Talking with Dr. Bobbie Green, head of our local NAACP, and exhibit curator Lauretta King, I mentioned that my friend Easy John Howe, an artist, had stopped in a bar in Vado and learned that Vado had been a Black community. He met descendants of folks who’d moved there. Turns out Bobbie grew up in Vado, which I hadn’t realized. I’m guessing that contributed to her strong commitment.
One archived item was a 1967 memo from Phil Ambrose to Dean Carl Hall, concerning a request by John Howe to approve a Black Students Association. Ambrose says he’s investigated, thinks the group would do no harm, and recommends approval. (Not ‘til 1967 did the U.S. Supreme Court hold that a White and a Black had the right to marry each other.)
That sparked nostalgia for my old friends and allies, a sharp memory of how things were, and the odd feeling we get when things we did or witnessed have become “history.” There’s a twinge of shock (“But I remember that!), and a recognition that folks can learn the facts but not how it felt.
When I arrived in 1969, Easy and I quickly became friends. And allies. The Movement for equality and against “racism” and war, was still a small but passionate minority here, upsetting folks by seeking change, and unpopular with a school administration profiting from defense contracts. Easy was a wonderful artist. After he went out with my sister for a while, our living room boasted a large painting by him (of a jazz musician) until a later jealous lover of hers destroyed it. Dean Ambrose was one of the few NMSU administrators we could actually talk with. Hall, by then a V.P., was the administrator who called Lou Henson to complain that Henson had hired “that rabble-rouser Peter Goodman.”
In 1969, New Mexico State honored its “tricultural” heritage but ignored Blacks, while using them as football and basketball players. By then, the worst aspects of racism had been vanquished; NMSU wasn’t forcing black students to listen from outside the classroom, like Clarabelle Williams; but a many whites here still didn’t “get it.”
What we were fighting was that much of the [white] country took for granted that “Negroes” or “colored people” were somehow very different from “us.” Nonsense. “Race” was invented to justify enslaving blacks, in a time when the dominant ethos was Christianity. Slavery had not needed justification in earlier times, when defeated armies and conquered peoples became slaves. Slaves weren’t all well-treated, but they weren’t viewed as fundamentally different (or not human), and might, in time, make money off a craft or talent, or become freed and intermarry. But by modern times, as men began speaking of freedom and individual rights, slavery needed a special excuse, and racism suited. A war vetoed that; but white southerners waged one of history’s most successful PR campaigns to rehabilitate “race” and enforce Jim Crow laws.
That vicious fiction was so embedded that no one was immune. Every white and some blacks had a bit of that assumption somewhere inside us.
Nor is that gone yet. That’s why a modernized NAACP exists here and is fighting a lot of good fights not only for Blacks but to help all groups our society abuses. Join us!
– 30 –
[The above column appeared Sunday, 23 June, 2024, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and (presently) on the newspaper’s website and on KRWG’s website, under Local Viewpoints. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM, streaming at www.lccommunityradio.org/).]
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