1950's race and religion in Newark

In 1954, I was in the fifth grade at Hawthone Avenue School in Newark.   It was one of those urban brick school, where the walls went right up to the sidewalk and seemed to hulk over everything.   The neighborhood was Weequahic, which we knew was a native american name.   We thought it was pretty weird because we could no signs of Native American anything around us (we were looking for anything we had seen on Roy Roger...teepees, bows and arrows, etc.)

At any rate about half my class was black and about half was Jewish.  So I concluded that race and religion were categories that always went together.....all Jews were white, all whites were Jewish, all blacks were Christian, and (of course what else is left) all Christians were black.

Well in the early fall of 1954 I told my father that I didn't believe in God, that I was an atheist.   He just said OK.   Hmmm....I didn't get much reaction out of that one.   Later in the fall come the Jewish holidays, so I'm sleeping in my bed thinking, "well I don't need to get up and go to school."    Along comes Dad and says, "get up."   I ask, "why?"   He says," if you don't believe in God, you get to go to school on the Jewish holidays."   "Okay," I said, surely not backing down on my principals.

So off I trot to school, expecting to see all the black kids, and none of the white kids.   Well I had a really big surprise waiting.   Sitting in class was one white girl!   So I went up to her and said, "are you agnostic or atheist?"    Her answer, "I'm Catholic."    That just destroyed my view of the world.

Well if I had been a bit more worldly, I would have known....because her name was Rosemary......not a very good Jewish name.   Well of course thinking she was terribly exotic, I promptly developed a huge crush on her.

This story went very well with my West Virginia union friends, because most of them grew up never seeing a Jewish person.   What different little worlds!