A narrative of racism and hope

He sat at the kitchen table and told his stories -- 80 years of American history -- a child of the segregated South, just four generations removed from slavery, who went on to serve in the U.S. Army as a lieutenant colonel assigned to the Pentagon. They cover a long arc, Bob Dunn’s stories do.

The stories drift back to his mother, who was strapped into a plow harness because the family could not afford a mule, through dark days of threats and taunts and learning to hold his tongue in the company of whites, ever on alert, and finally forward to election night when he sat in this same room and watched on television as Barack Obama was elected president, and felt almost as if he had floated away from his trim body.

Dunn told his stories in no particular order, apologizing for gaps in the narrative: “I put it out of my mind so much that I can’t go from one to another. I go around and around.”

There was the incident back in his hometown of Kinston, N.C. He was 13 years old, working as a delivery boy. One of his friends was a white boy named Sammy Manning, who worked in the same grocery store.

Late on a Saturday night, he and Sammy pulled out curved butcher knives and playfully began to reenact a sword fight from an Errol Flynn film. Dunn’s knife nicked the other boy on the ribs, just enough to draw blood. Sammy slugged him and ran for home:

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I had been there long enough to know that he is not going home to be bandaged. He is going home to spread the word that he got cut. . . . So I said, what is he going to do? And what are they going to do? Of course, they were lynching black people back then.

Sure enough, in about 15 minutes, Sammy showed up with his mother and a whole crowd of people, out there in front of the building, and I heard his mother say, “Where’s that nigger that cut my Sammy?”

Oh my God. I was going to go back over there and explain to her that it was an accident. Well, that was the most stupid thing I did because --”There he is! Right there!” -- they took off after me. And I took off running, and I was a real good runner at the time.

And it was raining that night. And I cut into a little alley where there were houses and dived under a house. They went up and down trying to figure out which way I went.

I remember there was a dog under the house . . . and he was growling and so forth. But I would prefer avoiding that dog than I would all those people -- because I knew what they wanted to do to me.

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He paused, seeing it all again.

“This happened,” Dunn said. “I am telling you exactly. It did happen.”

Now he was a young officer, stationed down in Alabama. These were the earliest days of the civil rights movement and the state was ferociously determined to resist the integration that had been forced on the military. His fellow soldiers for the most part treated him with little respect, refusing to follow such common-sense commands as stop playing with live ammo.

But his oldest daughter -- Dora, now 55 and listening from the kitchen -- had it even harder, he said. She was the only black in her high school.

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The teachers were the worst ones, against any integration. They jumped on her. The instructors would get up and start teaching this thing about the black people were happiest when they were slaves because slave owners took good care of them. Of course, she immediately would call the teachers: “That’s not right.”

“Well, how dare you!”

So she’d be sent out of the class. Each night that she came home she wanted to stop, to find someplace else. And I would spend each night talking to her, talking about “how important it is for you to continue what you are doing. You are the first black person to be down there, but you certainly won’t be the last. And you have got to be strong.”

And sometimes I regret doing that now because she was so young. But I told her that “regardless of what the situation, you have got to do it -- for us, for black people in general, you have just got to do it. You cannot let them win.”

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And now, he was in Kinston again, learning the family story from his preacher father and his mother, who made sure all nine of her children finished high school, with six of them scraping their way through college. He had been told, for instance, about a great-grandmother who, daughter of a slave, had inherited enough of a master’s blood to look white -- but still was treated as a black. Dunn worked as a young waiter in a fine restaurant, because being served by meek-mannered blacks was perceived by whites as a status symbol, a remnant of antebellum privilege. Then he found work as a bellhop at Kinston’s hotel. This was during World War II and the hotel was filled mostly with hard-drinking Marines.

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I remember once they were half-drunk, over at the sixth floor of the hotel. And to scare me they grabbed me by the legs and put me out the window. And they were threatening, “Should we throw him out or pull him in?” And they didn’t, and don’t think they intended to. But they could easily have dropped me because they were drinking and so forth.

But it was the type of thing that they would do at the time. And that was something you had to learn to put up with. When they pulled me back in they gave me a big tip and all that. But you know, you still say, Well, maybe one of these days I’ll be beyond this.

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And then he was in Vietnam, dangling from an airplane, this time as a matter of duty -- looking for jungle to defoliate and deprive the enemy of cover. He went on to serve in the Pentagon, vetting regulation reports. He built a second career with the Urban League. He outlived his siblings.

Dunn -- along with his wife, Faye, who sat in another room as he told his stories -- raised four daughters and a son, teaching them to not see skin color and to resist any impulse for hatred. Dunn watched a lot of history together with his daughter Dora. She remembered how he had screamed in anger at the television in 1957 when a black girl trying to attend school was spit upon, and how he shouted in exultation as Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech.

But there was no shouting this year as election night coverage reached its historical climax. A quiet fell over the room. Dunn had watched every campaign moment through the primaries, rooting for Obama, and now he felt as he often did after hearing a particular piece of classical music, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8.

“It is almost as though I am on air,” Dunn said, straining to explain the out-of-body reverie. “Mahler affects me that way. And I felt the same when I got the announcement that Obama had won. . . . I don’t know what I was thinking, but I felt that I was off the ground.

“ ‘I am there,’ ” he remembered telling himself. “I am there. And I have witnessed this.”

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peter.king@latimes.com

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latimes.com/americanmoment

Road to the inauguration

Follow Peter H. King and photographer Kirk McKoy in this series as they wend their way to Washington for the Tuesday inauguration of Barack Obama, sending back reports from across the land.