When Lee’s parents moved to Maplewood in the mid ’70s, they were part of a wave of Black families integrating into majority white suburbs. They were seeking opportunity and safety, but were often met with hostility and racism. In this episode, Lee sits down with Christopher Lehman, a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University, to understand what pushed Black families to want to integrate white suburbs and how they were received. Later, Lee sits down with some childhood friends who grew up in Maplewood, to break down what it was really like being a Black boy in a white Minnesotan suburb in the 1980s and 1990s.
We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse, and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, WhatHappenedInAlabama.org - listener discretion is advised.
My name is Lee Hawkins and this is What Happened in Alabama.
Today we’ll be going back to Maplewood, in particular my high school days. I have many fond memories of that time. I was elected class president all four years, I had a bunch of friends and my weekends were always full, but there were a lot of difficult times too. The racism I experienced in Maplewood was rough. And I wasn’t alone. Today, I’m joined by some brothers I grew up with. Not my biological brothers, but we’re united by our shared experiences. I call them the Maplewood Crew and we’ll be breaking down what it was like to be a Black boy in Maplewood in the 80s and 90s.
But, you’ll get a whole lot more out of it if you go back and listen to the prologue first - that’ll give you some context for putting the whole series in perspective. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much.
When my dad moved to Minnesota from Alabama, his family settled in the city of St. Paul, in a neighborhood called Rondo. After he married my mom, they purchased a home in a suburb called Maplewood. Other black families had started moving into the community after the development of a highway cut through Rondo and displaced more than 600 families. My parents were just under 30 when they got to Maplewood. They were young, hopeful and growing a family. To them and other black families who moved there in the 60s and 70s, Maplewood represented opportunity and upward mobility, a chance for their kids to flourish in ways they weren’t able to.
And, we did flourish.
As a student leader, I was in the news quite often.
Everybody was proud… My parents, my friends, my favorite teachers, and my coaches. But some people hated it.
Sophomore year, I was doing a lot of guest speaking at schools, churches, and public events. I was doing a lot of acting back then. This time, it was a one-act play, where I delivered the last speech that Dr. King gave to a group of Black Sanitation workers in Memphis, the night before he was killed. And that generated publicity.
That year, there was an article in a Minnesota paper headlined, “Student Brings Meaning to Black History Month,” with a big picture, after I spoke to some kids at a school.
A few days later, I got called down to the principal’s office. I figured it was about a student council matter, or sometimes the news camera crews would call about doing a story. But when I got to the office, those nice sweet ladies who worked in the office said hello and handed me a manila envelope that was addressed to me. I’d never received mail at school before, so I opened it right away and inside of it were letters, and cut out pictures of my face, with bible verses written all over them. The sender didn’t sign their name.
I can still feel the eeriness, standing there, looking at myself on the page. In my photo I had a flattop and a young, naive smile. In that moment, I realized someone out there had to be stalking me. All the letters repeated the same theme: That so-called race-mixing was a form of racial genocide akin to the holocaust. They warned that God did not create mixed race people – that sinful man did – and to destroy God’s races is to hate God.
I read this trash and I kept thinking about my parents, and how they told me as a kid, “Somebody’s always watching you, so watch yourself.” It could have been anyone. Neighbors across the street, teachers at the school, the police, really, anybody. I didn’t know who to trust, so I took the letters home.
I was almost afraid to tell my parents, out of fear that they would tell me I told you so, and that all my activism and speaking out against racism had led to this, and was going to get the whole family killed, as they’d always feared. I knew they would be scared. And man, they really were.
Lee Hawkins: So, you know, that white man that sent me those letters?
These letters gave my father flashbacks to his life in Jim Crow Alabama in the 1950s. That only made my parents even more determined to believe that by cracking the whip and enforcing the rules, they could keep us safe.
Eventually, it was decided, by the police and my parents, that I would need a police escort to school. My whole family was on high alert. For a few days, as I rode to school with that officer, I asked him to let me off at a side door because I didn’t want my classmates to see me getting out of that car. I tried my best to hide the fact that I was on edge, because I assumed the letters could be from someone with ties to the school, and I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing they had gotten into my head. I only told a few classmates, those who I, for some reason, believed would never send me that racist propaganda.
[PAUSE]
The letters continued to come in for the next few days and eventually, they stopped. What I didn’t know was that the person who sent those letters was under investigation by the FBI. And in 1988, they finally found him.
Lee Hawkins: He was at West Publishing for many years.
Lee Sr: Oh, okay. That sounds right.
Lee Hawkins: Yeah. Elroy Stock.
Lee Sr: Wow. What's his name?
That’s me and my dad reflecting on this period during one of our many interviews.
Elroy Stock had sent over 100,000 letters to people over the years. His letters didn’t just focus on Black people. He clipped out articles about indigenous people and whites. And he lamented the number of Asian and Indian children entering the country for adoption. And to find convenient targets, he scoured and clipped newspapers – sports articles, wedding announcements, birth announcements, and then mailed out his racist rants.
[PAUSE]
It all took a toll. I stressed, but I accepted it as a part of life for any Black person who wanted to excel in a white world. I’d read stories about the pioneers who had fought racism, like Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson faced, and I just assumed that anybody who was Black and breaking barriers was going to get hated on.
But being Black in a neighborhood that was more than ninety percent white was a new phenomenon for my dad. Though the population of Minnesota as a whole was largely white, the Rondo neighborhood, the part of St. Paul that he and his sisters moved to when they first came to Minnesota when was 12, did have a strong Black community. So when he grew up and had his own family and moved to Maplewood, it had to be a bit of a culture shock.
When my parents made the move from St. Paul to Maplewood in 1975, they were part of the wave of Black families who’d left cities for the suburbs. Between the 1960s and 1970s, the suburban Black population increased nationally by almost 30%.
CHRIS LEHMAN: And so it was important that after African Americans had the chance to finally do what they had aspired to do and spread their wings and make opportunities available to their children.
That’s Christopher Lehman, he’s a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota.
In my research, and speaking out to my Maplewood friends and cousins, I began to understand the distinct nuances of growing up Black in a white suburb in the 1980s. I reached out to Professor Lehman to get a better grasp of the factors that led to Black families moving into white suburbs and the racial dynamics they faced when they arrived.
My research and my personal experiences show me that because my dad was raised under apartheid in Alabama and racism was waiting for us in Maplewood – our move to the suburbs was loaded with all kinds of tension between the parents and the children. They were thrusting us into a world they knew nothing about – one they were often afraid of. And that made them more afraid for us, especially when we began to thrive socially and academically. This world that was so unfamiliar to them was one we thrived in – and that, I believe, is what both mystified and frightened them. But at the same time, they wanted the American dream. My dad used to say, “when those teachers teach the white kids, they can’t make you close your ears. If you’re in the same classroom, they can’t deny you the education they’re giving their kids.” My parents were determined to give us every opportunity they didn’t get.
Lee: My father had a family tragedy, and he was one of the many Black people who moved north and then to the city of Saint Paul from Alabama when he was 12. And he and my mom purchased one home and then another home in Maplewood before they turned 30. I mean, they were very young. There were other Blacks that we knew who had already moved, and they were very focused on pursuing the suburban American dream as they saw it. Some Blacks had made the move earlier, but the few Blacks we knew who moved to Maplewood and other suburbs did so in the 1960s, in the early 70s. What were the reasons that led Back people to move into the suburbs? And how does that connect to the Great Migration, and also to the breaking up of Black communities across the nation?
Lehman: From about WWI until the 1970s. The African-Americans who had the means to leave the oppression of the Jim Crow South did so. But moving to the North did not mean that African-Americans could live wherever they wanted to in the North, and cities set aside neighborhoods just for African-Americans. And then the smaller cities, or small towns, some of them were sundown towns that banned African-American residents from within their borders altogether. There were some sundown towns in which African-Americans could go in and work from 9 to 5 and just have to be out of the town once the 5:00 whistle blew. And then there were other, more severe sundown towns where African-Americans were just not allowed to set foot at all, no matter what time of day. And the Civil Rights Act of 1968 made sundown towns illegal, it made illegal the practice of redlining, in which the federal government withheld money to go to FHA loans in specific neighborhoods that were African American. So once the Civil Rights Act of 1968 makes the worst aspects of discrimination against African-Americans and housing illegal, that opens up all sorts of neighborhoods in which African-Americans are finally able to tap into greater wealth and resources of a higher quality.
Lee: And even though the federal government made those measures to open things up more to Black people to move into suburbs, they still faced a great deal of resistance, correct?
Lehman: Yes. That's right. One of the things that African-Americans faced when moving into these segregated neighborhoods was white flight. There were European Americans who decided that they needed to move to another suburb, one in which they believed that they would have their property values protected because they believe that if a neighborhood became desegregated, no matter how many African-Americans moved in, then the property value of a house in that neighborhood would plummet.
Lee: What dynamics were at play? What was the racial climate like and how were we received?
Lehman: It depended on the communities. There were some that were either indifferent or perhaps even somewhat welcoming to their new African-American neighbors. Worst case scenarios would be outright hostility and violence. And perhaps the most infamous case of this doesn't even have to do so much with people moving into a neighborhood but just with the issue of bussing in 1974, in Boston, and this was not even about people moving into each other's neighborhoods, but just going to different neighborhood schools. And that was enough for students, and sometimes their parents be throwing bricks at kids that were on buses and so forth. So it it depended on the location, but it could, it could get very violent.
Lehman: African-American parents had to deal with the issue of safety, because moving into this suburb, they had to figure out, where can we take our children in town besides where we have to take them, the school, where they can be relatively safe. And so it would take parents a while to try to figure out who could they trust in town to be sociable, if not pleasant, around them and around their children. And who can they go to if they need some kind of respite as well, especially other African-Americans who have paved the way.
Looking back now, I’m realizing how much of a culture shock it must have been for my dad. First, he came from a totally different culture in Alabama– to icy cold Minnesota. And then, from a city with a relatively healthy Black population into a one of the whitest places in America. Though my dad was friendly and kind to everybody, it didn’t matter the race, he was hard-wired to innately distrust white people, and now he was moving his young family to a place that was basically Scandinavia 2.0.
My family was part of an organization called Jack & Jill of America, which is basically a national group of Black mothers working for the betterment of Black children. And when I was a teenager, I became the teen president of Jack & Jill’s Midwest region, so I became friends with Black kids from all of the country – and it was my first time visiting and knowing Black families who lived in suburbs that were largely Black….just outside of Detroit and Chicago and Philly. And I used to feel so happy for my friends from those places, because they got to live where they wanted to without having to sacrifice all the good music and all of the Black culture that we had to leave Maplewood to get. They used to have to send me the house music mixes from their cities because the signal of the Black radio station in Minneapolis didn’t reach Maplewood. That’s how white it was.
Lee: Can you explain the similarities and differences between the experiences of Blacks who moved to largely white suburbs, as opposed to those who moved into the suburbs that had more Blacks?
Lehman: Well, certainly when you had – when there were African-Americans who moved into exclusively European-American suburbs, then they are the ones who are breaking the the color barrier, as it were. So they don't have any models or any previous African-American neighbors to to try to draw from, they have to set the template themselves. And they have to create the resources that other people can later use when they move in. So when you have places when or where African-Americans are moving into suburbs that have an African-American population, however small, then they can at least network with each other, they can pool their resources, and they can figure out ways in which they can cope with living in this community, where there are not a whole lot of people who look like them, but at least there are a few.
Lee: Yes, and that was our experience. You know, we, my parents, I told you my parents purchased two homes before they turned 30. The first home was in a predominantly white area, and the next home was in this, still in a very white community, but in our little enclave there were more black people. There was some black families who had purchased homes in that area, and there was a lot of collaboration and a lot of camaraderie between us, and we looked out for each other. So I definitely see that as something that I look fondly on as a matter of fact, because it was really hard and it would have been a lot harder without the other black people who lived in our midst. And obviously we read a lot about the Little Rock Nine and Ruby Bridges and the hyper visible, more iconic black symbols, symbols of integration in the South. But my own experience informs me that there were thousands of black kids integrating schools and communities across the nation, and many of them, like me and my sisters and my friends. You know, we didn't have a lot of visibility, but we were experiencing racial vitriol and hate speech every single day almost, without the benefit of a police escort or a National Guard troop behind us. We had to figure it out. And at times it could be very disillusioning for us and also for our parents.
I think it’s noteworthy and really quite fascinating that Professor Lehman and I lived in different parts of the country but, because we were Black and living in the suburbs in this period, we had a lot of similar experiences. He gave me an academic structure to the lived experiences of my family and many others, across the United States.
I call my generation the integration generation. There’s a lot that goes into that term, but one attribute of this group I’ve defined is that we were among the first Black children to integrate America’s suburbs, which, for many of us, was a major step forward for us and our families. But we also faced the racist backlash of being the first. And that backlash was quite often fierce. We were constantly tested, and if we wanted to be successful in Maplewood and in our lives after, we had to constantly be thinking three and four steps ahead of everyone around us. I recently sat down with three Black men from Maplewood who went to the same high school as me, but at different time periods. There were about four or five years between me and them – older and younger – and we didn’t have precisely the same experience, but, like most Black people in suburbs like Maplewood, we all knew each other and our paths did cross. But what’s funny is, even when our paths weren’t crossing, when we compare notes, we finish each other’s sentences. It was therapeutic for me to sit down with these brothers – not just to validate each other's experiences but also to figure out how to process it all these years later, and to know I wasn’t alone.
DiAndre Hodges went to high school with my sister Tiffany. He was several years younger than me, so we weren’t in high school at the same time. He moved to Maplewood from St Paul and he remembers how different Maplewood was, as soon as he stepped his first foot inside the city limits.
DiAndre Hodges: I moved to Maplewood ‘86. My sixth grade year. Coming from actually Oakdale.
Lee Hawkins: So, John Glenn.
DiAndre Hodges: So, yeah, went to John Glenn. My first year there. I think maybe the second half of the year is when everything started kicking off.
Lee Hawkins: Right, okay.
DiAndre Hodges: So moving there, we're thinking, okay, life is, you know, cool. But it was a culture shock.I'm young, so I don't see the racism until I get to, my sixth grade year at John Glenn, second half of the season, second half of the year n-word started coming out. I didn't know what that word was. Real talk. I didn't know what [n-word] was, so I'm being called [n-word ] and I'm not understanding it. So when I'm going home explaining to my mom, okay, I'm being called [n-word ]. What is that? So now my dad from Mississippi, he sat me down. He's explaining it. He's like, “There's racism.” Um, Dad, I don't know what it is, but I know I'm being called [n-word].
Marcel Duke: It seems like it changed so dramatically, even though I have the same stories.
That’s Marcel Duke. I knew him because he lived next door to us, and we literally grew up playing kickball, baseball, and hide and seek with Marcel and his sister. They were some of our day ones. And, you know, even though life moves on and everybody goes in separate directions once they get older, you never forget those people. I love those people, because they, well, they’re my people.
Marcel Duke: .. like, Mark Haynes and I.
Lee Hawkins: Yeah, tell me.
Marcel Duke: That's my partner, ace boom. I mean, we did everything together and we'd always walk home on County Road B and my dad would say, “You got to be careful on that road. You got to be careful on that road.” Well, you got called the n-word constantly walking down that street. You know, then cars would slow down and sometimes we’d look at each other, take off running, whatever. And then this particular night we're walking home, it's dusk, and my dad worked for the phone company, and he ran the motor pool downtown Saint Paul. He called it ma belle. And, so he would always take me down there and teach me about cars and stuff because he used to own a garage down on University, and, so, I got good at looking at cars, and I'd always challenge myself to could I figure them out and get the license plate number? So we got called those names so much I used to just okay, everyone that would say that I’d look at the license plate number, look at the license plate number. So this particular we're walking down County Road B and then we go split in the middle. And then he'll go back home. And then I'll you know, right in front of John Glenn. Then I keep walking. Then he'd go back home and we'd take off running and sometimes. And so we hear the n-word, and then we look back and the car does a U-turn. Up by the football fields, by the football field at John Glenn. And then he does a U-turn right there at the right turn. So he dips in, comes back. And so me and Mark are looking at each other. Well, they punch it and then they throw beer bottles. And for some reason we, we jumped on the ground. I want to say Mark got hit in the back with one. So we dealt– we dove on the, in the grass and that was the first time really somebody really threw something like that and really like like they were going to get us, you know, usually they just keep driving N N, N, N [n-word], you know. Right. And then you just like, dang, you know, and you have to go home and talk about it amongst your family and stuff. Right. So this particular day, it just so happened when I jumped on the ground and I look over and Mark, I look back at the car and the car’s stopped, I look at the car. I know the year and the license plate number. And then it, we took off running and they drove off.
So I run in the front door. They're playing spades. I run up, he's like “what's up, what's up?” So he, everybody gets up from the dining room table and walks to the front door. I see the car go u left up the hill, big hill up John Glenn on the on the on the west side. there. So, my dad said what happened? So I said, they threw these bottles and they hit Mark and Mark ran home. My dad would always say, did you get the license plate number? I said yes. And so I say it to my dad. They go to playing cards or whatever, and I wouldn't leave the front stairs. And in my mind, being a young person, I just kept saying, the car is going to have to come back. They live around here. Yeah, but in my young mind, I'm just thinking that I'm just like, well, they're going to come… County Road B is the main drag.
DiAndre Hodges: Yeah, it's gonna come back.
Marcel Duke: And so it's going to come back.
Marcel Duke: True story. A car is coming back down the hill, way up there, and I'm sitting on the stairs, it's probably 2 or 3 hours later. I run in the house. My dad said, what's up? I said, dad, the car's coming down the hill towards County Road B. It’s coming down Hazelwood. And so my dad calls my brothers up. We all walk on to the front yard. The car stops at the stop sign. Puts his blinker on to take a left. The passenger calls us all the n-word. Takes a left, and a left into the apartments.
DiAndre Hodges: Into the apartments.
Crosstalk: Uh oh.
Marcel Duke: We all head over there now. Now. My chest is way out, but I'm sixth grade or right? Third, fourth, fifth. You know, we're new money.
Marcel: But my brother's...
Marcel Duke: I'm sitting there going. Oh, we talk–
Lee Hawkins: Talking about the Duke Boys.
Crosstalk: Yeah. Right. Right, right, right, right.
Marcel Duke: So I wanna see my dad in action.We go through the lot there where the the swing sets and stuff were. So we get over there, and they are sitting on the hood of their car. So we're approaching. So the driver jumps in the car. But the other dude was a little, it was like he he wasn't going to, let's just say run or get in the car. So I, I knew my dad was carrying a pistol.
Lee Hawkins: I bet.
Marcel Duke: So I remember him putting it in his pocket, though. And I. I just remember him going over on the driver's side, and I thought he was going to strike the driver. But what he was doing is reaching in and pulling out the car keys. So even the dude covered up. But really my dad was strategic. All he did was reach in pull the keys out. Call the police. We waited a few minutes and the Maplewood police came.And treated us like S H I T.
Crosstalk: Right wow.
Crosstalk: What did you expect? Why did you do that?
Marcel Duke: Yeah, because my dad said, I want to do a citizen's arrest. And he made me carry the bottles over and everything. And I knew and I knew everything. And I saw the piece of paper I wrote down the license plate make model, color, all that. And the police acted like, just blew it off. Never took a report. Nothing. So that was our first experience with the Maplewood police.
Jason Johnson: At, at that time, a lot of the officers treated us like shit.
Marcel Duke: Yes.
Jason Johnson was the little brother of a brother and sister that Tammi and I were close to. He lived about five blocks from us, a few houses down from my maternal grandmother and across the street from one of my cousins. In other words, we’re not blood related, and we weren’t in high school at the same time, but we are family. I remember Jason being that tough little fella who used to tag along with his older brother and us, who, despite being so much younger, was never afraid to play tackle football with no pads, and wouldn’t hesitate to take the basketball right up the center to the hoop in games of 21. But when we got together as adults, he told a story I’d never heard before – one that made me sad, both that I wasn’t there to help, and that it happened at all. But I wasn’t surprised.
Jason Johnson had a scary encounter with the Maplewood police when he was just 14 or 15 years old.
Jason Johnson: DiAndre’s right there. We had some other family members with us, we was all going to the store we was all riding our bikes, and I was the last one behind everybody. Mm hmm. And but so we could see down the road an officer was coming up and he see that everybody was crossing the street. He sped up. Yeah. He said vooooooo, right? So by the time I'm getting in the middle of the street, I'm thinking. I'm thinking I'm about to get hit. I basically close my eyes. I brace for impact because that's how close the car was. It barely grazed the back of my tire. And he didn't even stop at all. It's like he was trying to. If he could hit me, he'd have been like, oh, accident, this and that. And it went right by me. It was the grace of God, the guy didn't bite me. And he he didn't slow down one time. He got to the corner, spread around. We tried to look at license plate. We're all sitting there like, Oh, man, everybody like, man, Jay, you okay? Like, they all thought I was going to get hit too.
Lee Hawkins: How old were you, Jason?
Jason Johnson: I was like. Like 14, 14, 15. And. And after that, I mean, I was so not only was I scared, but I was I would say for at least two or three days, it was hard to sleep because I was really thinking about me. Man, I can see the middle of the car, I can see the officer I mean, just the look, it was just so fast. And just as I turn my head and I'm like, man, he's about to hit me.
I remember hearing that some of the first Black folks moved to Maplewood in the 1950s.The narrative we were taught is that all the racism was concentrated in the South, but some people in Maplewood, like in many suburbs across the nation, tried to keep Black people out by using tactics like putting racial covenants in property deeds that forbade the sale of the property to anyone outside the Aryan race, and even burned crosses and left dead cats on people’s doorsteps. But that didn’t stop Black people from coming. In fact, some Black people lived close to each other, in enclaves. And from that period of the 1950s to when I was there in the 1980s, the few Black families who were there were known for our carefully manicured lawns and pristinely kept houses. I’ve heard that some white people even made up a name up for this. They called it, “the golden ghetto.”
Lee Hawkins: We were coming into a community that was really affected by Black success. A white working class, sometimes working poor.
Crosstalk: Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: Right. Community that would see all of these Black people coming in. And what was it you talked about? Cutting grass. I cut grass. You cut grass. We all cut grass. And why did we cut grass? Because our family wanted our lawns impeccable.
Marcel Duke: Yeah. Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: Remember that?
Crosstalk: Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: How all the Black people have beautiful lawns. Beautifully. carefully, manicured lawns. And a lot of that was the pride of who we were. But it was also, we don't want people to say that.
Crosstalk: Exactly.
Lee Hawkins: That the black people are lowering the property value.
Lee Hawkins: I remember when I was a kid, once I really took over the lawn, and that was really my primary responsibility, getting it to be beautiful. And then as soon as the snow would, would melt and we would get it, and all the Black people would have the sprinklers going, and chem lawn.
Crosstalk: Yeah yeah!
Lee Hawkins: You were ready to get at it, to have the dopest lawn..
Crosstalk: Yup. Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: They would drive over our lawn.
Marcel Duke: Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: And then you would go. And then there would be two tire marks.
Marcel Duke: Yeah. Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: Across the front of it. All up and down the street.
Lee Hawkins: And so then the Black people started putting rocks in front of our house all up and down Hazelwood.
Marcel Duke: Yeah we did that too.
Lee Hawkins: And then my white friends would come by and say why do you have rocks in front of your house that are that are colored the same color as your house?
Marcel Duke: Yep.
Lee Hawkins: It was the whole thing, that they – that was the only way we could stop people from driving over our lawns. Yeah. And this was circa 1970s, 1980s Maplewood, USA.
We had to be three different people in one day. We were constantly on the look out – watching our lawns, watching for the police, watching for whatever might come our way next, while also striving not to get too cynical or jaded – to still be able to trust that many of the white people in our community were not out to get us. And then, when we crossed into St. Paul’s Black community, that was a totally different experience. I brought the best version of myself to church, and probably the worst self-perception of myself when I went and hung out with some of the kids I knew from my cousins and my friends in the city who had nothing to do with the church, or at least were trying to act and be hard. We had to adapt to certain situations, while striving to be as true to our authentic selves as we could. And looking back now – wow – that was exhausting.
And what’s funny is that you could be studious, preppy, and playing the tuba or singing Fiddler on the Roof in the school play, and the chances are that if you raised your voice, a lot of the white boys were going to be afraid of you. I never understood that, but sometimes, I admit, I used it to my advantage. And I thought it was fascinating that Marcel and I had never had a conversation about that, but he said the same thing once we sat down and started reminiscing.
Marcel Duke: I would go home and talk to my parents. Why are they afraid of us? I'd always say that to my parents. Why are they always afraid of us? My brothers and sisters…They always are afraid of us. And I can't fight. I've never been in a fight before. No one inherently is born and you know how to fight. But in their eyes, they felt my brothers and sisters and me, were tough guys. We were always tough. And I'm like, I'm not tough.
I talked to them about the pressure we often felt to conform to the stereotypes that other people – Black, white and all races – imposed on us, in terms of what defined a real Black man. Studying the Slave Codes and the Black Codes of the past – the rules that governed every aspect of Black life – I now know that rules like forbidding Black folks from reading and writing were internalized by much of American society over the generations. And that, I believe, led up to this feeling that I and so many other Black boys I knew back then held, that we had to live down to these stereotypes at times, to prove how so-called Black we were. If we had only known the history back then.
Lee Hawkins [00:31:46] Let's unpack that, because I think that this is the dichotomy of of the Black male experience. You know, Du Bois talked about double consciousness and how, we have to be three different people.
Marcel Duke [00:32:00] Exactly. Yeah.
Lee Hawkins [00:32:01] On any given day. And I think that.
DiAndre Hodges [00:32:04] Even to this day, yes.
Lee Hawkins [00:32:05] When I was coming up, it was, you know, I got fed all the positive affirmation of what it meant to be a Black man at church and in the Rondo community. It was excellent. It was being a nerd. It was academics. It was all of those things. But then on the other side, it was a real nigga too. If you wanted to be a real nigga.
Marcel Duke [00:32:28] Yeah, yeah.
Lee Hawkins [00:32:28] You needed to have.
DiAndre Hodges [00:32:30] The aggression.
Lee Hawkins [00:32:31] That you needed to show that. Right? Or you weren't real. You weren't a real black person. And that came from the black community, too. And the white people. And I, a lot of times, I believe now I'm not going to say the whole Black community. I'm going to say there were a lot of Black people who were not exposed to the positive side of Blackness and then took their definition of what it mean, what it meant to be Black from racist white people that we went to school with. And so the pressure to always conform, I mean, if you were speaking proper English. Or you got an A on a paper, well, you're acting like a white boy.
Marcel Duke [00:33:11] Yeah. I got that constantly.
Lee Hawkins [00:33:13] You're not really Black.
Marcel Duke [00:33:14] Yeah. Yeah yeah.
Lee Hawkins [00:33:16] And tell me about that. Was that ever was, did you ever feel pressure to be hard? Yeah. Because you're a Black man?
Marcel Duke [00:33:24] Especially when I got older.
DiAndre Hodges [00:33:26] I'll just give an example now. At this age. Yes. A boiler tech over in south Minneapolis. So where I would work over there, it was like, right off of, Linden Franklin and all of that.
Marcel Duke [00:33:40] Right?
DiAndre Hodges [00:33:41] So over there, I'm cool with, all of my people over there. Right? But I speak proper.
Lee Hawkins [00:33:48] Right
DiAndre Hodges [00:33:49] So when I speak proper, I'm not Black enough when I'm over there and I'm just. No, I'm just as Black as you are. But I speak proper. That's the way I was raised. Yeah, but if I come out to the suburbs, I'm a threat. I'm a n-word. I speak too Black. You know what I mean? So how do you navigate around that. There is no navigating around it. Just like you just said. Now you have to be three different people. When you pick up a phone or you go to to a job interview, right? You don't have that bass in your voice when you even when you're– “Okay. Yes, I’ll come.” See how the voice changes.
Marcel Duke [00:34:23] Right.
DiAndre Hodges [00:34:23] If you take the bass out–.
Marcel Duke [00:34:25] Yes, I'll. Okay. I'll be there. Yes. Okay. What time. Yes.
DiAndre Hodges [00:34:28] And then you show up and then I'm like in Black.
Marcel Duke [00:34:31] Yeah. Right.
DiAndre Hodges [00:34:32] Well, you, you know. I'm black, Okay. Yeah. See, so then one of the things that we deal with now and, and I think when we were younger, so like the Rondo Day area area, I came from, McDonough projects. Yeah. But my, grandma Roberta, King, she stayed in the Rondo Days. So our house is one of the houses that was taken away. Yeah, when they was building the freeway. So that's how I remember that. Dealing with that side of always being over there was totally different from going back out to the suburbs. I mean, it was like two different lives. Like when you're over there, you fit in with your community of your Black folks. Yeah. But then when you go out to Maplewood now, it's the culture shock again.
Lee Hawkins [00:35:19] Right. And I used to say, we used to get built up in the Black community and then torn down in the white community.
DiAndre Hodges [00:35:24] Yes
Lee Hawkins [00:35:25] Your self esteem had to be very high. I had a lot of people who thought, “Oh he’s so arrogant, he’s so conceited.” You know, and maybe I was, because I had to be.
Marcel Duke [00:35:26] Yes.
Lee Hawkins: I had to be at a level 11 because I knew, when I walked into the school, my goal was to be the class president, they’re going to try to knock me down to a 7 or 8.
Marcel Duke [00:35:57] Yeah, 100%.
[break]
Lee Hawkins [00:41:15] But what I'm saying when you grow up in this. Yeah. You know, it was, you know, there were, there were some people who were really well off, but it was mainly a white working class community. And there was a lot of resentment with us coming in and, you know, so I was very curious about the other side. Of what was happening to these kids at home.
DiAndre Hodges [00:41:40] At their homes?
Lee Hawkins [00:41:41] Yeah. Because you knew their parents were racist, too. Right. Because you can't teach, a second grader isn't going to know what a [n-word] is unless somebody taught him that.
Marcel Duke [00:41:49] Yeah, right.
Lee Hawkins [00:46:48] I have done a little reporting into the lives of some of the kids who used to call us [n-word]. Some of them were in prison. Had parents who were in prison, later in life, because they came from a childhood trauma environment. One kid that I knew had a mother who was a heroin addict, and a father who was incarcerated, and lived with his uncle, and I didn't know why he lived with his uncle. But when I, you know, when we got older, I actually wanted to call him, to have him participate in this podcast and about the time that I was going to call him, he overdosed and died. And so you never know what people, I feel like people were threatened by us. But it wasn't just physical. It was the idea of..
Marcel Duke: Presence
Lee Hawkins: Who are these [n-word] in our community? They're taking something from us.
DiAndre Hodges [00:49:02] Even teachers would even tell you, you make a good garbage man. You make a good this. You know you won't be this, but not, you know, maybe go be a doctor or something. No, no, no. n-word, how dare you think that you're going to be a doctor?
As part of my research, I contacted Cassie Block, a woman who was the little sister of three older siblings who were around the same ages as me and my sister Tammi. She went to school with DiAndre, and they were tight. But I initially called her, because I wanted to get some insight about her brother Nick, who was my older sister’s age, two years older than me. He was known to call Black kids n-words, and it was too bad, because he really could be a nice kid. But I always sensed that he had his own struggles, though I didn’t know what. And wasn’t able to ask, because several years ago, he was killed in a motorcycle accident.
Reconnecting with these fellas and other friends from back in the day in Maplewood has been quite cleansing for me. Cassie’s corroboration of the facts that we always knew were true – but would be hard for people outside of our Maplewood experience to believe – is key. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry about this, but the truth is, the word of the white woman still carries a lot of weight in America. We can talk about how racist Maplewood was all we want, but for some people, unless a white woman comes along and vouches firsthand for what she experienced, our sharing of our experiences might just sound like a bunch of Black men complaining, saying woe is me.
Lee Hawkins [00:49:46] You know, it’s been really cleansing. It's been really cleansing to look at it. And one of the reasons I wanted you to call in was first to validate, because I think it's going to be really hard for people to accept what we're saying, you know? And so and, of course, you know, the power of the word of a white woman still carries weight in America.
Crosstalk: [00:50:08] Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Lee Hawkins [00:50:08] So we appreciate that you called in, to validate the word of the brothers right. So, but but also to bring us into the psychology of racism, you know, in, in what it's like to be on the other side. And I know that you and I spoke about some of the things that your brother was going through, that when we were.
Cassie Block: Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: You know, that it wasn't just that he was a blistering racist, that he had a lot of his own challenges that he was going through as a kid, in childhood trauma, and the role that that can play, and socialization and the way you're raised and the things you pick up on. Everybody in here said, you know, because I said that he used to call me the N-word as a kid and other Black kids. And then, but we all agreed that he changed, that he did evolve, right?
Cassie Block: [00:51:09] Right, oh for sure.
Lee Hawkins [00:51:09] I was hoping that you could tell me, you know, what is it that makes a third, fourth, fifth grader, say that to a black kid?
Cassie Block: [00:51:25] For me personally, and I'm going to assume that my brother faced the same challenge— there was no exposure, to my family, my family, my parents didn't have any Black exposure or, you know, culturally or physical or, you know, their jobs, their life. They didn't interact with folks that were Black But how do you have a perspective on what's good or what's bad if you have zero exposure, you know. It was easy for him to deflect that on, the easy, the easy target. And back then, you know, the easy target was, you know, the minorities.
Lee Hawkins [00:54:19] I think that many of the kids that we were brought up with, they were going through their own struggles.
Cassie: [00:54:36] Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: What was your brother going through, what was it like?
Cassie: [00:54:40] All of us were, were kind of poor. I mean, we, our families spent our money how we wanted to, but, so I think that's the kind of the hidden thing there is that we all were working hard. Our families are all working hard to, like, get us into a place where we thought it would be better for our family. That was the one thing we all had in common.
Lee Hawkins [00:55:30] What was. So is, was there resentment of the fact that the Black people were coming into and wanting the same thing
Cassie: [00:55:39] Yes. Absolutely. I mean, I think it was kind of like, well, how did they get that? How do and why do they. You know, why did they deserve that? And let's make ours better. You know what I mean? Like those. I mean, it it did. It became competition to a certain point. Like especially for my brother. Like, let's show them, we can do better. We are better, you know. They don't deserve the same rights as we do or whatever.
[break]
Lee Hawkins [01:01:30] There was a part of that conversation where I felt like everybody, kind of getting emotional.
DiAndre Hodges [01:02:01] Yeah.
Lee Hawkins [01:02:02] And it was no, I thought it was when she was telling the story about that, his stuff really happened. And that we needed her to cosign what we really went through.
Marcel Duke [01:02:14] Yeah. I don't believe.
Lee Hawkins [01:02:16] It. You see, that's the psychology of white supremacy, too. Is that…
DiAndre Hodges [01:02:19] Well, because this right here wouldn't have really went as far as you want it to go, right? Unless you got to see from the lens. From the other side.
Lee Hawkins [01:02:29] Right.
DiAndre Hodges [01:02:30] You know what I mean? So hearing her side of it. And to cosign what we are already talking about, what we've been through. She watched it.
Lee Hawkins [01:03:29] And to put it into context, this was a time when I mentioned prison, And, I was I want to make sure that I'm clear on saying that this was a time where disproportionately they were giving Black men unfair sentences.
Marcel Duke [01:03:44] Yes. Big time.
Lee Hawkins [01:03:44] And we were also, if you remember the song Self-Destruction.
Marcel Duke [01:03:49] Right.
Lee Hawkins [01:03:50] We were trying to help our communities, but we were also young Black men in situations where, yeah, we had to watch it in Maplewood, but we also had to watch our own people because we had friends being killed in the streets. And we did try to speak out about it. Yeah, we did try as a community to engage in activism around it, but that didn't mean that we as Black boys were ever safe. We weren't safe from the police.
DiAndre Hodges [01:04:22] No, but that was structured by, that was structured by white folks, though. When you talk about, when you look at the gangbanging. And you look at, competing or you're competing within your own culture because we're put in such a small place, with so many of us.
Lee Hawkins [01:04:41] Right.
DiAndre Hodges [01:04:42] And we're already seeing what they're doing to us. So it started to almost be groomed into us. We have to be the same way toward one another. Because if you think about it, it was always about territory with Blacks. It was all about, okay, you're this color and I'm this color. So you're fighting back and forth for this or this person got this so we over there getting it.
Lee Hawkins [01:05:03] The whole idea of haters I got a lot of it was about, people looking in the mirror and hating and.
DiAndre Hodges [01:05:09] Hating themselves.
Lee Hawkins [01:05:11] They were looking at us. They will look at another Black man, and all of a sudden, you know, you're at the mall and you're getting mean mugged because you have a nice coat on or you're wearing a chain. And now, okay, my dad used to always say, who are these [n-words] over here? Watch out. Here, put your hand in your pocket. Yeah. You know, and I hate to say it like that.
Marcel Duke [01:05:32] But it's true.
Lee Hawkins [01:05:33] But this is -Now the question is like, what would you like to see happen? Like how, how do you get around this to protect future generations of students of color?
Marcel Duke [01:10:56] I think, for my son, who's a Black boy at 16, I would say this - I'm involved. I'm an involved parent.
DiAndre Hodges [01:11:25] Yes.
Marcel Duke [01:11:26] And I want to say when, back in Maplewood my father would send my sister. He was old school like that, and I don't know why. I never really got the answers why.
Marcel Duke: Now they see me. And it's funny because my wife is white and we go to everything.
DiAndre Hodges: [01:12:46] Right?
Marcel Duke [01:12:46] And, my son is biracial. But he's still a [n-word].
DiAndre Hodges: [01:12:53] 100%. Don’t get it twisted. Still a [n-word].
Marcel Duke [01:12:59] So.. but because they see me and they know me and I'm involved, and I look at them in the face. And I don't care what you want to talk about, I can talk about that. And I'm very involved. Where I think back then my parents weren't. My older siblings were my parents, kind of, and I just, you know, I remember now that I'm married and have kids and stuff like that. I was going to change that. I'm going to be there. I'm going to be involved and they're going to see me. And what I didn't have as a child. I didn't have the confidence like that.
Lee Hawkins [01:14:28] What I love about that, Marcel, is you just highlighted a generational shift because I think that, yes, our parents did want to defend us, and they did in many cases. But on the racism piece, I feel like they didn't. I feel like they failed us in the sense that it would have taken too much, they felt, to do that because I feel like they were scared.
Marcel Duke [01:14:55] Yeah.
Lee Hawkins [01:14:55] Because of the generation that they were from. I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to talk down on them. I'm trying to say like, this was the reality, coming out of Jim Crow, Alabama, that my dad came out of, that mindset. And then your stepfather was from Mississippi. I mean, they were coming in and they didn't have what we have now because of them. We have the confidence. And now you're imparting it to your son. But was that part of it that they didn't have the confidence to stand up to these institutions?
Crosstalk: Yes. I agree.
Jason Johnson [01:15:32] I just think the history of lynching, I remember my grandmother, that's was one thing that she was always scared for us. was to get lynched. You know, be careful talking to white girls. You got to be careful for being late, because in their days, you get lynched in front of the sheriff. The sheriff was there. I mean, all those type of things, you know.
[break]
DiAndre Hodges [01:15:51] So I have two daughters and Soraya, my youngest, she goes to a predominantly white school,
Lee Hawkins [01:15:58] Do you whoop kids? Did you whoop your kids?
DiAndre Hodges [01:16:01] No. Well, I'll say, I'll say in the beginning. Right in the beginning. Probably when they were four or five.
Lee Hawkins [01:16:09] What made you change?
DiAndre Hodges [01:16:12] I found a better way. And the better way was to have conversations. And I got sick of crying after I was done whooping ‘em, because I felt like I only knew that way, but I needed to find a different way. And it had to be whenever I talk to them and I'm teaching them something, there's a question behind it. So is if I say, well, this or this or this or happened, do you understand why I'm saying this?
Lee Hawkins [01:16:55] You know I love what you're talking about. Because when I reflect on all of this in our generations, right, the difference between our generations and and the new generation, I feel like in a way, we didn't have a childhood.
DiAndre Hodges [01:17:13] Well, we always had to be in fear.
Lee Hawkins [01:17:14] Right? We had to be adults, we had to operate as adults.
Marcel Duke [01:17:16] Yes.
Lee Hawkins [01:17:17] As adults. From the time we were little kids. And I remember, not too long ago, I was at my building out east, and this, this Black woman walked in with her son, and he looked like he was maybe five, maybe five years old. And they walked up to the concierge desk, and I looked and I noticed he was holding a teddy bear. And the first thing I said to myself was, what is this kid doing holding a teddy bear?
Crosstalk [01:17:47] Right? (Laughter)
Lee Hawkins [01:17:51] How did he, how is she letting him hold a teddy bear?
Crosstalk: [01:17:52] That's kind of soft.
Lee Hawkins [01:17:53] And then I had to check myself. Yeah. And then all of a sudden I got this really great feeling and I was like, wow. You know, things are changing. He's being allowed to be a kid.
Crosstalk: [01:18:04] Yeah.
Lee Hawkins [01:18:04] He doesn't have the stress that we carried.
DiAndre Hodges [01:18:08] But the fact that you had to stop and think about that..
Lee Hawkins [01:18:12] Yeah, I had to check myself. Because our childhoods were stressful.
Crosstalk [01:18:15] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Lee Hawkins: Am I right?
DiAndre Hodges [01:18:18] 100%. Aggressive at all times. Adult at all times.
Marcel Duke [01:18:22] I think that's the balance. As a parent, I whoop mine. I want to make that clear.
Crosstalk: (Laughter)
Marcel Duke [01:18:31] So, I believe in that. And if you ask my three boys, they would say that. But I say that to say this. We have an awesome balance, because they know every time someone meets my kids or whatever anywhere in the world we've been, right away, and this might be the sad part, but they always like, oh my God, your kids are so good. So I pride myself on them having to be a certain way with everyone in the world and me.
DiAndre Hodges [01:19:15] That comes from slavery too though, whooping our kids.
Marcel Duke [01:19:19] Yeah. And I got I got it from my dad and now my brother Andre, he has three kids. Totally different. And he has awesome kids and he's awesome.
Lee Hawkins [01:19:33] Marcel, this really quick. Do you believe that your children would be out of line and that they couldn't be reasoned with without the whoop?
Marcel Duke [01:19:44] Perhaps. But I look at it. I don't agree with a lot of the way my dad governed us, but I do feel that living in Maplewood when we moved out there, fear of him - helped me.
Marcel Duke [01:20:19] I knew that if I messed up that fear, underlining fear of my father, guided me to this day.
Lee Hawkins [01:21:19] Yeah.
Marcel Duke [01:21:20] And that's how. That's the perspective that I carried to them.
DiAndre Hodges [01:21:25] No, And I don't disagree because like I said in the before, in the beginning, I whooped my kids. But that was to put in place...
Marcel Duke [01:21:34] Yes.
DiAndre Hodges [01:21:35] Of now, the framework, the framework of now the voice comes in and I ain't got to do this no more because now they fear the conversation.
Lee Hawkins [01:21:42] I think this is a debate that the Black community is going to continue to need to have.
Crosstalk: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
DiAndre Hodges [01:21:48] And sometimes these kids need they ass whooped.
Marcel Duke [01:21:52] They didn't get a lot of whoopings. It's the fear.
Lee Hawkins [01:21:57] But I'll tell you. Let me just tell you because okay, when you go back into slavery and you see the way that the juvenile justice system after slavery even I, we found some, some opinions from cases that involve young Black boys, okay, juvenile delinquency cases. And there's one judge in I believe it was 1901. They sentenced him and then they said, but wait a minute, we've got to give him 50 lashes, because a Negro cannot be reasoned with and he only understands the lash. And so I'm not. First of all, I would never condemn a Black person who uses corporal punishment on their children because, you know, when it happened to me, I believed in it too. And you know, I know that history and, and when I couple that with the history of what I experienced as a Black boy in Maplewood, having a father who felt literally like at any given time, if a white girl says, you raped her, you raped her.
Marcel Duke [01:23:07] Yeah, yeah,
Lee Hawkins [01:23:09] We can't do anything. So I'm going to beat you so that you're not even— you’re telling a white girl you can't go to the prom. Right? And so this was the reality that I was up against and that we were, you know, we were socialized into. And so I think as we start to understand history and we start to get a little bit more distance from the brutality of our generation, and we start to allow our children and your grandchildren, when you have grandchildren, to have that kind of secure, safe childhood that we didn't have.
Lee Hawkins [01:37:15] This is so powerful. Brothers, I thank you. Thank you so much. Because what you're doing is, you know, this is a hard thing doing a podcast like this. Opening up your whole life, going through and dissecting and remembering certain things that were traumatic and also all of the good things. But the hard part is to really sit down and confront this stuff. And I feel that you all have been like a support group. I needed to hear that you all went through this and we went through it together.
Marcel Duke [01:38:09] Yeah, right.
Lee Hawkins [01:38:10] And so I wanted America to meet some of my brothers in the struggle. And my brothers in the empowerment, because that's what you are.
I left that conversation feeling proud of those brothers – of all of us – because we fought through a lot and hopefully paved the way for the Black and Brown kids who came after us in Maplewood. It was never easy, but we thrived through it as Black boys, as families, and as a community. That experience positioned us to move through society with an ease that mystifies those raised in segregated environments. America is still a patchwork of segregation, and stepping out of a homogeneous world into the unknown can be intimidating for people of all races. But for me, it was all I knew, and I learned to navigate it from a young age, much to the alarm of my parents and many around me.
I now realize that the criticism I received – being too Black or not Black enough – often stemmed from others' confusion. Our critics, both Black and white, struggled to accept that we could inhabit both spaces and still be authentically Black. Their discomfort reflected their own insecurities, not ours.
We were an anomaly many had never seen before. I knew Black people who had never interacted with anyone but other Black people and whites who had only known other whites. The latter would often turn red-faced, sweaty-handed, and clammy around Black people, unsure of what to say and afraid of saying something wrong. I am grateful to my parents for integrating us into a new community while keeping us grounded in our roots. Our involvement in the church and Black community helped us learn the intricate layers of Black and American history that our suburban schools often refused to teach.
Today, I see the advantage this gave me and feel genuine sadness for white children in places like Florida, where diversity and inclusion, and the darkest chapters of Black American history are being erased from curriculums. Our Black and Brown children must learn to navigate the mainstream world, but they also often gain exposure to their history through their own communities. White students, however, denied access to this history, will face a diverse America with little understanding of people who don't look like them, yet contributed to the lives they enjoy everyday. This is not only sad but cruel. When they enter that college classroom or corporate office and see a Black or Brown professor or CEO, they often won’t have the training that Maplewood gave me, and Diandre, Jason, and Marcel. We knew our world and theirs too. We became resilient, able to resist and protest racism unapologetically, without being broken by the struggle. Our experiences in Maplewood prepared us for the challenges and opportunities of 21st Century America. We can thank our parents — and even bigots like Elroy Stock — for that.
CREDITS
What Happened In Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It’s written, produced and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.
Our executive producer is Erica Kraus.
Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.
Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga.
Our lead writer is Jessica Kariisa.
Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa.
This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Lando.
Our fact checker is Erika Janik.
And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.
Special thanks to the O’Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou and Ziyang Fu. And also thanks to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short.
The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.
You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.
Thank you for listening.