1972 Diaspora Blues: A Jewish Kid in Georgia

Here's what happened when all the white kids boycotted my elementary school over integration—except my family.

That’s me staring off into space in the middle row, the second kid from my teacher, with my newly integrated first-grade class in Augusta, Georgia, in 1972.

The following is an excerpt from my work in progress. It will be incorporated into my second novel, which has the working title of Diaspora Blues. I haven’t yet changed any names. This really happened.

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I’m glad I didn’t see it for myself. The way my father described it was bad enough. My three beautiful black cats had been tortured, their whiskers cut, their fur singed with cigarette burns. Our house had been vandalized, anti-Jewish epithets painted on the wall. Of all the houses on our street, why was ours chosen for this treatment? Why were our pets singled out for abuse? It was obvious to me. How else are we different from others in our neighborhood? At the age of nine, after having lived in Georgia for four years, I knew of only one way in which we were different.

We had pulled into our driveway in the summer of 1975 after a long vacation out west, and my dad could tell something was wrong with the house. He told us to wait in the camper while he went inside. He was gone only a few minutes before he came back, climbed back into the driver’s seat, and drove us out of the Confederacy for good. We did not stop until we hit Michigan. I never even got to say goodbye to my friends.

But to really understand why we left Georgia and why our house was targeted, we need to go back three years, before the Yom Kippur War, to 1972, when our school was forced to comply with a federal school integration order. For the first time, black students were going to be bused into A. Brian Merry Elementary School, where I was attending the first grade.

We were members of Adas Yeshurun Synagogue, but my older brothers and I were, as far as I knew, the only Jews attending our public elementary school. In Georgia, there is a racist hierarchy, and Jews were just a slight notch above black people. It was also not appreciated that many Jews were African American allies during the Civil Rights Era. The antisemitism came out in the strangest of ways—primarily through theological discussions for which I was quite unprepared. “My daddy told me that Jews killed Christ” was a refrain I had heard more than once. I was unable to respond because I lacked the tools. I was barely aware of who Jesus was at all and could not picture a world where a Jew would kill him.

Judaism, to me, was my Grandpa Joe, who wrapped himself in a warm cloak of good deeds, good feelings, and empathy for his fellow man. I learned about Judaism at Sunday school and Hebrew school, but I learned how it was lived by talking to Grandpa. Everything he did and said was “Jewish” to me. How or why anybody could hate my Grandpa Joe’s form of Judaism, I could not imagine. I had hints that life might have been hard for him as a Jew back in “Hungry,” but the details were vague.

One thing Grandpa understood instinctually was what Jews faced in the South. He told me years later that he never understood why my father moved the family into the heart of a region so infested with Jew hatred. My father had his reasons. He was a physician with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam between 1967 and 1968, and he came home with a burning curiosity about the impact war had on the human brain. He changed his specialty to psychiatry and moved us to Georgia while he did his psych residency at the Augusta Veterans Administration hospital.

Anyway, life in Georgia seemed normal to me at the time because all children believe what they experience is normal. Yet I could still detect that something about the culture was at odds with my own. Once, I asked a friend named Kurt to do something for me. He pointed to his arm.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He said nothing and just pointed to his arm again.

Again, I said, “I have no idea what you’re doing.”

Exasperated, Kurt finally asked, “What color is my skin?”

“Kind of peach,” I said. “So what?”

“It ain’t black,” he said, “so do it yourself.”

I disappeared into my own thoughts. It made no sense. I knew slavery had ended more than one hundred years earlier, and I almost informed my friend of this fact out loud but decided against it. Instead, I said, “What’s wrong with people who have black skin?”

“They cause too much trouble,” Kurt said.

At this point, I was on autopilot. Instinctively, I knew something was not quite right, but I couldn’t pinpoint what it was. Why was I not like Kurt? Why did I not have the same beliefs about black people? Nobody ever told me, point-blank, that it was wrong to hate people based on the color of their skin. It was always just understood. That was not how the Lovy family operated. By why? The only thing I could come up with was my Jewishness. It was the primary difference between Kurt and me. My Grandpa Joe treated black people as equals, and Grandpa Joe was Judaism to me, so my lack of race hatred must have had something to do with being Jewish.

But all I managed to say to Kurt was, “Well, maybe because we give them trouble.”

It wasn’t what I wanted to say, and it was based on zero knowledge of anything specific in the way of “trouble,” but it was all I had to offer.

Classmates had commented on how “northern” I sounded, and I always felt like I did not quite fit in. There was the Jewishness, yes, but had I grown up a couple of generations later, I might have been labeled as “on the spectrum.” My OCD was part of my “otherness,” but there was also something indescribable, something else not spoken, that set me apart from the other kids. There were social cues that I just did not “get.” But there was no language for it, no drugs to treat it, no explanation behind it, so my obsessions, compulsions, and lack of social awareness were simply shoved into a part of my mind that I labeled “Jewish.”

My compulsions were sometimes labeled as willfulness, and back then, in Georgia, willful children were paddled. On the ass. Inside a storage closet. This kind of abuse did not cure me of my obsessions, but it did make me forever distrustful of teachers.

A popular song in that era was Bobby Sherman’s “Julie, Do You Love Me,” with its chorus of “Julie, Julie, Julie.” The kids who taunted me with, “Jew-lie, Jew-lie, Jew-lie,” with the first syllable drawn out, could always have plausible deniability that they were only singing a pop tune. The same technique could be used with “Julia” by the Beatles. “Jewwww-lia.”

One of my teachers meant well when she said, “Now, don’t make fun of Howard and his people. If it weren’t for the Jews, we wouldn’t have the Old Testament!”

The entire class turned around to stare at me. Perhaps they were looking for my horns.

But, for the most part, “telling on” the other kids was not an option. I learned that in first grade, when Miss Vanover had me stand in a corner of the classroom with a paper donkey tail pinned to my butt that said, “I am a tattletale.” Apparently, “tattling” was worse than the original crime. So, I learned to stay silent as I wondered about the mysterious ways of normal, non-Jewish people.

This was the backdrop to February 13, 1972, when my father sat down with my brothers and me and told us we had a decision to make.

“You know about the Supreme Court ruling back in the '50s, right?” asked my father “They said that separate schools for blacks and whites were unconstitutional. But our school district—well, they've been dragging their feet. Now, a judge has ordered that students of all races should learn together. They're going to bus in more black students.”

He paused, letting the information sink in. “Now, a lot of the white parents in our district are planning to protest. They're going to keep their kids home tomorrow.”

His gaze shifted between my brothers and me.

“I want you to think about this. Think about our family, about the people we lost in the Holocaust. We've been the ‘different’ ones ourselves. So, I ask you, is it right for us, as Jews, to follow the other white kids into this boycott?”

The room was silent for a moment. My brothers and I exchanged glances. We knew what our father was asking of us. He was asking us to make a stand, to decide what kind of people we wanted to be.

The next morning, we woke up as usual, got dressed, ate breakfast, and went to school.

Inside, we were met with unfamiliar faces. Students we had never seen before, their eyes wide with a mix of fear and curiosity, looked around the unfamiliar surroundings. There was an undercurrent of tension in the air.

But instead of the usual morning bell signaling the start of classes, we were all herded into the school's main hall. The principal stood at the front. His usual morning announcements were replaced with a single directive: we were to scrub the floors.

Confusion rippled through the crowd. But the principal's word was law, and so, armed with buckets and scrub brushes, we set to work. As I scrubbed at the worn linoleum, I couldn't help but wonder what this strange day would mean for us all.

More than half the students in Richmond County stayed out of school that day. Out of a total enrollment of about 36,000, the parents of 19,209 students kept their kids home. There were TV crews set up outside the schools, filming black kids getting off their buses and entering their schools. One African American mother told a reporter, “As I can understand it, material has been handed out in the white schools that we don’t even know anything about. So, if they are together, they will know together.”

State Senator Jimmy Lester screamed into a bullhorn, “We are winning the battle against forced busing,” and the crowd cheered. After the rallies, many of the white kids were taken to newly formed private schools, creating a kind of de facto segregation. But, in the end, the federal court order did achieve some level of integration, which introduced me to strange manifestations of racism. For example, I would be the only white kid who swapped desserts with an African American classmate at lunchtime. My white classmates refused to eat any food they touched.

“Gross! Debbie touched that Little Debbie!” a fellow student said, very happy that the name of the black girl also matched the dessert.

“I don’t care,” I said, biting into the Swiss cake roll, my favorite of the Little Debbies.

My mother was told that if she showed up at PTA meetings, there would be trouble. So, my dad and mom attended the next meeting together. “I was a little more forceful than Mom,” my dad later said. “So, I went with her. And basically, they wouldn't challenge me.”

Life went on in Augusta for the next three years, but experiences piled up for me that cemented my “other” status in my mind. The next school year, in September 1972, I came home from school to find my parents and brothers glued to the television.

“There is a guerrilla,” said my father, pointing to a man on the screen who appeared to have a stocking on his head.

I was confused because he didn’t look like any “gorilla” I had ever seen. And I said so.

My brother rolled his eyes and explained to me that this was a different kind of “gorilla,” a human one that carried guns.

We were watching the Olympic Games in Munich. Well, what had once been the Olympics and now turned into a “hostage crisis.” Soon after that, it would be a bloodbath, with Israeli athletes slaughtered at the hands of Palestinian “guerillas.” I did not know what a Palestinian was. I did not know what a guerrilla was. But I did know that the Israelis were Jews and, as my grandfather and father had told me, many people did not like Jews. Full stop. That’s all I knew. The questions were bursting inside me, but I did not ask anything. It would take me many, many years to even begin to formulate the questions and still more to discover answers.