Professor Ivory's comments on Segregation

A couple months back Professor Ivory gave a long talk on leadership to me and a group other students during which he brought up his upbringing. His childhood is a direct example of the kind practical effects segregation had on every day life. Essentially, as a child subjected to living in a poor segregated neighborhood Professor Ivory was denied basic human rights.

I remember his brief description of his home North of Memphis. Ivory spoke about how his entire neighborhood lacked running water. Once a week, he got to take a bath before church. His mother had him at an extremely young age and had no access to contraceptives. He joined a gang very young because that was easier than not joining one. Ivory said he always had a stammer after he came across a hanging body – I’ve heard from other students that it was one of his step father’s suicide, but he did not explain it to us and I did not want to ask about it. He also described the Tuesdays during which and his sister would walk to the Memphis city zoon – he saw Southwestern on his route, a then exclusively white institution.

First of all what his talk impressed on me was the attitude he took on racism given his upbringing. He said something along the lines of “We’ve got problems but less than we used to” and that optimism struck me as very necessary in our current world. But what has really stuck with me is just how bad conditions were in his hometown. Up until at least the 1960’s the conditions of the area were essentially third world. This was a practical effect of discrimination – the city ran no utilities there because no whites lived there. In a modern context, clean water is a human right and the city felt as if they could deny this because the area was predominantly black.