Why Does My Skin Color Matter?: Experiencing Racism as a Young Black Boy during the Late 1950s through the 1960s

By James E. Puckett

We all have a past that we sometimes try to forget. When a situation arises that reminds us of our past, we must not allow it to dictate our future but somehow use our past experiences to propel us to do better.

As our society deals with issues of racism and hate between people of different races, gender, and ethnicity groups, it brings back memories of my childhood while living as a Black person in the mid-1950s and the 1960s. In this book, I highlight some of the events I personally experienced, others that were told to me by reliable sources, and some are fictional to give the reader a snapshot of what it was like being born and living during these times.

The stories I tell in this book draws the contrast between two small boys of different skin colors and how they didn’t allow the color of their skin to affect their friendship and the comparison between two different sets of parents who taught their children to love people of all skin colors and treat others the way you would want to be treated.

Sometimes our past leaves bruises and wounds that cannot be healed by us alone, but with God’s help, we can heal over time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098082048

Book preview

cover.jpg

Why Does My Skin Color Matter?

Experiencing Racism as a Young Black Boy during the Late 1950s through the 1960s

James E. Puckett Sr.

Copyright © 2021 by James E. Puckett Sr.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

I dedicate this book to my father, Moses Puckett, and mother, Liddie Lee Puckett, who protected and provided for me and my siblings and brought us out of poverty.

To all the people of all races, ethnicity, and gender who desire to change their quality way of living.

To those who desire to do better than they are currently doing.

To those who will not allow, at any cost, anyone—man, woman, or any race—to try and hold them back.

To those who will continue to fight, not physical but with all their spiritual, mental, and emotional strength.

Author’s Personal Commentary

With all the unrest in our country over the death of many Black men and women, it brought back memories of my early childhood. I begin to think about the things my grandparents and parents must had to suffer at the hands of the people with different skin color than theirs while growing up in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

My parents were sharecroppers up until the mid-1960s, who worked the fields from sunup to sundown. It is to them that I credit my discipline, integrity, hard work, and self-reliance. When I became old enough, my parents had me in the fields working along beside them. I can remember chopping cotton for $3 a day. I also picked cotton, pulled cotton, picked peas, dug potatoes, picked okra, pulled squash, picked strawberries, and plowed the fields using a single- or double-blade plow behind a horse or mule. This was the way of living for the Black people during that time in that part of the country.

Growing up during the Great Depression and when racism was at an all-time high, I watched my parents as Black people suffer and make unbelievable sacrifices just to stay alive and provide for us. My parents didn’t have much of a choice to do better, even though I know they had the desire to. They didn’t even have a high school education. I remember my dad signing his name with an X because he didn’t know how to write this name.

My parents weren’t allowed to own property until the mid-1960s, but no one can use this as an excuse today in the United States of America. I remember on one occasion when an older sister of mine told me the story of how my parents said they were making monthly down payments on a piece of land offered by people that knew them after the law changed, which gave them the right to become landowners and build the house they were living in at their passing.

My parents worked in the fields from sunup to sundown and sometimes at night. This was the way they made a living and took care of the family. Some would argue that they could have done better. During their time, farming and factory work were most popular. If other jobs that were more popular became available, the white people would get them over the blacks. I don’t know this to be true, but I suppose they chose farming because that was a way of keeping a roof over our heads.

The house we lived in did not belong to us. My parents sharecropped in return for a rent-free place to live. And I can tell you that the years that the crops did not produce a plentiful harvest, we still had to have a place to live and food to eat. Even if it was just milk and bread and sometimes water and bread when there was no milk. And guess who had to endure the shortage of money? You guessed it—Dad and Mom.

I guess you could say that we were poor to some definition. But we didn’t know anything about being poor because all the other Black families and some White families too, living nearby, lived the same way. We had no one to compare ourselves to when it came to a certain lifestyle. I can remember as a little boy, Dad driving us through what we called the Bottom early in the morning just so we could catch the bus to school. It was called that because it was in the middle of nowhere. When the weather was really bad, we never made it to the bus stop. We either missed school, or Dad took us to school. As I have said, Dad and Mom didn’t have any money to spend on us for new clothes. When our shoes wore out from wearing them so much, I could remember mom cutting cardboard boxes in the shape of our shoe soles and placing them inside our shoes to protect our feet from the ground.

My parents and grandparents believed in home medicine remedies when we got sick or hurt. I could remember three different medicines, among others—castor oil, 666, Father Johns—and some sort of liniment oil that Mom kept on hand at all times. If one of them didn’t cure you, well, I guess you stayed sick. They could come up with some of the strangest ways of treating us. For instance, whenever I got stung by warps, bees, or yellow jackets, my grandmother would place snuff spit on the sting. She claimed that would draw out the stinger and prevent swelling. Or, if we fail and skinned our knee or elbow, a mixture of dirt and water was sometimes applied to the womb as a first-aid. I didn’t know if any of these remedies were effective, but they believed in them, and it did seem to make me feel better. We wore our clothes until sometimes they developed holes in them. Mom would sew patches of other material over the holes to prolong the life of the wear. We wore the same clothes over and over again, but Mom made sure that they were clean.

As I mention earlier, one of my older sisters told me about the story how my mom was making payments on a piece of land that she was allowed to put on layaway. She did this by working a seasonal factory job processing fruit and working part-time as a housekeeping for a White family. She used the money she made to pay for the land that she and Dad would build their dreamhouse on.

Another one of my older sister shared with me is the story of how a White man that owned a car dealership gave my dad a full-time job so that he could have a steady income to be able to qualify for a mortgage loan, and on top of that, wrote a letter to the mortgage company on my dad’s behalf. He made a choice to help a Black man.

Even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were times when I was treated not to kindly by some Whites, and then there were times, I was treated like I was a human being, just like them—just another example that racism related to skin color was a choice back then and still is today. The ones that were kind to me did it properly because they knew my dad. My dad was known by just about everyone in the community.

In this book, I have recalled a lot of the events that took place during the late fifties and early sixties in the Deep South where I grew up. Some of the stories are real as much as I can remember them, some are stories that my father shared with me, and then there are the fiction stories I use to hammer the point home that race discrimination of any type is taught and is not learned. To keep things somewhat simple, I only mention one sibling in the book, but there were eight of us. My mother had four children when she and my