THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 7, 1996 TAG: 9607040667
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TERRI WILLIAMS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 247 lines
Goldie Williams has worked for the S. Goodman clothing store at 731 Washington Ave. in the heart of downtown Greenville, Miss., for 43 years. Goodman's sells everything from work overalls to prom gowns.
When you open the door to the store, you'll find my grandmother there with a reassuring smile and a stance that says ``I'm eager to help.''
My grandmother got work at the Goodman store because she wanted a better life for herself and her husband, son and daughter. My grandfather was a sharecropper while my grandmother, father and aunt toiled long hours picking cotton on several Mississippi plantations.
The sun was hot, the pay low and the farm bosses were often abusive.
``They called us niggers,'' my grandmother recalled. ``They called the men boys and the women were girls. Just in general, they were disrespectful. They got physically abusive to some people but not me.''
At S. Goodman, my grandmother said, she learned that people of different races could respect one another.
S. Goodman is owned by Sidney Goodman. It's a family store that had its origins in Glen Allan, Miss., in 1902. The Goodman family moved the store to Greenville in 1918. It's run by Goodman, his wife, Corrine, and children Sam and Rebecca.
The Goodmans, white Jews, and Goldie Williams, a black Christian, became fast friends.
``The farm boss never said a good thing about me,'' she said of her former employer on the plantations.
``But this man (Sidney Goodman) said `Thank you.' I had never heard that before. They told me to enjoy my work. They said don't worry about making mistakes; we're not all perfect. They talked to you like you were a person.''
Says Sidney Goodman: ``You just treat people like people.''
Over the past 20 years, Jews and blacks haven't always treated each other like people. Like Goldie Williams and the Goodmans have.
Shared oppression has often been the glue that has bonded both groups. Yet a deep divide grounded in mistrust, disparity of economics and religious differences has evolved.
Consider the following:
In 1991, relations between blacks and Orthodox Jews erupted in Crown Heights, N.Y., after a Hasidic driver struck and killed a 7-year-old black child, a boy. In retaliation, black youths attacked and killed a Hasidic Jew.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign weakened after he referred to New York City as ``Hymietown.'' In the early 1990s, Jews protested Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's references to Judaism as a ``gutter religion.''
During the mid-1980s, black leaders decried Israel's continued financial support of South Africa when apartheid was still the form of government.
Even the Goodmans faced opposition.
About five years ago, a black group picketed the two Jewish-owned stores downtown - S. Goodman and Steinmart's - because the predominantly black public school system had a white superintendent. The black group contended that the Jews were powerful and could change the system, my grandmother said.
My grandmother left her post on the job, walked out of the store and asked the throng of picketers why they were targeting the Jewish stores.
``The two Jewish stores employed 95 percent black,'' my grandmother said. ``I wanted to know why they weren't picketing the stores in the malls that were mostly white. The problem involved more than just one group of people.''
Confrontation, Jewish intellectual Michael Lerner says, can evolve toward unity.
Lerner, who co-wrote ``Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion and Culture in America'' with African-American scholar Cornel West, says the civil rights movement unified the two groups and drove them apart.
West asserts that many black groups suspiciously viewed Jewish involvement, arguing that their participation was based on self-interest and paternalism.
Says West: ``Black folk didn't come into a movement so they could be congratulated . . . or to soothe their agonized conscience. Black folk in the South faced terrorism and looked for allies. When allies came, they didn't say, `Here are the whites, here are the Jews, and here are the gentiles.' They said, `Here's some folk in America who give a damn about people who have been mistreated for ten generations.'
``And among those whites who came South, some seemed to feel as though they knew more or knew all. The paternalism was tangible. . . . Southern blacks sometimes felt overwhelmed by the fast-talking as opposed to slow-talking, by the cosmopolitan sense of what the world is like out there as opposed to a conventional and provincial, colloquial, pedestrian sense of our small, little world.''
Lerner counters that Jews too faced discrimination. ``So it's in the self-interest of the Jews, because if `Blacks' are oppressed then Jews too, will be oppressed.''
Ultimately, it may take another movement to reunite both groups, Lerner said in a recent interview.
``A social movement often comes in the form of a confrontation. Yet a confrontation is the first step toward healing,'' Lerner said.
My grandmother already had been working at the Goodman's store for nearly a decade when the civil rights movement made its way to Greenville in the '60s.
Greenville's a city of about 60,000, the kind of place where folks are friendly and most know the stories of each other's lives.
When I was younger, my sister and I would travel the 7 1/2 hours from Houston either with our parents or on the Greyhound bus bound to visit my grandmother.
It's a ride that takes you through the swamplands of Louisiana and on to the Delta region of Mississippi where the steady streams of white-dotted cotton fields flash before your eyes.
As little girls, my sister and I would marvel at the feel of fuzzy cotton buds against tiny palms or giggle when a relative spat chewing tobacco in a rusty coffee can while they told us stories on the porch. Yet even as kids, we knew all was not idyllic; we'd heard the stories of struggle. Greenville, like many cities in the Confederacy, was fighting to hold on to segregation.
My father was heavily involved in the movement during his years at Jackson State University. He and fellow civil rights workers - blacks, Jews and whites - stayed at my grandmother's house. She fixed huge pots of soups and stews to feed everyone.
``I could never pick them up from the bus station in the morning,'' my grandmother said. ``I'd pick them up at night. There would be so many that they would have to sleep on the floor.''
The Goodmans recalled that several young Jewish workers worshipped at their synagogue while they were in town. And that times were tough for Jews, too.
Jews weren't allowed into the country clubs. Rebecca Goodman would not become a debutante. And only recently, said Corrine Goodman, was she allowed into the Garden Club.
In August 1964, when news spread that Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner had been murdered in Philadelphia, Miss., about 200 miles southeast of Greenville, the pain was immediately felt.
``I felt bad,'' said Corrine Goodman. ``The fella's name was Goodman. Immediately he was related even though he was not. When that Goodman name came up, it upset me more than anything.''
``It was awful,'' my grandmother said.
For years, I'd been told the civil rights movement stood as the testament to Jewish-African-American union.
But work relations with Jewish and black colleagues have often elicited tension.
Blacks say Jews have often benefited at the expense of blacks. They point out Jewish merchants and landlords who have traditionally worked in African-American communities. Jews also benefit more so than other minorities because they're white, argue some blacks.
Jews counter that blacks shouldn't use race as a quota for getting jobs or consider it a barrier to success. They wonder why blacks don't repudiate Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan for his anti-Semitic remarks.
I felt the same tension when I attended Howard University in the late '80s.
Howard was like most African-American colleges that fuel students' self-esteem with a healthy doses of ``feel good medicine'' about their culture.
Farrakhan was a frequent visitor. So were Angela Davis, Wynton Marsalis and former Black Panther leaders.
For me, this ``feel good'' medicine was just what I hungered for.
For years, I had felt isolated growing up in a mostly white, middle class, conservative Houston neighborhood. Our house was egged when we moved there; kids yelled racial epithets at the bus stop.
At Howard, I found my black identity.
The local Nation of Islam minister hosted study groups on campus to teach students about their faith. I attended some meetings, buoyed by the self-help message and the sense of empowerment the Nation instilled.
But I was deeply disturbed by the message about Jews. There was a constant reference that Jews were the cause of black problems, the slave trade and the poor economic conditions in the African-American community.
Sometimes I said nothing. Sometimes I nodded in agreement.
Although I stopped attending the meetings, for several years I was disturbed at my own inaction.
Every so often, Grandma Goldie would call and say, ``How are you doing? . .
I'd always hang up with a gnawing feeling. I'd wonder what my grandmother and the Goodmans would think of me.
My grandmother's relationship with the Goodmans has always gone beyond the doors of S. Goodman. Far beyond.
When Sidney and Corrine Goodman went out of town, my grandmother watched their three children. Over the years, she acted as a surrogate mother and was allowed to discipline and spank them.
When my father got accepted to medical school, the Goodman family co-signed a loan with my grandmother so she could help with payments. Both families have been at each other's houses of worship.
My grandmother celebrated the Goodman grandson's bar mitzvah at the Hebrew Union Congregation temple. Years later, in 1989, when my grandfather died, the Goodman family sat up front in St. Thomas Missionary Baptist Church.
When you ask them what unites them, they don't have a whole lot to say. It's pretty simple.
``There are some whites I don't like. There are some blacks I don't like,'' says 79-year-old Sidney Goodman. ``Color has nothing to do with it.''
Grandma Goldie says it all comes down to trust.
``There seems to be mistrust between both groups. The Jewish people have to learn to trust the blacks and the blacks have to learn to trust the Jews.''
Trust, write West and Lerner, cannot come about until the barriers crumble.
Both West and Lerner argue that Black Nationalism - a quest for a black nation-state - and Zionism - a movement supporting the state of Israel - have acted as stumbling blocks to mutual cooperation.
In the end, healing comes through dialogue within both communities, they write.
It may already have begun.
This spring, at Howard, blacks and Jews began publishing a joint publication aimed at easing friction, especially following the fallout of Farrakhan ex-aide Khalid Abdul Muhammad's divisive speech there. In Crown Heights, N.Y., reports this year show that tensions have begun to subside.
Yet West and Lerner are candid; they know dialogue isn't the only solution.
``It's often easier to inflict psychic pain than to heal it,'' they write. ``Inflicting pain takes hardly any time at all; healing it may take decades.''
Today my grandmother at 78 will start her day at 5 a.m. She mall walks with other seniors. She then works her 8-hour day at S. Goodman.
Just as she has for four decades.
Today, if I hear of another pain inflicted on Jews or African-Americans, I won't nod my head in agreement, I'll have the courage to speak up.
And I will turn to Greenville for a lifetime of learnings.
When I need a grounding in sensibilities, I go to Greenville. If I can't get there, I pick up the phone and say, ``Hi, Grandma Goldie, how are you?'' MEMO: Terri Williams covers Suffolk city government for The
Virginian-Pilot. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos courtesy of the Williams family
Goldie Williams outside S. Goodman in Greenville, Miss., where she
has worked for 43 years.
ABOVE: Ray and Goldie Williams with their granddaughters, Tara, Toni
and Terri in the late 1970s.
LEFT: Sidney and Corrine Goodman in the 1960s.
Terri Williams, right, with her grandmother, Goldie, and her father,
Arthur. The Goodmans helped finance Arthur's medical degree.
Sidney and Corrine Goodman at a birthday party for Sidney.
Graphic
In South Hampton Roads, one group has tackled
Jewish-African-American relations head-on.
The African-American/Jewish Coalition is about three years old
and counts 25 to 30 members who regularly meet to talk about issues.
It is co-chaired by Dr. Bernard ``Barry'' Einhorn, a Norfolk
dentist, and Carlos Howard, a Norfolk funeral director.
In October, 20 members of the coalition traveled to Washington
for tours of the Holocaust Museum and the Anacostia Museum of
African-American History and Culture. On the bus ride home, they
debated, sometimes heatedly, the history of the relationship between
the two groups.
Since then, the coalition has set goals for improving racial and
ethnic understanding and has produced at least one program,
supported by a state grant, to provide support for young mothers.
KEYWORDS: PUBLIC JOURNALISM RACE RELATIONS JEWS
BLACKS by CNB