“These are just two of the tens of thousands of reasons that blacks are not welcome in my neighborhood.”
—Anonymous letter sent to the author by a San Leandro resident in 2004. The envelope contained two newspaper clippings involving violent crime. In one of the clippings, the criminal suspect was white.
Recently, I was able to get hold of some of the surviving court records from the trial. It turns out that the judge ruled that Mr. Wentworth never entered our apartment that He didn’t believe me. It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t believe me, because I was telling the truth. Kids always think that people will believe the truth. As adults, we learn differently, don’t we?
It turns out that he didn’t believe my mother either. He ruled that any emotional distress she suffered was the direct result of her marriage to my father. The finding of fact called her “delusional” and “prone to fantasy.” So much for justice. Apparently this means that you can do anything to the poor, anything to the abused and the downtrodden, because their pain and suffering, their misery, is the result of their own unfortunate circumstances. No amount of harassment or degradation has any merit because it pales in comparison to their already-sorry state of affairs. My mother got no money.
Our apartment, that Friday night.
“It’s my deal!” Tracie shouted.
“No, it’s my . . . okay. Go ahead, you can deal,” I surrendered.
My mother smiled. Things hadn’t turned out quite as badly as she’d thought. The judge also ruled that the eviction was unwarranted. We didn’t have to move.
“Gee, I don’t have anything,” Mom said, looking at her cards. Then she suddenly slapped a joker to her forehead. “Except this.”
A little more than three years later, my mother would finally run out ofjokers.
“Gal, you got another wild card?” Grandma spat. “Shit!”
Grandma would live in that apartment for another twenty-three years, until Tracie and I bought her a house. She’s eighty-five now and she stays busy running behind her thirteen great-grandchildren.
“Look, Mommy,” Tracie said, slapping a joker to her forehead. “I don’t got no wild cards. See?”
“Double negative. Very good!” Mom smiled.
Tracie would stop sucking her thumb, lose her lisp, and become a successful model, businesswoman, wife, and mother.
I’m very proud of her. My other sisters would follow suit and fulfill my mother’s middle-class dreams.
As for Sylvester, he never came back after I threw him out of the house that day. As far as I know, my mother never saw him again.
Things got better after the trial. Starr eventually sold the apartment complex as more and more blacks moved in. The Wentworths were replaced by other managers who didn’t harass us. Best of all, I met some of the really wonderful people who made it possible for me to grow up in San Leandro.
People like Joe Zipp and Mike Trutner, my scoutmasters. People like Marylou Ramirez, my eighth-grade teacher, who nurtured me, put me on the stage for the first time, and told me that I was worth something. Jon Regan, who befriended me when we were just nine years old and is still my best friend. Skinny, uncoordinated Jon would grow into an incredible high school athlete and, later, to my shock and amazement, into a United States Marine. The little boy who couldn’t get a push mower over a clump of crabgrass graduated boot camp near the top of his class, earning the distinction of marksman and a promotion to corporal. Who would have thought? He’s married to a wonderful woman and has three kids. I’m the proud godfather to his oldest son, Joshua.
There’s our dear family friend Charlene Raimondi who’s been looking after me since I was ten. Unbeknownst to me until recently, she paid for my mother’s coffin so that Mom wouldn’t be buried in what was literally a wooden box. Charlene still looks after me to this very day.
There was Tommy Thomas, my CYO baseball coach when I was ten, who later opened the first comedy club in San Leandro, Tommy T’s Comedy House. He gave me my start in showbusiness at eighteen. He encouraged me and hired me to perform even in the beginning when I wasn’t very good, and gave me the opportunity to discover that my true calling wasn’t civil rights law after all. His kindness and confidence in me gave me the ability to find my professional path. For that, I will always be grateful.
My fifth-grade teacher, Lisa Carrion, and her father, Mr. Duchard, did a kind and amazing thing. Lisa and my mother connected on a level, the depth of which I still don’t fully understand. What I later found out was that after Mom died, Lisa and her dad secretly paid my Catholic high school tuition. They never said a word to me. They just wrote checks.
And then, there was Paul Cromwell, the father of one of my St. Felicitas classmates. Dear, sweet, kind Mr. Cromwell. I found out at his funeral that his own family never knew that after Mom died, he came over every Christmas Eve and brought Grandma money to make sure that we had things for Christmas.
These are the people who changed San Leandro, and they’re the reason that I still live here today. According to the 2000 census, today San Leandro is one of the most diverse cities in the state of California. Take that, San Francisco!
If you walk down the streets of San Leandro today, you’ll see people of all races, creeds, and colors. They go to work together. They sit next to each other in school and shop together in the same stores. Some of the old attitudes persist. There remains an ignorant minority, primarily some members of the older population, who long for the “good old days.” (Have you ever noticed how black folks are never part of “the good old days,” or “simpler times”?) This small faction is dying off, though. A good friend of mine, a successful businessman and entrepreneur in San Leandro, put it best when he said that the racial attitudes of San Leandro have changed “coffin by coffin.”
I have a friend who has been a member of the San Leandro Police Department since the 1980s. At the time that my friend, a native of Chicago, joined the force, he was one of the few African-American officers in the department. He took the job here with no knowledge of the city’s history. He recently related to me the story of one of his first police calls.
Responding to a 911 call, my friend arrived at a San Leandro home and knocked on the door. An elderly white woman answered. She took one look at this black man in a policeman’s uniform standing on her front porch and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t call the Oakland Police Department. I wanted San Leandro’s.”
Old stereotypes die hard. So hard, in fact, that it is difficult for some people to believe I still live here among all these ghosts. Upon thoughtful reflection, I would have to say that it is, at least in part, due to the strength and resilience of my mother. She fought too long and too hard for us to be here for me not to take advantage of all of the opportunities that this community has to offer. It seemed to me, as a young man just out of high school, that to bolt the first chance I got would almost be disrespectful. If I left, what was her fight for? She was no longer alive to stand her ground. I was determined to stand it for her.
The aforementioned friends and benefactors are the second major factor that keeps me in San Leandro. The third is that even though things have gotten better in immeasurable ways, there is still some work to do.
In recent months, several of the Bay Area’s newspapers and electronic media outlets have run features on my family’s story and my mother’s fight, as well as what I’d discovered about the institutionalized racism that existed in the city’s real estate industry. Several journalists reported to me that they received calls and nasty letters (anonymous of course) from some of the older San Leandro residents, livid about the exposure and angry about my “dredging up the past.”
A columnist from one of the major dailies told me about the woman who called his office to complain about the complimentary article he’d written about my work.
“Why couldn’t he and his family have just lived where the black people lived?” she demanded to know.
Without missing a beat the writer said, “Ma’am, may I please have your name and phone number so that I can call you when I do an article on bigots?”
Not surprising, she hung up.
Then there was the woman who apparently listened to every radio and television interview I gave on the subject. I say “apparently” because, following my appearances, the show’s producers and/or hosts would immediately receive an e-mail tirade on how I was making the whole thing up and how she had lived in this town since the 1940s and there had never been any prejudice or racism in the city of San Leandro.
Part of her rationale is that the city has always been “a melting pot,” which she would illustrate by rattling off all of the white European countries represented in town.
I e-mailed the woman myself, gave her my sources, and invited her to look them up. She of course said, “I don’t need to look them up!”
“Coffin by coffin.”
There has been some “white flight” from my generation as well. Many of the kids I grew up with, whose parents fled to San Leandro to avoid the growing ethnic diversity of Oakland, now reside in the bedroom communities of nearby Southern Alameda and Contra Costa counties. Suburbs like Alamo, Danville, San Ramon, Walnut Creek, Orinda, and Dublin are the new San Leandros. They boast mainly white communities made up of folks who want to live by people who look and think as they do.
A few years back, when the movie Malcolm X opened at a San Ramon multiplex, it was widely reported that someone changed the marquee to read malcolm nigger.
I recently ran into a man I’d gone to grade school with who was telling me he had moved to one of these suburbs. I asked why so many San Leandro residents of our generation were bolting to these areas. His response?
“Too much overflow from Oakland.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
There are still some problems with housing discrimination in the area as well, but nothing like in the 1970s. The folks from the local chapter of Fair Housing tell me that, in recent years, they have caught some landlords using a technique they call “vocal profiling.” A representative of Fair Housing will call and inquire about a home or apartment for rent speaking in a stereotypical “black dialect.” “Ebonics,” if you will. Some landlords contacted will say that the unit is no longer available. A few minutes later, the Fair Housing representative calls back using “standard English” and is invited by the landlord to come out and inspect the property.
I think of the fun my mother could have had with this using her British “credit extension” voice.
In April 2004, San Leandro Mayor Sheila Young presented Grandma and, posthumously, my mother, with a city commendation for their bravery in fighting to make San Leandro a more diverse, inclusive community. Although Grandma, my sisters, and their families moved to the Sacramento area in 2001 to take advantage of less expensive housing opportunities, Mayor Young issued a proclamation making Grandma forever an honorary resident of the city of San Leandro.
“This makes me want to move back to San Leandro,” Grandma said.
Although I didn’t let her know that I’d seen them, she had tears in her eyes. I was more than a little misty myself as I thought about Mom looking down on what she’d set in motion. I could feel her smiling.
I put my own house in order as well. I left the morning show job to focus on what I love—writing and comedy. I continued my medical treatment and obtained the services of a good therapist who has helped me battle the demons I had kept at bay for so long. Unfortunately, the weight of the depression was too much for my marriage to my children’s mother, and we divorced. It is often said that when one door closes, another one opens. I guess there’s truth to that. After the dust settled, I met and married the love of my life, Susie. All of the good changes in my life enabled me to find the strength and courage to talk about these issues publicly. I did so in the best way that I knew how: on the stage.
I had spent my entire life doing stand-up material on politics and popular culture but I had never done anything personal. I had never really told my audiences the truth. I decided that it was time to cleanse my soul and exorcise my demons once and for all. In order to do that, I knew that I had to be naked up there on the stage (metaphorically speaking, of course) and not hold anything back. Not even the thing I was most embarrassed about in the world—my “gesture.”
The play Not a Genuine Black Man opened at The Marsh theater in San Francisco in April of 2004. Originally scheduled for a six-week stint, it went on to run for two years—becoming the longest-running solo show in San Francisco history.
During the show’s run, I met so many other black men whose lives have mirrored my own. They were the first blacks in the suburbs of Philadelphia, the white enclaves of southern California, the homogenized communities of Wisconsin, Iowa, Idaho, and Minnesota. I met Asian men and women who have been castigated by those who share their race because they’re “too white.” They’re called “bananas” and “Twinkies” because they are “yellow on the outside and white on the inside.” I’ve met elderly women who endured extreme isolation as the first Jews in their midwestern suburban neighborhoods, and Latinos criticized for too readily embracing European culture and values. They are ridiculed as “coconuts,” another “white on the inside” metaphor. They, too, thought that they were alone, that they were the only ones of their kind in the universe. That they were not “normal.”
I was also surprised to learn that I wasn’t alone in fighting depression, either. Many people I’ve known for years, people who I thought “had it all together,” have opened up to me about their battles with the disease. It helped me to understand that depression is indeed an illness and that those afflicted with it should not be any more embarrassed or ashamed about it than they would be if they were diagnosed with cancer or diabetes.
One of the most touching moments I experienced in this regard was after a performance one night when a young professional woman approached me and stoically confided, “I think about killing myself every day. After hearing your story, I’m going to call someone tomorrow and get help.”
Wow.
I’m a firm believer that most things in this world happen for a reason. We don’t always know whose reason or for what reason, but there is a purpose. It turns out that the difficult period I went through was not purgatory after all. I was indeed saved from the finality of what could have happened in the garage for a reason. To tell the other “Oreos,” “coconuts,” and “Twinkies” and whatever other pejoratives the race police decide to bestow upon those who don’t subscribe to their interpretation of what it means to “keep it real,” that they are okay. They are normal. We must all live our lives in the way that makes use the most comfortable and the happiest.
Whether it’s considered “black” or not, I still love Rick Springfield’s music. I open for him every opportunity I get and I never miss one of his new CDs. If there’s anybody in the “ ’hood” who’s got a problem with that, tough.
But even after coming to terms with all of these issues and settling them, I realized that I still had one piece of unfinished business.