Local club members say racial relations still need improving

Seventy-eight years ago, a young Irving Foster saw firsthand the stark hatred that blacks faced in 20th-Century America.

"It was in New Orleans that I saw this black man standing in his own yard and talking to a white woman who walked by," Foster, 86, of Las Vegas, said. "A car sped by and a white man threw a rope around his neck. But the rope caught part of a gate post and broke, otherwise it would have dragged him to his death."

That was 1921, and it would be nice to think that things have gotten better.

In June, however, James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old black man, was dragged behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas. Three white men were charged in his grisly slaying. Police say Byrd was killed simply because he was black.

As the birthday of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. is observed today, such incidents raise the question of just how significantly things have changed.

"Things have changed significantly for blacks, but things have not changed sufficiently for us," Julian Tarleton, 70, said. "There is a lot of room for improvement."

Foster and Tarleton are members of a local all-black bridge club they call "The Group."

As it has done for the last 16 years, The Group met Wednesday at a local hotel restaurant for lunch and retired to the home of one of its members for the bridge game. The game site is rotated weekly to give each of the 15 members a chance to host.

Members talked about how things have changed for blacks during this century and shared stories of blatant acts of prejudice they endured in every phase of their lives.

Foster, who was born in Louisiana, is a retired supervisor for the U.S. Postal Service in Los Angeles. He joined The Group in 1988.

"When I stated working for the post office in 1940, blacks weren't allowed to be clerks, because whites would not buy stamps that had been handled by blacks," he said.

"But the post office was one of the best jobs blacks could get. It paid 90 cents an hour, compared to janitor, which was less than 40 cents an hour."

Tarleton, a South Carolina-born retired math and computer scientist, joined The Group in 1992 and today is its vice president.

As a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Tarleton, got a visit from a young ministerial student who got a little preachy with him.

"I ran him out of my dormitory for forcing his church politics on me," Tarleton said. "It was Martin Luther King Jr."

Ten years later, while Tarleton was doing postgraduate studies at Atlanta University, he marched with King and hundreds of others in Atlanta. After college, Tarleton learned a stirring lesson that racial hatred is not just limited to the Deep South.

"In South Carolina we always heard about how California was the promised land for a lot of people," he said. "But in 1962, when I drove up to a California border crossing station, the first words I heard from the agricultural inspector" who was white, "was: 'Boy, where are you coming from?' That hurt deeply."

Tarleton worked as a comptroller with the Pacific Missile Test Center at Point Mugu, Calif. During his last two years there, he managed annual budgets of $750 million.

Things weren't that different in California, and club President Ray Plouche, 72, said things aren't that different now.

"I'd say the changes over the years have been mostly window dressing," Plouche, who hosted last week's game, said. "What I wanted to see in my lifetime was that a man would be judged for being a man and not for the color of his skin."

Born in Louisiana, Plouche is a retired supervisor with the International Labor Workers Union in San Francisco. He joined The Group in 1993. As a civil service engineer, Plouche endured years of being passed over for promotion after promotion, often training white men who became his bosses.

George Jackson, 79, born in Michigan, experienced the same glass ceiling in his career with the Detroit Police Department.

"I was able to rise from patrolman to a division commander but the road was long and hard," he said. "I not only got passed up for promotions, I got trampled on at times."

The most blatant example of prejudice he experienced was on a train from Atlanta to Austin, Texas, in 1942. Jackson, an Army first lieutenant, was approached by a white enlisted MP who asked him: "What are you doing impersonating an officer?"

But a couple of members have noticed some change.

"Since the 1950s and 60s things have changed significantly," retired Army Col. Thomas Leigh, 79, of Henderson, said, "and a lot of that was because of the efforts of Dr. King and others. Things are much, much better today.

"I believe things will be a lot better for my grandchildren when they are older. I think they will live to see many of Dr. King's dreams come true," said Leigh, The Group's secretary and former project director for the American Association of Retired Persons.

After 21 years of active-duty military service, Leigh worked 18 years for ITT. In 1967, he was selected to serve on the Vice President's Motivation for Youth Committee. That work laid the foundation for what became affirmative action.

Stanley Loupe, 74, born in California, recalled his years as an engineer in the Los Angeles Fire Department.

"When I started at the Los Angeles Fire Department it was segregated -- 78 black firemen at two stations and 1,500 white firefighters at the rest," he said. "The only way blacks could get promoted was if a black (supervisor) retired or died."

But progress was evident two years ago, Loupe noted, when he attended the opening of a black firefighter's museum at the old segregated station on 14th Street and Central Avenue.

"I was so proud when I saw 87 current black fire department captains marching in the parade," said Loupe, who was also one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen of World War II.

Some of the members of The Group were able to take advantage of the ignorance and prejudice of white America.

Jimmy Williams, 74, born in Missouri, is an entrepreneur who started what he said was St. Louis' first maid service.

In 1980, Williams decided to invest his profits in real estate. As neighborhoods in St. Louis began turning from white to black, he bought homes cheaply.

"A black family would move next door to a white family, and the white family would put their home up for sale," Williams said. "They did not want to live next to black folks so badly that they were willing to sell their nice homes for far less than they were worth."

Contrary to the myth that blacks moving into neighborhoods cause property values to decrease, Williams later sold many of those properties for four to five times what he paid for them. He retired to Las Vegas and joined The Group in 1988.

David Perry, 72, a retired design analyst for Dura Manufacturing Co., experienced prejudice from both sides. He is part white, black and American Indian.

"I was often mistaken for being white," he said. "After I'd get a promotion, my white bosses got real mad if they found out I was black. What saved me many times was that I did exceptional work.

He was in an all-black unit of sailors in the Navy, and he had difficulty there too. "There were some who didn't trust me because they thought I was a planted there by whites. Later, in civilian life, white people I worked with thought I was planted there by the NAACP."

A number of the members of The Group said the biggest break they got was the GI Bill, which allowed many of them to finish their educations and get chances at decent jobs.

"All that we ever wanted was nothing more than an honest, level playing field," Wilbur Houston, 88, a retired railway mail clerk and charter member of The Group, said. "We asked only for fair play."

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