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By
Gerald Early
Photos from Temple University Urban Archives
In
the fall of 1955, my mother became a school crossing guard for the
St. Mary Magdalene di Pazzi Catholic School, located on the northeast
corner of Seventh and Christian streets in South Philadelphia. My
father died in early 1953, when I was about nine months old, and
since his death, my mother had been doing work of one sort or another,
none of which she found satisfactory. She then went on welfare.
Her options were few, as she had not finished high school and could
not take a job that would keep her from her children all day or
all night. (At the time, my oldest sister was nearly six years old
and just starting school.) She did not like being on welfare and
desperately searched for another job. It took more than six months
for her to get the school crossing-guard job. This job was ideal
for her situation, because it was part-time but spread out over
the day. No particular segment of the day—the morning opening bell,
the lunch hour (children were sent home for lunch in those days
of truly neighborhood schools), the afternoon dismissal—required
more than 90 minutes of her time. In effect, she didn’t need a baby-sitter.
The job
had two drawbacks. First, welfare rules at that time required that
if she took the job she would have to reimburse the government for
the amount of relief she received. Second, the school for which
she was to serve as crossing guard was an Italian-Catholic institution
that did not admit blacks, or indeed anyone who was not Italian-Catholic.
Indeed, her employer, the police department of the city of Philadelphia,
was hesitant about placing a black woman at that school and would
have preferred having a white woman there. I suppose they could
not find one. Both of these conditions gave her momentary pause,
but she took the job, anyway. In two years, she paid back the government.
She kept the job of guiding Italian-Catholic children over Seventh
Street and Christian Street for over 20 years. She was never fully
aware of the fact that she was, in her way, a civil rights pioneer.
In her own minor way, she broke a significant barrier in race relations.
My
mother carried herself with a great deal of dignity; she is very
black-skinned and felt she had to. She couldn’t fall back on providing
white people the visible comfort of being light-skinned and, thus,
from the point of view of the herronvolk, just slightly removed,
as it were, from being “one of us,” or at least clearly better than
“the rest of them.” Because she wore a uniform—a cap that looked
very much like a policeman’s cap, a long, double-breasted blue coat
in the winter, a blue jacket, white blouse and gray skirt in milder
weather—the Italian kids in the neighborhood called my mother “the
lady cop.” The uniform, I think, intensified the dignity my mother
brought to the job and made the Italians respect her all the more.
As a boy I was certainly proud of her every day I saw her on that
corner. She glowed with what I can only call a kind of African nobility
transfigured to an American frequency, looking a great deal like
her father, who was very black-skinned as well. Surely, the fact
that she had the job and was such a success in it had a significant
impact on my life. It made it possible for me to grow up among Italian-Catholics,
people who under most circumstances loathed African Americans with
a passion that took on the grandeur of an artful design. Generally,
I liked the Italian-Catholics I lived with very much, even though
I knew they were very racist, with the typical resentments and narrow-mindedness
of a patriarchal working-class culture that in many ways resembled
the black working-class culture that I knew but in some important,
vital ways did not. I had learned enough about the Italian-Catholics
to know that I did not ever want to be one or to be like one. By
the time I was a teenager, I knew I never wanted to be an ethnic.
However
racist they were, their racism was never directed at me. It always
went around me, and I was indulged in ways that no other blacks
in the neighborhood were. I was always a pretty bookish, studious
boy, and far from resenting it or feeling threatened by it, the
Italians were extremely supportive of my timid intellectual ambitions.
“Jerry, you go to school and make something outta yourself. Don’t
be like these bums around here. You a smart boy and you can grow
up and be a great man,” our Italian landlady, Mrs. Curci, said to
me all the time. They all said that to me—the shop owners, the fruit-stand
merchants, the parents of the kids my mother crossed, the kids themselves
I played stickball and softball with. I don’t mean to say that I
did not have some unpleasant moments with the Italians, but they
were very few and they did not bother me much, not because I did
not take these racist moments seriously but because I had seen them
in other guises and understood, or at least could fully sense, the
remarkable complexity of their humanity. My life with black people,
both then and subsequently, would have been a great deal easier
if the racism of the Italian-Catholics had been more directed at
me, or if those few unpleasant episodes had been greater in number.
The St.
Mary Magdalene di Pazzi Catholic Church is located on Montrose Street,
one of the those narrow side-streets that Philadelphia is noted
for, midway up the block, between Seventh and Eighth. It was founded
in 1852 and is the oldest Catholic church in the city. It still
sits, cathedral-like, massively medieval in its institutional glory,
among the tiny, neat rowhouses as a kind of bulwark of Little Italy
against the disorder and squalor, the heroic and rebellious chaos
of the blacks who lived just a few blocks away in their own little
rowhouses and in the Southwark Plaza Projects at Fifth and Carpenter
streets. For that was the unofficial name of the neighborhood in
which I grew up: Little Italy. Ironically, the oldest black church
in America, Mother Bethel, founded by Richard Allen, is just six
or so blocks from St. Mary’s. It is one of the strange facts of
history that black people had actually been living in this ward
longer than the Italians. People forget that Du Bois’s 1897 classic
book, The Philadelphia Negro, was about the very ward that
I lived in, anchored by the Mother Bethel Church.
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