A few summers ago, I spent some time at the historical society of the town where I grew up. I grew up in what is now a suburb of San Francisco, called Antioch, California. At the time I was a boy, it was a distinct little town with its own idenity, a distict downtown area, some suburban growth and a lot of rural area. I remember the first housing tract that was developed. It was right next to the street where our older house was located, and they wre building homes that were going to ssell for $13,000. My parents were shocked, just shocked at the prices.

While I was at the historical society, I leafed thrugh a year's worth of the Antioch Daily Ledger, the little hometown paper. I found the advertisements for these homes that were being offered that year --- I think it was about 1952 or 1953. The advertisements proclaimed; "Three bedrooms, all-electic kitchens, sewer and water already installed" --- and then this line: "Fully restricted to protect your investment." Fully restricted. That meant, in the California of the 1950s, that black people, or "colored" as they were called then, or Chinese, were not allowed to buy property. A chillingly ugly reminder of life the way it used to be. The thing that struck me particularly was the off-hand way that this really ugly reality was asserted. I thought about it later, it was almost as if they were chatting casuallly with their projected buyers. "Lovely new homes, one bedroom for each of the kids, all these new General Electric appliances in the kitchen, and no pesky Negroes to annoy you." This was really a horrible thing, and yet, as is the case with so much that is really evil, it was presented in such a casual, ordinary way.

The other thing that I did at the historical society was to buy a great little book on the history of Antioch. It is a really fine publication, and like the best of those books, it is just chock full of high quality pictures. There were pictures of places I remembered as a boy, there were pictures of things and people I had never heard of, and there were all sorts of facts about the town of which I was unaware.

One was that there was a black man living in town.

Now, when I grew up it was commonly understood that there were no black people in Antioch. After all, the city was "restricted to protect your investment." The black people lived four miles away in Pittsburg (without the "h"), a slightly bigger town that boasted an army post and a huge steel mill, which had probably contributed to the integration of that town. The Southern Pacific railroad ran through both towns, offering rail dervice down the Great Central Valley of California, several passenger trains a day and freight service for the industries along the San Joaquin River and the farming (what we now call "agribusiness") in the valley. The Southern Pacific, the SP as we knew it, did its part for social responsibility by always hiring a black family to live in the station, the pater familias serving as the stationmaster. This one family, or series of families, I suppose, constituted the miniscule integration of Antioch --- or so I thought.

The history book told another story. Complete with pictures. There was another black man who lived in a small house at the edge of the river, and he did modest works of drayage in town, hauling and moving things, and he also served as the sacristan of the local Congregational Church. He did their altar linens. Until his death in the 1930s, he was an important local figure. There were pictures of him with major figures in the town's business and cultural life. There was a picture of his home.

By the time I cam along in the 1950s, he was gone. I had no idea that he even lived in Antioch. No one ever mentioned him to me, there were no stories about him common to the popular culture of the day, and it was as if he had never existed.

My conclusions about this aspect of my visit to my old hometown are threefold. There are, perhaps, three kinds of racism. One is the ugly and overt kind that results in people being beaten, lynched, and cruelly treated. I suspect that that sort of racism was practiced in Antioch too, just sufficiently beyond my memory to be out of my frame of reference. There is another kind of racism, which, while not physically violent, was insidious and quietly destructive. It usually masqueraded as "protecting your investment" and was spoken of in vey polite, very acceptable terms. It hid benearth the ordinary language of advertisements, real estate and financial affairs.

But there is anothe kind of racism, which simply causes people no longer to exist. It is the racism that expunges memory. By the time I came along, Antioch was, with the singular exception of the sequential Southern Pacific families, a white community and, we wee told, always had been. And that had always been a lie. A lie designed to deprive our one black resident of his identity so that the generation that came after him had completely lost track of his existence.

He did not matter. He did nto exist. It remained for the authors of the history book to remindus that the ugly sin of racism takes several forms, perhaps the subtlest being racial amnesia, the expunging of the truth about how things had really been in a small town on the banks of the San Joaquin during the century when this country was coming to grips with the depths of atrocity and neglect associated with racial discrimination.

I found it an interesting and challenging experience to examine something of my hometown history. If you ever have the chance to do the same kind of thing in your hometown, I do recommend it. i tis important to pay attention even to what is scribbled in the margins of those books that tell our common stories.

The Rev’d Lloyd Prator, Rector
Saint John’s in the Village Episcopal Church

New York City