The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race. Carl C. Anthony
Why then did our dad decide to send us to Dobbins Vocational School to learn to work with our hands? Vocational school was where you sent kids who couldn’t achieve academically. The most obvious explanation is that he wanted us to have the skills to work with him in a family business. He admired the success of Italians in Philadelphia’s construction industry and hoped to emulate them by establishing his own company, Lewis E. Anthony & Sons.
Another factor must have been a loss of ambition and hope for us after the many disappointments he had suffered. He was a brilliant self-made man with many skills and talents, yet he had been unable to overcome the stigma of racism and fulfill his potential. This was due in part to the absence of family support that resulted from his status as an orphan. He was probably afraid that without solid vocational skills, we would be at the mercy of the social and economic forces that had crushed his own dreams and aspirations.
Attending Dobbins Vocational School
To get to Dobbins Vocational School, we had to take a bus, two trains, and another bus. The trip took about an hour. On the way, we would pass by the television station, WFIL-ABC, Channel 6, which was home to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. We watched American Bandstand every afternoon, giggling at how the show cleaned up black music, toning down its sexual content for a white audience. We never saw any black people dancing on the show.
When we enrolled at Dobbins, we were assigned a homeroom in the cabinetmaking and carpentry shop. We went to basic subjects like math, English, and history in the morning and shop in the afternoon. Our first assignment in shop was to make isometric drawings of thirty wood joints on tracing paper with a thirty-sixty-degree triangle. I loved making drawings of tongue-and-groove, mortise-and-tenon, dovetail, and all the other wood joints.
For the first assignment, I remember making a border around the drawing a half inch from the paper’s edge with a 1B pencil. For the title block in the lower right-hand corner, I filled in guidelines for lettering with a 4H pencil. I used a soft pencil for the lettering and for outlining the wood blocks and a harder pencil to fill in the details.
The teacher was evidently impressed; he sent me home with a note to my parents, suggesting that I be reassigned to architectural drafting. My dad objected, but the counselors at Dobbins prevailed. I was switched out of carpentry and cabinetmaking and assigned to the architectural drafting homeroom. The studio had about thirty students distributed evenly in tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. It was run by Mr. Hruslinsky, an excellent teacher and disciplinarian. I loved his class. He expected nothing but the best from us. Every semester, four or five students in the studio would win first or second prizes in regional or national competitions.
Our main activity was making copies of house plans taken from magazines we had selected. I chose split-level ranch houses from magazines like Better Homes and Gardens. I particularly liked futuristic-looking houses with butterfly roofs, jalousie windows, and accordion-folding doors. I loved making perspective drawings of these houses.
We also had to copy watercolor and pencil landscape sketches by accomplished practitioners. The trick was to get the work done in an hour. Although we viewed anything that wasn’t modern with suspicion, I enjoyed copying drawings of the ruins of Egyptian and Greek buildings. We also made copies of drawings from Sir Banister Fletcher’s classic reference book, A History of Architecture, first published in 1896 with updated editions coming out throughout the twentieth century.
Although Dobbins was about six miles from our house, Lewie and I would sometimes walk home, saving our transportation money to buy model airplanes. The walk took about an hour and a half and gave us an interesting tour of race and class divisions in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods. First, we went through a bad neighborhood and sometimes had to go out of our way to avoid being caught by local gangs and beaten up. We passed Girard College, a forty-threeacre campus boarding school for poor, orphaned, or fatherless white boys between six and eighteen years of age. The college, although owned and operated by the city, was, nevertheless, off limits to black people.7 After crossing the Schuylkill River, we passed through luxurious Fairmont Park and the Philadelphia Zoo. At the tip of the park, we caught a glimpse across the river of exclusive boathouses with their social and rowing clubs, which did not, we imagined, include any of us. Before reaching home, we walked through the familiar run-down neighborhood where I was born: the Black Bottom.
In 1955, when I was sixteen years old and halfway through the eleventh grade, Dad decided to take Lewie and me out of school to work in the family business, doing house painting and wallpapering. Soon, Lewie had a run-in with Dad and left home. Six months later, I left too.
It started one evening when Dad told me to turn off the TV and go to bed. I resisted. He said, “As long as you are living here in my house, you will do as I say. If you are old enough to make your own decisions, you are old enough to support yourself.” Feeling rebellious and sassy, I replied, “I’m a man-child.”
My father didn’t take to that answer. He walked me out of the room and into the hallway, repeating what he had just said. I came back with the same response. We replayed the scene several times—from the hallway to the doorway to the porch steps to the sidewalk to down the block. Finally, when I repeated my line that I was a man-child, my father said, “You are on your own,” and walked away.
After that collision of our two strong wills, I never lived at home again. Later, overhearing a conversation among adults, I learned that when he had come back into the house, Dad had seemed upset as he told Mother, “Your son is gone.”
I spent that night at Aunt Ede’s house, borrowed fifty dollars from her, and caught a Greyhound bus the next day for a destination as far away from Philadelphia as I could imagine: the home of Dad’s relatives in Enid, Oklahoma. I landed unannounced on the doorstep of Great-Uncle Lewis and Aunt Mary, who took me in. Being away from home for the first time, I experienced a wonderful sense of personal emancipation. At the same time, I was shocked and troubled by the sudden immersion in a world of blatant segregation.
First Exposure to the Segregated South
My journey on the Greyhound bus was my first exposure to the American South. Although Philadelphia was no more than a dozen miles above the Mason Dixon Line, we had learned to think of it as a Northern city. The South was indeed another country. Signs of racial segregation were everywhere: separate toilets, separate drinking fountains, separate seating areas, and separate entrances to buildings. On buses, it was generally understood that African Americans took seats starting in the back and coming forward while whites started in the front and moved backwards. I had read in the newspapers and heard stories about the culture of segregation that victimized black people, but I wasn’t conditioned to such formal protocols. Early on in my time there, I boarded a bus and took a seat toward the front. Nobody said anything to me, but the tension was palpable. The bus driver didn’t start driving. Then, it dawned on me: I’m in the wrong seat. I stood up and moved more toward the rear of the bus to make room for the white passengers who were boarding.
Here I was, late in my teenage years, finally being exposed to the formal racial protocol of the South, a protocol that presumably every African American in the South already explicitly understood. And they had to: African Americans who violated the caste system, with its elaborate restrictions on small acts like showing affection in public or expressing even the slightest disagreement with a white person, were punished with many forms of violence. The culture of segregation condoned outright murder of African American people by lynching and other means and was strengthened by denial of the right to vote.
Spending time in Oklahoma and encountering such visible racism was a jarring experience for me, but one that helped me identify the more hidden racism of the North, where there were no written-out signs, but the feeling of being in the wrong seat was all too familiar.
I stayed with my relatives in Oklahoma for about five months.