The 'Black Table' Is Still There 14 Years Later, Lawyer Mulls Why He Sat Elsewhere
During a recent visit to my old junior high school, I came upon something that I never expected to see again: the all-black lunch table in the cafeteria of my predominantly white suburban junior high school.
As I look back on 27 years of often being the first black person integrating such activities and institutions as the college newspaper, summer music camps, our suburban neighborhood, my eating club at Princeton or my private social club at Harvard Law School, the scenario that puzzled me the most then and now is the all-black lunch table.
Why was it there? Why did the black kids separate themselves?
What did the table say about the integration that was supposedly going on in home rooms and gym classes? What did it say about the black kids? The white kids?
What did it say about me when I refused to sit there, day after day, for three years?
Each afternoon, after fourth period, I was among 600 12-, 13- and 14-year- olds who marched into the cafeteria and dashed for a seat at one of the 27 lunch tables.
No matter who I walked in with - usually a white friend - one thing was certain: I would not sit at the black table.
I would never consider sitting at the black table.
What was wrong with me? What was I afraid of?
I would like to think my decision was a heroic one, made in order to express my solidarity with the theories of integration that my community was espousing. But I was just 12 at the time and there was nothing heroic in my actions.
I avoided the black table because I was afraid that by sitting at the black table I'd lose all my white friends. I thought that by sitting there I'd be making a racist, anti-white statement.
Is that what the all-black table means? Is it a rejection of white people?
I no longer think so.
At the time, I was angry that there was a black lunch table. I believed that the black kids were the reason why other kids didn't mix more. I was ready to believe that their self-segregation was the cause of white bigotry.
Ironically, I even believed this after my best friend told me I probably shouldn't come to his bar mitzvah because I'd be the only black and people would feel uncomfortable. I even believed this after my Saturday afternoon visit, at age 10, to a private country club pool prompted incensed white parents to pull their kids from the pool in terror.
In the face of this blatantly racist behavior, I still somehow managed to blame only the black kids for being the barrier to integration in my school and my little world.
I realize now how wrong I was. During that same time there were at least two tables of athletes, an Italian table, a Jewish girls' table, a Jewish boys' table (where I usually sat), a table of kids who were into heavy-metal music and smoking pot, a table of middle-class Irish kids. Weren't these tables just as segregationist as the black table?
At the time, no one thought so. At the time, no one even acknowledged the segregated nature of these other tables.
Maybe it's the color difference that makes all-black groups attract the scrutiny and wrath of so many people. It scares and angers people.
It did those things to me, and I'm black.
As an integrating black person, I know my decision not to join the black lunch table attracted its own kind of scrutiny and wrath from my classmates. While hearing angry words such as "Oreo" and "white boy" hurled at me from the black table, I was also dodging impatient questions from white classmates: ''Why do all those black kids sit together?" or "Why don't you ever sit with the other blacks?"
The black lunch table, like those other segregated tables, is a comment on the superficial inroads that integration has made in society. Perhaps I should be happy that even this is a long way from where we started.
Yet, I can't get over the fact that the 27th table in my junior high school cafeteria is still known as the "black table" - 14 years after my adolescence.
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