—BESSEMER, ALABAMA—
AUTUMN 1936
Davis and his only son, Lil’ Georgie, sit in the front room of their small Bessemer house on the eve of Georgie’s eighteenth birthday. Georgie clips a photograph of 1936 Olympic star Jesse Owens from the Bessemer Herald. In the picture, Owens is dashing across the Berlin Olympic finish line, winning the hundred-meter quarterfinal. Georgie pins Owens’s snapshot on the front room wall that displays the Davis family photographs.
“He’s gotta be the greatest athlete in the world,” Georgie says, beaming with pride. “Daddy! Can you believe Jesse Owens won four Olympic gold medals?!”
“That Owens boy makes us black Alabamians proud,” Davis says. “Guess he showed that Hitler monster a thing or two about colored athletes.” He smiles, slapping his knee. “Wish I could’ve been a fly on Hitler’s head when Jesse beat all those Krauts!”
The Davises, like other Alabama families still suffering the effects of the Great Depression, need some encouraging news. The nation’s sudden economic collapse back in 1929 hit Alabama especially hard. Davis and his family, like other poor blacks in the southern United States, still endure Depression-caused poverty and find no relief in sight.
“Lil’ Georgie,” his father says, “it’s good to see a poor sharecropper’s son do so good in sports. I know his daddy’s proud of him.”
He points to the photographs of distant family members hanging on the wall. “His people, like ours, worked long, exhausting days. The Owens men worked the farms while our family’s men toiled in Birmingham’s coal and steel plants and on railroads. Not been easy for any of us, Lil’ Georgie. We’re still struggling to keep a roof over our heads. But it’s good that the Owens boy’s done so well.”
“I’m gonna do good, too,” Georgie says, grinning. “One day you’re gonna be so proud of me.”
“I’ll always be proud of you, son, no matter what you do—or don’t do. You’ve got nothing to prove to me.”
• • •
That afternoon, alone in the front room, Davis reflects on his past, his family, and his son, Lil’ Georgie.
I tried so hard to make sure Lil’ Georgie got a good education, unlike most Alabama colored boys. At least my boy has three years of high school under his belt.
Even now, in 1936, Davis knows that education for Alabama’s black kids is dismal, taking place in windowless schoolhouse shacks with dirt floors, heated by old coal stoves. In the early part of the century, when Davis was a boy, Bessemer parents “graduated” their children out of grammar school and put them straight into Alabama’s pig iron factories. Every able-bodied person, no matter how young or old, was needed to help put food on the family table.1
Davis glances at the wall’s photograph of Georgie on his first day of school. He’s smiling big, ears clean, hair cut and combed, and wearing a crisp grade school uniform, a red plaid satchel held tightly in his hand.
You’ve been blessed, Lil’ Georgie, to get educated. Few poor boys are so lucky.
Davis wanted his son to get a good education. Some of the more fortunate black children around Birmingham got to attend the better schools built and run by the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company (TCI). But Davis didn’t work at TCI, so Lil’ Georgie wasn’t eligible to attend. Davis looks to the ceiling and smiles. Thank you, Lord, and thank you, Mr. Rosenwald.
Davis had had the opportunity to enroll Georgie in one of the Rosenwald schools, built and funded by Illinois-born philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, the first president of Sears, Roebuck and Company. Out of the goodness of his heart, Mr. Rosenwald set up more than five thousand special schools for poor black children in the South’s hard-hit rural areas.2
Davis looks down at his hands, rough and scarred from the intense heat of blast furnaces, a result of working year after year at steelmaking plants, converting iron ore, limestone, and coal into scalding liquid iron and casting it into pig iron.
The “Bessemer process,” they called it. He rubs his knotted knuckles. Ruined my hands, as well as my youth.
He reflects on his childhood, a time of poverty, hunger, racism, and harshly enforced Jim Crow laws.
Not much has changed since then.
He tried hard to teach his small, innocent son to obey the segregation rules so brutally enforced in Bessemer, often warning him: “Lil’ Georgie, use only the toilets and water fountains marked ‘Colored,’ and step off the sidewalks when a white person walks by. Stop and let ’em pass first.”
“Why do I have to do that, Daddy?” Georgie had asked.
Davis recalls how his heart hurt when he tried to answer his son’s question.
“Just do what I say, Lil’ Georgie. Hear me? Don’t ask questions. It’s just the way things are.”
He’d tried to explain to Georgie why he couldn’t check out books from the Bessemer Public Library, or go to the moving picture shows in the town’s theater, or shop for shoes in white-run department stores. He’d tried to explain why only black barbers could cut his son’s hair, only black nurses could set his broken bones, and only white kids could swim in Bessemer’s public pools. And he tried to explain why Georgie’s baseball team had to play on dump-site vacant lots out of eyesight of the white boys’ public ball fields.
Some things are hard to explain to a kid. Sometimes near impossible.
Even now Davis hates sitting in the backs of city buses. It hurts him even more to watch his wife and son forced to the bus’s rear, or standing during a long bumpy ride when front seats are filled and a white person demands their back seats. But, even so, he keeps his mouth shut, and he obeys the unfair laws. But, at home, in curtain-closed private, he fumes aloud, pounding his fists on the arms of his chair.
Now that Georgie is a man, Davis worries about his son’s adventurous personality, his playful innocence, his boyish immaturity, and his reckless, compulsive behavior. He has told him many times: “Son, I know you like girls, but you’re eighteen years old now—a grown man. You can flirt with colored girls, but stay away from white girls. They’re trouble.”
Davis squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head:
Oh, please, Lil’ Georgie, don’t look at them, don’t talk to them, and for sure don’t touch them, not even by accident. Colored men’ve been lynched for less.
Davis opens his eyes and looks at the newspaper picture of Jesse Owens on the family room wall. He recalls his son’s promise to him: “One day you’re gonna be proud of me, too, Daddy, just like Jesse made his father proud.”
I am proud of you, Georgie. You’re my only son, and you are precious to me.