Black History Month

It's a good bet that most of my generation from this small town would recall the Skinners, who lived on  West Street, and Missouri Latham, who lived on Woodlawn Avenue as the only black folks in our little community back in the 1950s.

Mrs. Latham's rambling white house was across the Allegheny River behind my family's home. I remember watching from my little hideaway behind the bushes in our back yard as this tall, thin woman, her hair confined in a kerchief, emerged from her back door across the concrete ditch, toting a laundry basket to hang clothes on a clothesline strung in a sunny spot next to the channel. Mrs. Latham went to our church, where she sat in one of the back pews and always wore a hat and white gloves. My father was a pall bearer at her funeral at the church in 1970.  

The Skinners raised a family in Coudersport. My mother remembers their son and daughter going on to attend Hampton Institute (an historical black college) in the late 1930s. Granddaughter Beverly visited her grandparents some summers in the late 1950s and Mr. Skinner checked with the authorities to make sure it was all right for her to use the community swimming pool.

But the other folks with black skin in this white skin world were the migrants who followed the vegetable harvest north every summer, many traveling with their families.  At times, there were more than 3,000 itinerants here. Every fall,  there were a few dark faces in school – there and gone before leaves fell from the trees. 

"My first experience with black folks was when my grandmother took me to a migrant camp," related my friend during a recent dinnertime conversation.

And instantly I was sitting next to MY grandmother in her black and white Chevrolet, bouncing across a rutted dirt track on the way to deliver clothes to a migrant camp one summer. It was hot, the windows in the car were open. Grandma was intent on her driving and on her mission to help the poor .

I remember a long, shabby barracks, open doors and weathered steps and the dry packed earth. Boxes of donated used clothing in the trunk of the Chevy – faded t-shirts, shorts, pedal pushers, blouses missing buttons - perhaps even some of my own outgrown clothes.  And the sad, uncomfortable feeling that these little girls would pull on panties that had first belonged to others.

Later that same summer, a team of all-stars from nearby migrant camps came to Coudersport for a softball game at Metzger Field against a team of local men. The church women prepared a picnic for afterwards at Mitchell Park. Again, my grandmother was there and so was I.  It was there, for the very first time, I had a bologna sandwich with mustard on white bread.

 work of Kerry James Marshall, American artist
from the Cleveland Art Museum
(acrylic and collage on canvas)