Racism Story Recalls a Fighter for Tolerance

We should all be sickened--but certainly not surprised--by the recent upsurge in hate crimes in Orange County and around the nation.

Not surprised because intolerance, after all, is as old as humanity and as American as the Constitution. Our forefathers did indeed come to this country to escape persecution--but they also came to practice it.

As the late essayist E.B. White pointed out, many of us think “freedom and justice for all means freedom and justice for ourselves and a few of our friends.”

Ask any of the “witches” of Salem who were hanged (just for the record, none was burned at the stake) in 1692, or John Ury, who was executed in 1741 in New York after being convicted of the crime of being a Catholic priest (he wasn’t).

Or the Irish who were hunted down and killed in Philadelphia and New York in the 1840s . . . or the blacks who were lynched at a pace of one every three days for nearly a century . . . or the Indians who were killed for sport by the Forty-Niners.

Or the Japanese who were dispossessed and locked up . . . or the Jews who were excluded from our society . . . or the Chinese and Mexicans who were refused jobs or citizenship and, in Orange County especially, at the turn of the century, who were beaten up or burned out to break the boredom of a summer evening.

The list is a long and sobering one and includes anyone whose presence or beliefs ran contrary to the established order--labor leaders, Communists, free-thinkers, free-lovers, Socialists, Okies, you name it.

Of course, long, long after they’re out of our hair, we celebrate them in books and movies as examples of the spirit of America. (I wonder if the knowledge that Maureen Stapleton would someday portray her on the screen would have eased the pain and humiliation of the tar and feathers Emma Goldman received in San Diego in the early part of the century?)

What prompts these thoughts were two stories in The Times during the past several weeks. The first carried the headline “Intolerance Doubles in County,” detailing a report by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith showing increased vandalism against, and harassment of, Jews.

The second came a few days later and reported the death of Mary Tinglof Smith at the age of 81 in Sun City.

Ironically, Mary Tinglof’s name came to mind when I read the B’nai B’rith story. I was thinking how sad it would make her.

Mary Tinglof (as I knew her before she married J. Richard Smith) was a member of the Los Angeles Board of Education who fought to integrate the schools in the 1950s and early ‘60s.

She was intolerant of only one thing that I know of and that was ignorance. That and the old saw that familiarity breeds contempt.

She was convinced that familiarity breeds understanding, which was her message when she went out to talk to parents who were fighting to maintain the separation of the races.

“You are robbing your children of a true education,” she would tell them. “You are depriving your children of the tools they desperately need to succeed.

“The world is not all white and middle class. It is white and brown and black and yellow and where else are we to prepare them for that world if not in school?”

And the home.

Obviously, parental example goes a long way. Being intolerant while preaching tolerance is about as effective as ranting against drugs while in a martini-induced fog.

Sigmund Arywitz, the late state labor commissioner, once told me in exasperation that when it came to race relations, there were times he missed the Depression.

“We were all broke together,” he said, “and too busy looking for work or food to worry about what the next-door neighbor looked like or what God he prayed to.”

I can relate to that, having spent much of my youth in poverty and in what today is termed a “mixed neighborhood.”

I can do without the poverty, but that experience has left me--and, consequently, my children--blessed with friendships involving all of God’s makes and models.

And just when you think that maybe society is making some strides, up from the sewers pop the skinheads and the know-nothings, just as prepared as were our forefathers to remake this nation into their own image.

Sigmund Freud said that humanity “is in the highest degree irrational” and that against prejudice, “one can do nothing.”

It seems to me we should all pray that Freud was wrong--and Mary Tinglof Smith was right.