois at age twenty-two and was a brilliant and wonderful man.

I always had a job in the summertime, not because I was very eager to work but because I needed the money. One summer I was so late applying that the only job I could find was washing dishes in a place called Mammy’s that served hotcakes and such on the boardwalk. I lasted one day. I said, “Let me get the hell out of here!”

I spent another summer digging ditches. Les Hayling took a picture of me and a fellow named Jesse Pone down in a ditch. He said, “I’m gonna take this back to Howard and show ’em what you all were doing!” I also worked for the New Jersey Department of Agriculture out around Heightstown, doing surveys and looking into issues involving the many African American farmers who had emigrated to our state from the South. Bill Hayling, who was in medical school by then, spent the summer working on their health care.

Rural southern Jersey encompassed a lot of farmland and produced large crops of apples, apricots, beets, blueberries, peas, and peppers, among others. Its residents were also remarkably conservative and hidebound. As elsewhere, workers were often exploited and preyed upon. For example, a salesman would sell a farmer a wristwatch for $10 down and $1 a week. But this was outright price gouging: the watch would only be worth $5, and the payments would last forever. If he never saw another nickel, that salesman had made a killing. The farmers were unsophisticated and needed protection from such swindlers. These farmers led a tough life.

One thinks of New Jersey as a northern state, but we used to say that Jersey was the first cousin of Georgia. The Ku Klux Klan was active as far north as Red Bank. There were cross burnings in Heightstown and Hamilton Township. They had separate schools for colored folks in Salem County until around 1958, even after Brown v. Board of Education, and neither blacks nor Jews were allowed to stay in some Salem hotels even into the 1960s. When I was younger, I recall that in Cranberry a migrant farmer and his wife were stripped naked and painted white.

That same summer I spent digging ditches, Fred and I went to the Lincoln Theater in Trenton to see a movie. It was a hot night, and we were thirsty when we got out. We came to a drinking establishment on Hanover Street called Jack’s Rathskeller, but when we got about two steps inside the proprietor stepped from behind the bar and said, “I’m not serving you. You’ve had enough. You’ve had too much. You can’t drink here!” We had no intention of hanging out and listening to the jukebox, and we weren’t going to ask any of the women to dance; all we wanted was a glass of beer. Having been a Marine, I took umbrage, but the man completely refused us. I was faced with many choices. I could cause a scene, I could slink away, or I could try not to let this happen again.

Out we went. I was furious, but what recourse did we have?

We filed a complaint with the New Jersey Civil Rights Bureau, a small but fervent independent organization that tracked and protested just such incidents. The Bureau had no teeth to speak of, but after several months it negotiated a mediated settlement: we could go back to Jack’s Rathskeller and be served. I suppose we should have been elated: we had, against long odds, integrated a de facto segregated drinking establishment. But this was New Jersey—it was supposed to be integrated in the first place! And we certainly had no interest in going back there; bartenders were known to spit in glasses, if not worse.

I was by no means the only one among us who made a point of being treated fairly. Les Hayling and our friend Sam Dorsey emerged from a community dance one evening around midnight and went looking for something to eat. Les was wearing a shirt and tie, as was his fashion, and Sam, who was in the Air Corps, had on his leather bomber jacket. They found the Lenox Restaurant on Perry Street across from the Catholic church, went in, and ordered a ham-and-cheese sandwich. The man behind the counter refused to serve them. Les said, “Man, we’re going to have to sue him!” He brought the case to a lawyer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In the hall outside of the courtroom, the owner of the Lenox Restaurant tried to settle. He still wasn’t going to let Les or any of us eat in his establishment, but he offered $500 to drop the case. Les said, “Oh no, I’m not making any money out of this. The NAACP is suing you, and they’ll get the money.”

A Judge Volpe presided. “How many stools were at the counter?” he asked Les.

“I don’t know, Your Honor.”

“How far were you from the tables or booths?”

“I don’t know, Your Honor.”

“How many booths were there?”

Les had had enough. “I don’t usually take a tape measure with me when I go to get a ham-and-cheese sandwich at twelve o’clock at night!”

Judge Volpe responded, “I hold you in contempt of court!”

Les changed his attitude, but only slightly. He wasn’t jailed for contempt, and he did win his case. The money for damages went straight to the NAACP.

...

I saw a young lady with great legs reading a book while strolling down Howard’s Senior Walk and took immediate notice.

“Hey, freshman!”

She looked up, surprised to be interrupted.

“Don’t you know you young folks aren’t supposed to be here?” By tradition, Senior Walk was reserved for seniors. Permission to set foot on this hallowed ground had to be earned; if one had matriculated to senior year, one had proved some semblance of worth and promise. And here this pretty young woman was treading blithely. This was as good a reason as any to strike up a conversation.

When she found that I was reading a calculus text, she was impressed. It turned out that she had only recently come to campus. I kicked her off the Walk and asked her out on her first Howard date. It didn’t take long for her to tell some of her New York friends about me. They had heard about the Three Aces at the Four Deuces and said, “Him?!” Her name was Joyce Burrows. We began dating and simply never stopped.

I was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the oldest black fraternity in the United States, among whose distinguished members were Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Owens, and Justice Thurgood Marshall. Its guiding principles were “manly deeds, scholarship, and love for all mankind.” As the APA dean of probates—the “big brother” responsible for recruiting new fraternity brothers—I brought in Andrew Young, who went on to become mayor of Atlanta and US ambassador to the United Nations. We used to call him “Little Andy” Young.

Howard was also home to several sororities, including Delta Sigma Theta, of which Joyce Burrows was a member, and Alpha Kappa Alpha, of which my sister Joyce was a member. Whereas DST was affiliated with the fraternity Omega Psi Phi (known as the Q’s), AKA was affiliated with Alpha Phi Alpha. I was an Alpha. Joyce was the Q Queen. This meant trouble.

There was a serious rivalry between the Alphas and the Q’s, and now here you had this rival Alpha taking out the Q Queen. This did not sit well with a lot of the brother- and sisterhood. Sometimes Joyce would go to a Q party, and because I was not invited, I had to wait for her to be brought home before she’d go out with me. She felt it was her duty to preside over the sorority’s official functions. I used to raise hell about it, but to no avail.

I graduated cum laude from Howard University in 1950 and did sufficiently well in my mathematics studies that I won a fellowship to continue at Rutgers University graduate school. I didn’t quite know what I would do with a degree in mathematics; although I continued to feel that I did not have the vision or foresight to become an engineer or an architect, I was good at the pure math and decided to pursue it.

That summer I lived in Trenton. I saw Willie Mays play for the Trenton Giants his first year in the minor leagues—not the Negro Leagues, but regular white folks’ baseball, a Class B team—the year before the Giants called him up to play at the Polo Grounds. The story about “Say Hey Willie” was not his hitting but his arm: they’d say he could back up to the wall in center field and throw a strike across the plate.

I worked in a rock wall factory making insulation. The idea was to save enough money over the summer to go the whole school year without working and be able to concentrate on my studies. I manned one machine that shot granular material into burlap bags, and then another that I stepped on to stitch the bags shut. I didn’t ask what this material was or what effect it might have on me; I didn’t have that luxury because I needed the paycheck. The work was stultifying and grueling, and two or three times a week I put in a double shift—not overtime but sixteen hours straight. My second-shift boss didn’t care that I might be tired or bored, he just wanted me to produce, and I had to oblige.

After a summer of factory labor, I had amassed the necessary funds to quit working. One night I stayed up damn near half the night solving a math problem. I arrived at what I thought was the correct answer, took a quick nap, went to class, and asked the smartest student, who was a woman, “Did you get the answer to number two?” “Yes,” she said, and told me what it was. I agreed. “That’s what I got.”

As an afterthought, elated as I was that I had the correct answer, I said, “How long did it take you?”

“About twenty minutes.”

It had taken me several hours. I knew then I could not succeed. I told my father, “I’m dropping out of school.”

“You can’t do that! What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know, Pop, but I know what I’m not going to do.” I dropped out and got a job selling insurance.

Life was not easy in the African American community of Trenton after the war. People had jobs, but not many were prospering. At the same time, the tradition of supporting one’s family was strong, and people were proud to be able to put away something to make their loved ones’ lives better after they passed away. Life insurance provided this opportunity.

I sold “industrial insurance,” which is to say, policies the face value of which was $1,000 or less—poor people’s insurance, which fit the budgets of the people I knew and the people I was meeting going door to door. African Americans. I worked for Progressive Life Insurance Company, home office in Red Bank. The premiums were small: ten cents a week, fifty cents a month, or two dollars a quarter. There was usually a little card hanging somewhere in the house, and with each visit the salesman would collect the money and mark the card “paid.” On a term policy, people could pay a dime a week forever. Salesmen were compensated based on collections as well as net increase. How was I to succeed?

I studied the habits of the insured. One man got paid on Thursday, another on Friday. One got paid every other week and brought his check straight home to his wife; another stopped at a bar, cashed his check, and drank it. A good salesman had to know where to be the moment his customers had money in their pockets.

I started wearing a hat so I could take it off. I would knock at a single-family home and wait until the lady of the house answered. As soon as she opened the door I would remove my hat with one hand and introduce myself. “Mrs. Smith,” I would say, “how are you today? My name is David Dinkins, I’m from the Progressive Life Insurance Company . . .” and launch into my presentation. It was important that she see me take off my hat. I was showing respect to people who received very little of it. People pay respect to those who give respect, and besides, whether or not it was reciprocated, I felt that was the way one ought to behave. I had always been taught to be polite, and I found it to be good business.

I was also aware that the white agents from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, my competition, treated these same women quite differently. They would breeze in to collect their premiums, step through the door, and say, “Hi, Suzie, how’re you doing?” With their big smiles and air of assumed familiarity, these men were entirely unaware of the resentment they were creating. This was the plantation mentality brought north, and in their smug certainty, the agents didn’t even know it. This woman is your client, I’d think. She is paying your salary, and she is entitled to better than being called by her first name. “Suzie” is a girl, “Mrs. Smith” is a woman; there is a profound difference. I found their behavior disrespectful, and of course it was racial. I resented it, and my presentation was in clear contrast. Apparently my approach was appreciated. Within a year I was leading Progressive in both collections and new business.

As I began to move in new financial circles I met an agent who sold ordinary life insurance—policies with a face value of more than $1,000 whose premiums were paid monthly, quarterly, sometimes annually. For a salesman, selling ordinary life insurance meant less time spent on collection rounds, higher premiums, and higher fees. This fellow took clients to lunch and sent flowers to them on their birthdays. I said to myself, Man, this guy knows how to live. I’m in the wrong end of this business! My success at Progressive got me a job with his general agent in Philadelphia. I lived and worked there for six months and then moved to New York.

As I established myself in the insurance business I waited for Joyce Burrows to graduate. I had received my diploma in 1950, and she was in the class of ’53. Boat rides were the big thing in New York during those summers, and I was pleased to escort Joyce on one of these excursions sponsored by a Howard fraternity. What I didn’t know was that the fellow she had dated before me and his cohorts were lying in wait. Apparently they had decided they would get me drunk and steal my girl. So all night long these guys came up to me with flasks and said, “Hey, Dave, want a drink?” We’d step into the head for a nip. What they didn’t realize was that I had driven my daddy’s new car up from Trenton and no way was I going to be drinking! Certainly not to excess. Sure enough, when the night was over, they carried the other guy off the boat, stoned, and I drove home with Joyce.

Joyce and I were partners. She had a very vague sense of direction, and I used to kid her that she’d get lost if she couldn’t see the flag on top of the Howard library! We used to go to a little place with red checkered tablecloths and get a pitcher for seventy-five cents and sit and drink beer and plan our future.

Joyce has always had my number. Still does. I often tell this story:

I am mayor of New York. I’m riding in the car with my wife, and I see a fellow with a shovel, digging a ditch. I say, “Joyce, isn’t that a fellow you used to date?” I say, “Nothing wrong with a fellow digging ditches. I’ve dug ditches.” I used to work for a general contractor digging ditches. I’ve worked in factories, waited tables, shined shoes, washed dishes, washed cars, all kinds of jobs. So I’m not knocking them, I’m just commenting on my wife’s good fortune. “That is a fellow that you used to date, isn’t it?”

She says, “Yes, as a matter of fact it is.”

I say, “See, if you’d have married him, you’d be the wife of a ditch digger.”

She says, “No, if I’d married him, he’d be mayor.”