Thoughts About ‘Being Black in Tucson, AZ’

by Ernie McCray

I’ve been a member of our group, “Being Black in Tucson, AZ,” for a little while now, commenting on a thing or two, but I’ve never introduced myself to you.

That being said I’m an 82-year-old dude who spent the first 24 years of his life “Being Black in Tucson, AZ.”

Since then I’ve lived in San Diego which is just an hour away by plane and five hours away by car.

I didn’t want to go too far. Because I dearly love my hometown.

For its physical beauty and power that make it a spiritual place for me: hiking trails in Sabino Canyon above refreshing pools and streams; powerful Sonoran winds that you can lean against; frightening monsoons that give the Santa Cruz River a chance to roar; majestic saguaros with their lovely blossoms.

For how far it has come since the Jim Crow days of my youth when people like me were limited as to when we could skate at the rink or where we could eat, sit at the movies, swim or play or even where we could work for pay.

For all the love I received from my family, neighborhood, church, school, and friends back then and the love I still bask in when I’m invited to town to speak or receive an honor of some kind.

I joined this group to keep that feel and I’ve felt right at home checking out posts of the best places we can get our hair done or cut or where we can enjoy some downhome delicious ribs or meet new friends.

I admire such simple expressions of love and was stoked when I took part in a conversation in the group about love that is so essential to our wellbeing: Black love. Love directed at making life better for us.

But I didn’t sense or get much love when I weighed in on an “All Black Event,” questioning if it made sense to create a day of fun in the park and tell a Black man who has a Latina wife and two half-Black children that he and his kids are welcome but his wife can’t come.

Whoa, what did I do that for? I mean I got some heavy shade thrown my way and wasn’t prepared to duck.

For just expressing a feeling I was told that old-timey Black folks like me are responsible for the conditions Black people are in today, that my generation has left this generation with “a legacy of integration” that we had “ignorantly fought for.”

In this young man’s way of thinking my generation should basically STFU and pass the baton on to young folks who know what they’re doing.

All I could think was “Come on, bruh, don’t treat us old brothas and sistas like that.”

Don’t look back on our time and grade us like our lives were a social studies assignment, no more than we should look back at those of us who were enslaved and comment on how they should have kicked “massa’s” ass and hitch hiked to freedom.

Every generation enters a world they didn’t create and feels around for a way to exist in that world. The best that they can.

There’s a picture in my photo album that speaks to me about my days on earth. It’s a photo of a cousin and friend and me standing on the corner of 4th Street and 10th Avenue in 1955.

Who knows what we were thinking.

But it was at a time in our lives when the gears of our country were shifting and small changes were happening. Sidney Poitier, a rising star, had just burst on the scene in “Blackboard Jungle.”

Ray Charles singing about a woman he had “way over town” could be heard all over town.

That summer my emotions whirled like a desert dust devil. Emmett TilI was horribly killed, putting me in a dark funk that I thought was going to drown me.

At about the same time Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat, filling me with a level of pride that covered every square inch of my insides.

And, because of the house I was raised in, I’ve striven to turn that world around with all my physical and emotional strength – and nothing I’ve done in that regard has been done “ignorantly.” I was fully aware of what I was doing and why.

I knew when I was winning writing contests and representing Dunbar, the “Colored” school, against White schools, as a 4th grader, that I was saying to the town you can forget that “Dumb-bar” nonsense.

I knew when I, at about the same time, puffed out my chest and called the director of the YMCA out for calling us Black boys “eight ball,” that I was protecting our dignity as human beings.

I knew when I used my status as a super-jock basketball dude at the U of A to bring a wee bit of attention to my community that I was doing what was right, just as when I got kicked out of a couple of Tucson City Council meetings for demanding equal rights.

Oh, it’s the little day to day acts that move the world by degrees and I left Tucson for my new town in 1962 with a couple of degrees and as an educator, writer, and actor, I’ve continued pursuing social justice. For everybody: People of color and poor White folks; gay, straight, and trans folks; folks with disabilities; non-English speaking folks…

And at a time like now, when there’s so much social change in the air, signified by all the people across color lines who are aligning with us Black folks after not doing so for many centuries, it saddens me that a young bright Black man, with good intentions, would say to me, regarding my thoughts on a woman – of color – not being welcomed to a Black event with her husband and her children: “You’re speaking to a brick wall here.”

But that’s something over which I have little or no control. All I can do is keep my love in play as the struggle moves on, using, with a few improvements, what I learned when I was “Being Black in Tucson.“

That’s my legacy.