Dreaming In Black And White (eBook)

Chapter 1
Among But
Seldom a Part

I have spent much of my life pressed between two worlds. I am a black man, one who has not only lived mostly in white society but who has also been called upon my whole life to explain the black world to the white, the white world to the black. It has not been easy. I long ago accepted this as the calling of God for my life, and I am grateful. But there has been a price. I want you to know this price, and so I want to take you with me on some of the journey I have known. Perhaps this will bring understanding. Perhaps it will lead to healing. My greatest hope is that it will help to both explain and to calm the desperate ethnic storms of our generation.

I must say at the start that my experience has not been on the most jagged edge of the black experience in America. My house has never been burned. No family member has ever been lynched. No man has been shot, no woman raped, no child kidnapped or maimed among my immediate relations. I have never been pummeled by police or dragged down a gravel road by men in white sheets or taunted by an angry racist crowd. Many who look like me have known such horrors.

No, my experience in America is far more normal. Perhaps that is the tragedy.

I was fortunate to be born to two proud African American parents. They both understood and reveled in the glory of being black. They both chose to attend Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), but their choice was systemically corralled because they did not ethnically qualify to attend their major State universities. Still, they education they enjoyed was in no way less-than.

They both were skilled professionals. They both had a profound understanding of justice and truth. They both also knew the story of their people and the power that black heritage meant for their time. I was the beneficiary of all of this. How very grateful I am.

My mother, Violaruth Joyce Johnson, was an amazing woman. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1937, to a father who worked food service on the railroad and a mother who was a nurse. She thrived in the public schools of her city and then attended and graduated from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri in the Spring of 1958 and earned her Masters in Education from Tuskegee Institute in 1971.

In 1958, she took a job in the Kansas City school system. It was a difficult job at a difficult time in our nation’s history and it was all the more so for a black woman. My mother did it and did it well. What a legacy she left me. I don’t mind telling you that my mother was beautiful. That’s not just a proud son talking. You can see for yourself.

Violaruth Joyce Johnson

With another student she appeared on the cover of the March issue of Ebony magazine in 1958.

If I am accused of bragging, guilty as charged. I am unapologetically am proud of my heritage!

My father, Joseph Everett Fuller Jr. sprang from far different soil. He was born in 1930 in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Dr. Joseph Everett Fuller Jr.

His father, my grandfather, was the head of the math department at the famed Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, the groundbreaking school founded by Booker T. Washington. As if that wasn’t accomplishment enough, my grandfather was also the president of the Tuskegee Savings and Loan. My grandmother Ruby died of breast cancer in 1955, so in 1960 my grandfather married Rosa Arrington, a regal woman who was a professor in the English department at Tuskegee.

It was easy to write the words you see in this previous paragraph. It was much harder to live those words. Imagine what it was like for my grandfather to achieve what he did. He graduated from what is now Bradley University in 1929 and went on to earn his Master of Arts in Mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1929 and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1945.

Of course, 1929, the year Joseph Fuller Sr. graduated from college, was the year during which the Great Depression began. It was also during the Jim Crow era. “Separate but equal” was the law of the land. It was a cruel joke. Blacks were still being lynched. Racism ruled. That blacks would ride in the back of the train or the bus and step off the sidewalk when a white person approached was still expected in much of the country. Despite it all, my grandfather had earned his MA and PhD at two prominent universities in the North and had then chosen to serve his people at a school in the deep South. What a man he was. What a hero he has always been to me.

His experience left scars. We can only imagine together how many times he was called “n----r” or “boy”—despite the fact he was an accomplished man, certainly far better educated than those who abused him. We can try to envision the moments he was threatened or refused service or perhaps humiliated in front of the woman he loved. We cannot know exactly how this felt to him.

I do know some of the impact of these injustices upon him because I remember from my earliest days hearing him say that he would never go to the white part of Tuskegee. He said he had no intention of giving his money to white people. He would keep his business in the black community. Even when segregation ended, Grandpa never went to the white side of town, so torturous was the treatment he had endured, so deeply wounding were the injustices.

My grandfather had his disappointments but also his inspirations. He believed deeply in his students and in what they promised for the future. There he was just two generations from slavery, training gifted young black students to go out and change the world. I’ve always imagined they inspired him and that this was a hedge against the pain and the mistreatment. He also knew the eccentric inventor George Washington Carver, whom he admired. Still, seeing such black geniuses serving humanity by way of serving God surely changed him. He became, in time, a man of deep faith and I am grateful for that legacy in my family.

My father grew up in Tuskegee, then, and he, too, became an accomplished man. His was a far more exotic story than his own father’s, though. Dad attended Tuskegee High School and was a gifted student and athlete. Again, I may be bragging, but I have good reason. In 1947, just as Jackie Robinson was breaking the color barrier in professional baseball, the Philadelphia Phillies were looking at my father as a possible part of their team.

Unfortunately, it was just as athletic opportunities loomed to join a Major League squad, that my father received a draft notice from the Air Force. He decided to defer his enlistment and go to college. He enrolled at Lincoln University in Philadelphia. There, he studied. He played baseball. He drank deeply from the noble black culture at that stellar HBCU. One of the treasures from Dad’s life that we still hold dear in my family is his yearbook from Lincoln University. In it, his coach wrote, “I have never seen a better baseball player in my life.” The words mean a great deal to us even now and still speak of the possibilities that went unfulfilled in my father’s life.

As he graduated from Lincoln, the Korean War was just beginning. Dad wanted to serve but he yearned to make a contribution, like his father, as a professional, at a more specialized level than as a common soldier or airman. He decided to train as a dentist and enrolled at the famed Meharry Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the most esteemed black medical schools in the country. He graduated in 1954 with his dentistry degree and then enlisted in the Air Force in 1954-55. He would serve as a military dentist for two years. It was during this time that Dad’s story, well, just takes an odd turn.

It seems that during Dad’s military years, he returned while on leave to Tuskegee to spend time with his best friends from high school. They went to a night club that hosted live musical artists. In the way of often-told family stories, the details always survive. That the beer that night was two dollars a pitcher is something I know because this detail was repeated time and again throughout my life. While the guys were celebrating and horsing around, one of the buddies suddenly turned to my dad and said, “I dare you to get up on that stage and sing a song.” Well, there weren’t many challenges my Joe Fuller did not accept. Dad got up, sang beautifully, and sat down.

That would have been the end of the story except that there was a talent agent in the bar that night. He approached Dad and told him he was great and that fame as a singer was possible. He also asked if Dad would go to Memphis and record a demo. Dad agreed. Two weeks later, on the strength of that demo, Dad got a recording contract with Hi Records, a soul music and rockabilly label there in Memphis. Hi Records was the same label that signed the great Al Green years later, and released many of his hits, including Let’s Stay Together and Tired of Being Alone.

My dad’s season of fame began right then. I still have the vinyl 45 singles. They are invaluable mementos! He was on the road for a year and a half during 1958 and 1959, performing his singles like You Made a Hit and Nothing But You. He was such an impressive singer that his name—Joe Fuller—became well known. He even appeared on the Tonight Show with Jack Paar. That was real...