At Age 10, Youth Learns He’s Black Like Dad : Bias: He was astonished by how much it mattered. Even his grandmother treated him with contempt.

Gregory Williams was 10 when he found out he was black--and that it would matter.

“In Virginia, you were a white boy, in Indiana you’re going to be a colored boy,” the youngster was told by his father, a light-complexioned black man, on a bus ride to Muncie, Ind. “You’re not any different today than you were yesterday, but you’ll be treated differently in Indiana.”

Williams, whose mother was white, had had no clue of his father’s racial background. It was only after their marriage ended, and Tony Williams was forced to return to his hometown of Muncie, Ind., and the housing projects on the black side of town, that Gregory learned of his mixed-race heritage.

“I didn’t believe him really, but he was pretty earnest about it so I began to believe him,” Williams, 51, said in a recent phone interview. “There wasn’t any choice about whether I was going to be white. I clearly was not going to be white.”

The tale of how Williams, now dean of Ohio State University’s law school, crossed the color line is recounted in an autobiography published last week, “Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black.”

Growing up near Alexandria, Va., in the early 1950s, Williams lived in the white part of town and went to an all-white school. Like his father, he had a light complexion and straight, dark hair. His father’s slightly darker skin tone was attributed to Italian ancestry.

Williams’ troubles began as a youngster. His alcoholic father abused his mother, who later left with a younger brother and sister.

After the family’s business collapsed, Williams, his penniless father and younger brother Mike were forced to move to Muncie to live with his father’s family.

It was on that trip that his father leaned across the aisle of the Greyhound bus and explained to the boy for the first time his racial heritage.

Shortly after arriving in Muncie, their father disappeared and the boys were shuttled from one relative to another.

Their white grandmother, who lived 10 minutes away, didn’t visit for about a year and a half. When she did, the children begged to get their mother’s address.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” the grandmother said. “I don’t carry messages for niggers.” She never gave them the address.

Enter Dora Terry, widow of a small-time gambler and a friend of the newfound relatives. The black housekeeper took them in, stretching her $25 weekly salary.

But Williams had to fight for acceptance elsewhere.

Black children rejected him, then accepted him on the playground--after many fights. He successfully fought to keep his position as junior high school quarterback when the coach discovered he was black.

Dating also was a struggle. He went out with white and black girls, often meeting in secret. Anonymous callers told the families of white dates that he was black. Inevitably, the romances failed.

Phyllis Bartleson, a black classmate who now heads Muncie’s Human Rights Commission, said a black who looked white in the 1950s faced not only prejudice from whites but also resentment from darker-skinned blacks.

“There’s a kind of a perspective--at that time particularly--that these people think they’re better than others,” she said. “You might even call it racism within the ranks.”

She remembers Williams as quiet and studious, and always the gentleman.

“To have him come from that kind of environment and be what he is today is just remarkable. It says to society that it can be done.”

For his part, Williams called his struggle “a long, painful process.”

“I didn’t have time to think about who I was mad at,” he said. “I was basically trying to survive.”

Academics saved him. He put himself through Ball State University, then the University of Maryland and George Washington University, where he received a law degree.

Later, he held a variety of administrative jobs at the University of Iowa, before arriving at Ohio State in 1993 as dean.

In 1969, he married Sara Whitney, a white woman he met in grade school. Her family disowned her for dating a black man.

His father and Terry died long ago, but during college he reconciled with his mother. His brother Mike, blinded in a bar shooting, still lives in Indiana.

“I do believe there was some reason I was called upon to live the life that I was given,” Williams wrote. “Maybe to share it with others in the hope that no child will have to experience what I did.”

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‘Life on the Color Line’

Excerpts from “Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black”:

He leaned closer and spoke very softly. “There’s something else I want to tell you.”

“What?” I groaned.

“Remember Miss Sallie who used to work for us in the tavern?” . . .

“It’s hard to tell you boys this.” He paused, then slowly added, “But she’s really my momma. That means she’s your grandmother.”

“But that can’t be, Dad! She’s colored!” I whispered, lest I be overheard by the other white passengers on the bus.

“That’s right, Billy,” he continued. “She’s colored. That makes you part colored, too, and in Muncie you’re gonna live with my Aunt Bess.”

I didn’t understand Dad. I knew I wasn’t colored, and neither was he. My skin was white. All of us are white, I said to myself.

But for the first time, I had to admit Dad didn’t exactly look white. His deeply tanned skin puzzled me as I sat there trying to classify my own father. Goose bumps covered my arms as I realized that whatever he was, I was.

*

There wasn’t a blade of grass in sight, just concrete, mud and gravel.

“This is the Projects, boys,” Dad explained. “Colored families live on this side of Madison (Street), and crackers on the other. Stay outta there. If the crackers learn you’re colored, they’ll beat the hell out of you. You gotta be careful here, too. Coloreds don’t like half-breeds either.”

*

His sharply pressed long white apron reminded me of the Ku Klux Klan leader I saw on Uncle Osco’s new television following the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools.

That beefy-faced, white-robed Klansman stood in front of a burning cross, railing against black and white children learning together. He claimed that the Supreme Court was encouraging “race-mixing” and the only result would be the “bestial mongrel mulatto, the dreg of human society.” In the refuge of Uncle Osco’s sitting room, I laughed at the pale, jowly Southerner. In a white sheet and pointed hat, he looked more like the “dreg of society” than anybody I knew. Yet his nasal repetition of “mongrel mulatto” finally hit like a thunderbolt.

He was talking about me. I was the Klan’s worst nightmare. I was what the violence directed against integration was all about. I was what they hated and wanted to destroy.

Source: Associated Press