With Displacement Comes Chaos

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This is part of our continuing series of accounts by readers of how they shed the illusions of liberalism and became race realists.

I attended Manners Elementary School in Washington Park, a suburb of East St. Louis, in the late sixties. At this time it was an all-white, lower-middle-class neighborhood. I would walk to school, come home, and play outside until dark. On weekends and summer vacations, my friends and I would be gone all day on bicycles, playing at the creek, and going to the multiple mom and pop stores to buy sodas and chips. As long as we were home at the end of the day, no one was concerned.

This all changed when I started at Lansdowne Junior High School on 40th and Waverly in East St. Louis. My first day there, I was accosted by seven blacks demanding my lunch money, circling and punching me.

I quickly learned to walk to school in a group. We would hang out before school at the dairy across the street and sit on the milk crates, which made good weapons if they were swung or thrown at the blacks.

For the two and a half years I attended that school, there were numerous altercations — always started by the blacks. The school went from half black to almost all black. In many classes, I was the only white student. I was always a good student – one year missing 80 days of class and still making the honor roll. We finally moved to Belleville, where I attended the all-white east side high school.

Ten years ago, I drove through my old neighborhood in Washington Park, by then all black. The street signs were no longer there, the roads were full of potholes, and the smell of marijuana was everywhere. It was like a third-world country, with garbage in the ditches, and people just hanging out doing nothing.

A few weeks ago, I saw a news article about a group of blacks rioting in a high school cafeteria in Illinois. The newscaster identified the school as Belleville East. Evidently my old high school is morphing into the old junior high school, once the blacks became more numerous. How sad.

If you have a story about how you became racially aware, or about your firsthand experience with race, we’d like to hear it. If it is well written and compelling, we will publish it. Please feel free to use a pen name and send it to us here.