Helene Southern Slater was eighty-four years old when I began to interview her. Though in a wheelchair, this self-made woman with an authoritative presence exuded vitality and pride. Now living in a nursing home, she has covered one wall of her room with awards she had received over the years. With her eyesight failing, she devotes hours each day listening to news programs on television to keep abreast of world events, talk shows on radio so she “will know how people are thinking” and sports broadcasts because she especially admires the achievements of athletes. Helene is a descendent, through her mother, of West Ford, a slave owned by George Washington who is believed by the family to be the illegitimate son of the first president of the United States. Helene considers racism a far more intractable social problem than gender bias in America, and, in later issues of this website, her stories will explore the effect of the Depression on middle-class Afro-American families, the struggle for education and entrance into the professional classes, and the dynamic of the father-daughter relationship. This story concerns her youth when she was a protected middle-class child and tells how, as an adolescent, she discovered the real meaning of racism.

HELENE SOUTHERN SLATER
The Awakening

My name is Helene Ford Southern Slater. I’d like to introduce myself as a colored lady because that's what people of my complexion were known as when I came along in 1913.
     I grew up in the great city of Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin and William Penn are our heroes. At one time Philadelphia was the capital of the United States, and it has many places that people like to visit such as Independence Hall where the Liberty Bell lives—you can see its crack.
     The great city of Philadelphia was a segregated place when I was a girl. There were colored neighborhoods and white neighborhoods. Colored people weren’t allowed to go into the white movie theaters, but I wasn't aware of this because white people could, and did, come to our theater, the Royal on South Street. I never felt I was losing anything going to the Royal because Fats Waller played the organ during the silent movies there. Yes, Fats Waller, and he was sensational. People were just stomping on the floor when Fats played for the comedies and the westerns.
     It was at the Royal that I saw “The Phantom of the Opera” when I was about twelve years old. I still remember vividly the scene when the girl goes underground and looks for the phantom. During that scene, Fats was playing all this creepy music. The girl finally finds the phantom, she reaches out and pulls the mask off the phantom's face, and when Lon Chaney turned around and showed the audience what he really looked like—his face was horrible—Fats Waller hit that organ. I'm telling you, he scared the water out of us children. I've never been as scared in my life since.
     I’m talking about growing up in Philadelphia. I’m saying there was prejudice in Philadelphia, but I didn’t understand what this meant as a girl. I had no idea what it meant. No idea.
     We lived at 1513 Christian Street, in a middle-class colored neighborhood. Judge Armand Scott lived across the street from us. The Nicholas Brothers lived three doors down. The Nicholas kids became famous dancers, but when I was growing up they were kids just like me, and we used to dance together out on the sidewalk.
     Marian Anderson lived around the corner on Frasier Street. Marian’s sister Alice became my best friend, and through her I met Miss Marian. In those days, Marian sang at the local churches and my family would go and pay seventy-five cents to hear her sing.
     On Sixteenth Street, just above Catherine Street, was our fire department company. There were no colored firemen, but as kids we loved to go over to the firehouse to see the horses. Picture this: Whenever there was a fire, the gong rang in the firehouse. The horses knew what to do. They heard the gong ring, and not guided by anybody, they walked backward, backed under their harness, and waited for the firemen to fasten the harness in place. Once the harness was attached to the hook-and-ladder, the horses pulled the truck and the firemen to the fire. The firemen always hung onto the side of the fire truck, and one of them kept striking the gong as they went tearing through the city streets. Watching these beautiful horses perform was amazing and thrilling.
     Every New Year’s Day, the Mummers’ Parade came down Broad Street. Colored people weren’t allowed to march, but as a girl what this parade meant to me was that I could hear fantastic bands of mandolin and banjo players, and when I was a little older, I would go with the other kids and sell peach baskets to people so they could sit and watch the parade. I loved string band music, and it was fun selling peach baskets for fifteen cents and making a little money.
     It was years before I understood that the place known as the city of brotherly love did not feel love for all its brothers and sisters. There was racism all around me, in the movies, in the stores, in the schools, in the streets. But in all honesty I don’t believe I suffered any bad effects from it as a child, and I attribute this to the way my father sheltered and nurtured me.
     My mother died when I was five years old, during the great influenza epidemic in 1918. My father, William Southern, was the son of a Blackfoot Indian. Pop was a chubby little gentleman, handsome as far as I’m concerned. He was not an educated man, but he had built up a successful business. His company was called the Crescent Paint Company, and he painted large office buildings like the Campbell Soup Company, the home offices of the B&O Railroad, and the Baldwin Locomotive Works.
     Pop gave my sister and me every advantage he could. He was able to buy us the things we needed, we were never hungry for food, we had all the clothes we needed, and he gave us plenty of affection and discipline. As a girl back home in Philadelphia, my job was to go to school, study and get good grades, and take music lessons.
     When I think of my childhood, the memories are of a wonderful, exciting, safe period in my life. Racism was all around me, but it wasn’t something that caused me any worry or misery. I had a few more years of innocence before the world got around to teaching me what racism really meant.

     Philadelphia was a center of education when I was growing up. One of the greatest colleges in America, the University of Pennsylvania, is there. Gerard College didn’t admit students of my complexion when I was young. Lincoln University was the colored college, but it was for men only.
     My elementary school, where every day we said the pledge of allegiance to the flag and recited a prayer, was segregated. To be honest, the fact that I wasn’t permitted to go to school with white children didn’t mean anything negative to me then. Black teachers were required to teach black pupils, but even in hindsight I regard that as a fortunate situation because our black teachers knew what black people had accomplished and what black people were trying to achieve, and they told us during our civics lessons. White teachers wouldn’t have been interested or known this, or if they did, they wouldn’t have emphasized it as strongly. At school assemblies, well-known and accomplished black persons came to speak to us. In the fourth grade, I heard Dr. George Washington Carver at one of our assemblies. I have remembered that event all my life—that I was in the presence of Dr. George Washington Carver. Our teachers brought us students into contact with black people who we could admire and respect and want to emulate. I’m saying that in my school the emphasis was on accomplishment—how much colored people had achieved—not how much they had suffered. I’m saying that my elementary school teachers made me feel proud, not ashamed, of being colored.
     Let me tell you something about racism. You don’t realize it's going on unless it happens to somebody else like yourself. You have to see it happen to somebody else, and you have to identify with that person. I didn’t identify with people who had bad things happen to them, so when certain things happened to me that were unjust, I didn’t understand the cause.
     When I was growing up, I saw pictures in the newspapers of colored people being lynched, but somehow it had never registered that these horrible things had anything to do with me. It was something that happened in my own family that woke me up. I vividly remember the day I was visiting my aunt and uncle, and here comes Uncle Jake’s sister from Florida. She wasn't expected. She had her children with her, and she was in tears, crying hysterically. What had happened? Her husband had been lynched. Lynching was what I had seen in the papers, colored men hanging from trees. But this lynching was not something I read about in a newspaper. This had happened to someone in my own family! I never forgot, I never forgot that occasion! This terrible, violent thing had happened to my own family, and I realized that it could happen to me.

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