"I was friends with all the waiters and they were all black, but back then we said colored and nobody thought anything about it. It wasn't until I was in the military did I see blacks as equals. I hate admitting this, but it really was so accepted not to see them as equals. It was a cultural shock to wake up and understand that indeed all men are created equally. We just evolve unequally.
"Before the days of civil rights, half the population of Memphis was black, but they all lived in enclaves; small sections of poverty in the inner belly of the cities where they worked. When I attended Vanderbilt it was all white and the students and professors smoked cigarettes all during class. Nobody thought a thing about it back then."
During one of Dr. Fleming's home visit Wednesday afternoons he told me that in the summer of 1958, during Elvis Presley's first leave home from the army, a few of Elvis's boys knocked on Johnny's door. They were seeking a new piano player and offered 20 year old Johnny a once in a life time chance. Johnny said no thanks then and added that day, "I'd probably would have died before Elvis."
On April 4, 1968, Johnny was a 30 year old Air Force Captain in the Medical Corps traveling standby after attending a medical conference in Boston on his way home to Memphis and learned of the demise of Reverend Martin Luther King when he landed in Chicago, "I was in full uniform in a plane filled with the reverend's brethren all wearing black arm bands. I never felt so white in my life.
"You have to understand that I never gave it a thought that I was never to address the sharecropper's wife as Mrs. although every white woman was that or Miss. It was a different world not that long ago and by the time I was three years old my family moved from the farm in Mississippi to Memphis, so my mother could play bridge without driving twenty miles on dirt roads to get to the nearest town. When I was 14 years old I would drive the Chevy from Memphis to the farm and deliver the furnishings; that was the word for the meager wages my father would pay Rueben's family with thirteen kids in one room. It was a wooden structure built on stilts and the wood floors were routinely drenched with kerosene to keep the roach population under some control.
"Rueben and I would fish together and when he stood trial for disemboweling a man on the porch of Brook's Grocery Store, I went to his trial and spoke for his character. Nobody flinched when the judge said, 'This is Quickens County and one n----r has killed another. Court is adjourned.
"It's not easy looking back and seeing how inbred the racism actually was and realizing how blind I had been to it at the time. But when I was a kid it was customary to see colored only water fountains, colored folks only allowed into the Memphis Zoo on Thursday afternoons. It wasn't until those outside agitators from the north pricked a few consciences did anyone even considered that blacks-colored back then, weren't OK with things just as they were. It just didn't register until those outside agitators blew it up in our faces...
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