Emery Center event reflects on a painful past

Oct. 12—Longtime resident Henry Parks recalled growing up in north Dalton at a presentation at The Emery Center on Oct. 5.

"We used to save up our money and go to the movies," the 77-year-old recounted. "We couldn't walk there without being harassed ... we would leave the theater and walk across the street, go down to the depot and then have to walk up the track to go home."

Despite the constant intimidation and threats, Parks said he and his childhood friends never told their parents about what they experienced.

"Because we knew if we told them, they were going to say 'Nah, you can't go back there, because you know what you had to go through,'" he said. "Being hardheaded, we just withheld the truth from them, we would say everything went all right."

He recounted visiting a cafe in Dalton during the Vietnam War era. He had to place his order at the back of the restaurant — and he had to leave the premises to actually eat his food.

"I'm going to fight with somebody else that I don't even have any earthly idea what I'm fighting for," he said. "But it was for their freedom and I didn't have any freedom myself."

Emery Center Director Curtis Rivers also spoke at the event.

"To be ignorant of things that occurred before you were born is to remain a child," he quoted Marcus Tullius Cicero. "There's so much history we don't even know about, that fell through the cracks, because the white man had the pen and the paper — we didn't have the pen and the paper, we couldn't even read."

At one point in the 20th century, Rivers said the African American population in the area numbered close to 20,000.

He cited three factors for the eventual migration out of Whitfield County. One was a lack of jobs, the other was a lack of housing.

The third factor, he said, was fear.

"Years ago, the Blacks could control the vote in the city, they had the block vote," he continued. "I walked past two white schools to get to a Black school ... that's the way it was."

The event, sponsored by the Whitfield County Community Remembrance Project, was an informational session held in conjunction with an ongoing Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) student essay contest.

The contest is open to all Dalton and Whitfield County high school students and asks applicants to examine a topic connected to racial injustice in the United States, with an emphasis on at least one historical event.

"Essays are good when they relate to the trauma of today," said speaker Beverly Foster.

Whitfield County Community Remembrance Project representative Valerie Silva brought up the 1936 lynching of A.L. McCamy.

"EJI has documented 702 lynchings in the state of Georgia, that's second only to the state of Mississippi," she said.

The Emery Center presentation lasted approximately two hours. Several speakers brought up issues they thought could make for excellent essay material.

Speaker Neill Herring said he was 6 or 7 years old when the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling was announced.

"My father, sitting at the table, said 'This had to happen and it's going to happen,'" he recounted. "And my mother said 'It'll never work unless they start in the first grade.'"

Herring said his "vision of the future" was cemented at that very moment.

"Race really controlled our lives in so many ways," he said. "We didn't think about it and that's the most powerful control of all ... it just operates automatically."

Another speaker, Sam Gowin, noted that three Whitfield County representatives attended a secessionist convention in 1861 — two of whom were slave owners.

"The two guys who had people they owned, they voted against secession," he said. "Trying to get into the head of these folks from 150 years ago, it's interesting to me."

During the Civil War, Gowin said the total population of Whitfield County was about 20% Black.

"It's about 3% now," he said. "You wonder what happened to everybody."

At that time, he said Whitfield County had a higher number of enslaved people than its surrounding counties.

That, he said, could largely be attributed to railway access.

"The railroad brought money into this area," he said. "And when you had money, that's what you bought, you bought people."

After the Civil War and well into the first half of the 20th century, he said "racial purges" were constant in the area.

"They would march into town, whip people, kill people sometimes," he said. "And they drove a lot of folks off."

The first documented racially-motivated lynching in Whitfield County, he said, was in 1870.

"These folks almost never did what they were accused of," Gowin said. "What was happening, it wasn't punishing 'the bad guy.' It was intimidating, scaring folks, making sure these Black folks didn't vote 'the wrong way' politically, didn't try to earn too much money."

The specter of persecution and maltreatment referenced by Gowin, however, would continue to linger even 100 years after the Civil War ended.

Parks said he began a four-year stint with the Dalton Police Department beginning in 1972.

"I worked in the sheriff's department from '76 until '80," he said. "I had tried to get on with the state after I left the city, but it was political."

As a Georgia State Patrol trooper, he recounted working in southern Georgia — and an incident in which a woman was adamant that he could not arrest her due to his race.

Even some Rotary members, Rivers said, made efforts to bar him from joining the organization.

"But once I got in, they began to showcase me," he said. "So I went through a lot, I have a lot of stories to tell."

Gowin, a real estate attorney by trade, said the lasting legacy of Jim Crow policies can still be felt today.

"When you look at these old restrictions and covenants on neighborhoods, anything built in the '30s or '40s have got these things — 'this subdivision is for the white race,'" he said. "Those things were enforced for a long time ... if you were trying to learn a trade or save up some money, you're a dirt farmer, that's all you can do."

Rivers discussed the process of school integration, which arrived in Dalton in the late 1960s.

"If you were to go to Dalton High at that time, you would see Blacks together and whites together," he recounted. "They had their own little clusters at that time, but there were no problems."

When Walker County Schools integrated, Foster said there was an assumption that the African American students simply were not as advanced academically as the white students.

"In the segregated school, the teacher knew your parents because they shopped at the same grocery store, they lived in the same community, they went to the same church," she said. "But when we went to the white schools we were flabbergasted because they had a smoking area ... that was a sin in our community unless you were a full-grown adult."

One thing that was abundantly clear, Foster said, was that the white educators had no idea how to instruct their African American students.

"The Black parents didn't feel like they were welcome at the white PTAs until sometime later," she added. "Our parents didn't feel like they had any say-so in the schools, so that made a negative impact."

In some instances, she said the African American teachers at the then-segregated schools actually had higher levels of educational attainment than the instructors at the white schools.

"Some of the white teachers, they didn't care if we learned or not," she said.

Foster, however, said she's encouraged by today's youth.

"They really are trying to get along," she said.

Despite the discrimination and intolerance he faced when he was younger, Parks said he holds no grudges.

"But I tell you, things could be a whole lot better," he told the audience, "if we'd all just work together and put our heads together and put our strife and hatred and bitterness behind us."

Local entries for the essay contest will be accepted through Dec. 1.

Additional information on the guidelines for the contest is online at https://sites.google.com/eji.org/whitfield-co-ga-essay-contest.