The Senior Set On Living Black History

By Shams Tarek

For a lot of people commemorating Black History Month, it’s about people in books.

There are famous people, like a preacher from Atlanta named King who was known for leading much of the civil rights movement.  A picture of him speaking on the Mall in Washington is accompanied by a quote about having a dream.

There are regular people turned famous, like an Alabama seamstress named Parks who captured the hearts of millions of people by boycotting a no-blacks-in-the-front bus policy.

And there are thousands of regular people turned relevant, activists mostly, captured in newspapers, magazines and history books as participants in the nation’s countless civil rights rallies.  Some of their images have become iconic.

Many of these people are dead.  Most of them were from the American South.  But what do the seniors of Southeast Queens, who experienced the civil rights era firsthand, think about what it was and what it has produced?

On the morning of Aug. 28, 1963, a 31-year-old Shirley Foy got on a bus leaving Carter A.M.E. Church in Jamaica and heading south.

Later that afternoon, she was standing on the Mall in Washington, listening to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with a few hundred thousand other Americans interested in equal rights for blacks.

It was a day she’ll never forget, she said.

“It was beautiful,” Foy said of the March on Washington during a press talk with her and five other seniors at the Allen Senior Center.  “I’ve never seen anything so grand in my life.”

Foy was floored when she arrived at the quadrangle near the Mall to see a sea of buses and people like she never saw before, and never saw since.  But despite the beauty of the day, she said, it was underscored with a constant sense of danger.

“The news that morning kept saying the Nazis would be there for a counter-demonstration,” Foy said.  “I was scared.  We got to the church [before the ride] and we prayed.”

Preparing for the worst, Foy said she wrote a letter to her kids while on the bus telling them that “I had to go,” and asked her grandmother, who was with her, to read the letter to her kids the morning after the march if anything happened to her.

Of course, the letter didn’t need to be read.  Now 70 and in a wheelchair, Foy watches rallies, like the August reparations rally in Washington, on television.  She’d attend in person if they were accessible, she said.  She does what she can.

“They made you promise that when you come back,” Foy said of her church and community peers in 1963, “you continue the work that was started there.”

Southeast Queens was never a hotbed of civil rights activism. Most of the marches, rallies, sit-ins and teach-ins of the era, like the March on Washington, happened in the nation’s capital, in southern states like Georgia and Alabama and on the politically progressive west coast.

The blacks, whites and others of Southeast Queens, meanwhile, led a more quiet life, insulated from the segregation and liberal politics of other parts of the country.

But another dynamic emerges when looking at the political and historical landscape of Southeast Queens and its black seniors:  A lot of them aren’t originally from Queens.  They can tell you stories that reach across the country.

Take, for example, 83-year-old actor and World War II veteran Aaron Boddie.  He came to Manhattan in 1946 after living his whole life in Alabama, and moved to South Ozone Park in 1953.  He came for a better life.

“When I was discharged [from the military] in 1946,” Boddie said, “a black man could only be a Pullman car porter or work for the post office.  So I came to New York.”

He also came, he said, for political reasons.  A poll tax and other measures taken by local authorities in Alabama kept him and other blacks from voting, he said, and outspoken critics like him were not safe.

“I didn’t want to get hung up in a tree,” said Boddie, who first voted after moving to New York.

Boddie still lives in South Ozone Park.  His legacy back home isn’t lost, though; he posed for a life-size statue that’s now part of a voter registration exhibit at Birmingham’s Civil Rights Institute.

Earl Smith, a 70-year-old Jamaica resident whose bright eyes, flashy clothes and wavy hair make him look like a cross between Little Richard and James Brown, had a different experience.

Smith was born and raised in a mostly white town in Pennsylvania, where he mixed openly with whites as well as other blacks.

“I don’t know what segregation is like,” said Smith, who moved to Hollis in 1960.  “I was blessed.”

Smith wasn’t as blessed in Howard Beach, though.  He recalled going to a largely white housing complex to see a business partner when an encounter with two white police officers left him shaking with anger.

He slowed down his car when the officers waved at him, he said.  He expected to get some help finding his partner’s address, but got a mouthful of slurs instead.

“He stuck his head through the window and nearly kissed me,” Smith said of one of the police officers.  “He said, ‘Nigger, where you going?’  I got tight.”

Smith asked for the exit, he said, to which the officer told him, “You’re damn right; you better take your black ass outta here.”

The seniors at Allen told of other – albeit isolated – instances of racism and discrimination in Southeast Queens and its nearby neighborhoods.

Smith worked in the mid-1950s as a bartender in Elmont, a Nassau county town on the Queens border near Cambria Heights. Blacks and whites were comfortable with each other back then, he said.  He worked from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. with few problems, and most of the men soliciting the town’s black prostitutes were white.

“But Elmont was progressive,” Smith said.  “It was moving.”

As the years passed, white enclaves in western Nassau county got more and more rare.  In 1990, according to Census figures, Elmont was 75 percent white and 15 percent black.  The 2000 Census reports a town that’s 45 percent white and 35 percent black.  Despite the growing black population in Elmont, Smith said that the town’s free and easy mixing of the races is a thing of the past.

Closer to home, there are reports of being short-changed by the City and the state.

“As the white people moved out, the services went with them,” said Foy, who said she was told by a school for gifted children not to send her kids there.  At P.S. 140 – a mostly black school where her kids ended up going – there weren’t enough books to give one to each student.

Boddie put it this way:  “We haven’t made very much progress since the 1950s.  America is still as it always was.  The black man is still the underdog.  If I was white and in Queens, I’d have much more than I have now.”

Despite Boddie’s cloudy forecast, he admits that moving to Southeast Queens was good for him, and that the area is better for blacks now than it was when he first came.  Not only was it easier for him to vote but his local State senator, Malcolm Smith, helped him get his World War II medals 50 years after his discharge, he said.

The Allen seniors were unanimous, in fact, in calling Southeast Queens a “haven” for blacks where segregation was a distant reality and there was never a need for marches.

Bertha Godfrey, an 81-year-old woman who moved to Brooklyn from the south in 1956 and to Jamaica five years ago, remembers that “we were treated cruelly [in the south].”

“They had their own school buses,” Godfrey said of her white peers.  “We had to walk five miles back and forth to school.  We were spat on by the white kids on the buses.  When I came to New York, there was a difference.  It was nice.  Everybody got along.”

Smith summed it up: “There is no racial out here.  To tell you the truth, the whites that are here are really trying their best to get along with the blacks.”

Perhaps the most telling sign about the state of being black in Southeast Queens today is the fact that the Allen seniors talked about general quality of life concerns whenever they got a chance during the recent roundtable. Race was hardly a factor.

“What can we do about the noise here?” Godfrey asked.