The black-and-white dividing line

Black History Month is a chance to look at the lessons of hate sometimes learned in youth - and how they can take a lifetime to overcome

The Black Lives Matter protests this past summer in our cities, including my hometown of Pittsburgh, were a reminder of the black-and-white dividing line in America.

Acclaimed writers Annie Dillard and John Edgar Wideman grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, but they lived in neighboring communities that were dramatically different in wealth and race.

In "An American Childhood," Dillard remembered Pittsburgh as "a great town to grow up in," but her Point Breeze community was the privileged world of Pittsburgh's white ruling class, whose children knew that corporate Pittsburgh "was theirs by right."

From the perspective of her remembered childhood, Dillard saw her Point Breeze "littered" by the libraries and parks of Carnegie, Mellon and Frick, those "tireless Pittsburgh founders" and "fabulous men," as "the Valley of Kings."

By contrast, John Edgar Wideman, in his Homewood short stories, revealed a black community populated by the descendants of runaway slaves and family servants, many of them dispossessed by Pittsburgh's post-war Renaissance that drove them out of their homes in the lower Hill District.

Wideman's Homewood is a war zone of bombed-out row houses and boarded-up store fronts, of tar-patched streets and badly cracked sidewalks littered with the fragments of shattered wine bottles.

Its generations, once linked by an ancient past and an oral tradition, now seem cursed, its children, in Wideman's words, doomed to "fall like stars from the night sky."

Like Annie Dillard and John Edgar Wideman, I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, but my working-class South Side was different from their Point Breeze and Homewood communities.

In his preface to his Pulitzer Prize-winning "Fences," a play about a former Negro League ballplayer living in the Hill District, Pittsburgh's largest black community, Pittsburgh native August Wilson noted that "the destitute of Europe" were welcomed participants in the industrial growth of cities in the North, but not "the descendants of African slaves" who had migrated from the South.

The city rejected them, and they fled and settled along the riverbanks and under bridges in shallow ramshackle houses made of sticks and tar papers."

My block on the South Side, located just across the river from the Hill, was a vestige of that forced migration. It was where white families lived on one half of the block and black families on the other half.

But it was no social experiment in diversity. It was as if a demarcation line cut across the red-brick alley. My unhappy parents and grandparents warned me about mixing with the "coloreds," who should have been living across the river with their own kind.

Propinquity overcame racial suspicion and hatred once we kids ran out of our houses and ended up playing games with and against each other, but there was a snake lurking in the background waiting for us when we returned home.

The Broadway musical "South Pacific" has a song about racial intolerance that begins, "You've got to be taught to hate and fear/ You've got to be taught from year to year."

It's taken me a lifetime to educate myself and try to overcome the lessons of bigotry and hate taught to me in my youth.

When I was growing up, I lived in a very segregated city and thought that Pittsburgh's rivers were natural racial barriers, isolating much of Pittsburgh's African-American population at the base of the Downtown's Golden Triangle and between the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers.

There were plenty of bridges crossing the two rivers, but they were avenues for commerce, not for integration.

Racial inequality damned so many past generations, but the bridges are still out there.

We can only hope that today's generation will ignore the ignorant teachings and injustices of the past, set aside racial barriers, and see those bridges, finally, as arteries for integration into the future.

• Reading Baseball is a series of stories and commentaries by Richard "Pete" Peterson, co-author with his son Stephen of "The Turnpike Rivalry: The Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cleveland Browns." His essays appear regularly in the Times and on WSIU 91.9 FM.