Update 1-4-11

Hi,

Yep, we stayed a couple of extra days in Tucson, enjoying the comparatively clean air.  And while there's always a part of me that's relieved to be safely home, there's another part that wishes to continue the even quiet adventure.

Again, happy new year to all, and, now, here's the first of two recent articles from the Long Island Herald about Booker Gibson.

Breaking Racial Barriers at Every Turn
An African-American teacher makes his way in Long Island’s very white world
Scott Brinton
Long Island Herald

By his own admission, Booker T. Gibson wasn’t the most athletic student at Mepham High School in Bellmore in the 1940s, so becoming popular at a school that placed a high value on success in sports –– in particular, in wrestling –– was no easy feat. But, man, could Gibson play boogie-woogie piano, and at the time this highly rhythmic style of the blues ruled the airwaves.

So Gibson, a soft-spoken student musician with an electric smile and an easygoing personality, was wildly popular and became president of Mepham’s House of Representatives. “I became a star,” he said with a laugh during a recent interview at his comfortable North Merrick home.

Gibson’s senior yearbook features a photo of him standing beside a lectern before a semicircle of preppy student representatives, leading the class of 1948. His was the only black face in a room full of white teens.

Gibson, now 80, grew up as one of a handful of African-American children in predominately white Merrick, where an undercurrent of long-held racial stereotypes and prejudices, spoken and unspoken, ran through what was then a rural culture –– and, for that matter, the nation’s collective psyche.

Gibson, who retired as a music teacher in the Valley Stream Central High School District in 1986, has made his home in the Merricks for most of his life. Having served in the U.S. Air Force, he is now a respected member of Merrick American Legion Post No. 1282. Tom Riordan, a fellow post member, said Gibson has played a critical role in the group’s annual visits to the Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center for more than a decade. “For a good number of years,” Riordan said, “Booker has been playing the piano for our comrades at Northport. We serenade them. He plays the piano. He has been an inspiration as far as our visits are concerned. He’s been an A-plus member” of the post.

Through the years, however, Gibson has faced social adversity, and has had to overcome a number of bumps on the long road to achieving equality with his white counterparts.

Making his way in the world

Gibson, named for the renowned African-American educator Booker T. Washington, was born in the Bronx in 1930, as the Great Depression began, and spent his first eight years in an apartment in Harlem, in the shadow of the Apollo Theater, with his parents, Theodore and Mary, and two older siblings, Frances and Ted.

Gibson’s father was killed in an accident while on the job as a New York City sanitation worker. His mother remarried a chaplain with the city’s Sanitation Department, the Rev. Walter H. Blake. Gibson’s mother received a settlement from the city after her first husband’s death, which enabled the family to buy a house.

After his mother remarried, she spotted a small advertisement in The New York Amsterdam News, one of the nation’s leading African-American weekly newspapers. A black minister, a Reverend Clary (Gibson does not know his first name), was seeking African-American families to move to Merrick, where he was looking to establish a black enclave that he called Clary Gardens.

Gibson recalled driving with his mother, stepfather and siblings over the 59th Street bridge through Queens until the hardscrabble streets of New York gave way to Long Island’s country roads, surrounded by fields and forests. The family visited Lindenhurst and Gordon Heights before settling on Clary Gardens, a collection of six quaint, three-bedroom cottages on South Smith Street, later renamed Dobson Avenue in honor of Ed Dobson, a Merrick aviator who was killed in World War II. What was then Clary Gardens is now part of the larger Old Lindenmere section of Merrick, which abuts Birch Elementary School, built in 1960. Gibson still has a set of the original plans for Clary Gardens.

He moved to Merrick in 1938, the year of the Long Island Express, a Category 3 hurricane that roared up the East Coast, causing a $15 billion swath of destruction in today’s dollars. Gibson’s home survived the tempest. Surrounded by five other black-owned homes, it was all his family wanted, sporting a full bathroom, a two-car garage and an oversized backyard with plenty of room for the children to play and for the family to raise chickens, turkeys and pigs.

Gibson attended Merrick Grammar School, now known as Chatterton Elementary School, and studied piano with Rosabelle Weiss before moving on to Mepham, where he made the Honor Society and was selected for the American Legion’s Boys State, a summer camp for student leaders.

Despite his popularity at Mepham, Gibson said he couldn’t think of dating a white girl. It was, to put it mildly, socially unacceptable. “They would never have that — no way,” he said.

There were no black girls in his grade, though. So when dances came around, school officials had a black girl from an upper grade dance with him. At his senior prom, a girl was brought in from New Rochelle.

Into the wider world

In September 1948, Gibson went on to the State University of New York at Potsdam. During World War II, his mother had earned enough money sewing parachutes at a Lynbrook factory to send him to Potsdam, where he studied music education and piano.

Once again, Gibson was a lone black face in a sea of white students. “I was a novelty,” he said. “People would turn and look.”

But, he noted, “The college kids were fine. Up there I could date girls, because their parents weren’t around.”

He completed his student teaching in a little K-through-12 school in Madrid, N.Y. He was the only black man that many of the faculty members and students had met. Gibson said he vividly remembers his first day at the school. “Everyone came out of their rooms to look at me,” he said.

After graduation, he served four years in the Air Force, at bases across the U.S. and in Japan, writing music for Air Force public-relations campaigns. He joined the Air Force, he said, because he had heard that it was more tolerant of blacks than the other branches of the military.

After his service, he returned to Merrick, hoping to land a teaching job. It was the mid-1950s, a time of racial tension, particularly in the South. Only a half-dozen years earlier, while visiting cousins in Atlanta, Gibson had to enter the famed Fox Theatre through the back entrance and sit in the balcony, away from whites.

“I remember that movie theater, that big, beautiful movie theater, and having to climb all those stairs” to the balcony, he said.

Because Gibson had served in the military, he was granted an interview in the Malverne School District, a white school system. He recalls being asked to interview with the Board of Education, an unheard-of practice. He didn’t get the job.

“I would have been the first black teacher there,” he said.

Gibson persisted, though. On Oct. 10, 1956, he was hired to teach music at South Junior-Senior High School in the Valley Stream Central High School District –– South’s first African-American teacher. And, once again, music propelled him to popularity among students.

He married, had two children, divorced and remarried — to his wife of 39 years, Frances, a music teacher who retired from Forest Road Elementary School in Valley Stream District No. 30. Gibson had a third child with Frances.

Over the years, the couple has continued to break racial barriers. “If you have diversity,” Frances said, “you learn about the feelings and backgrounds of other people … It’s healthier to have a more diverse educational system.”

Long Island, Booker Gibson said, remains highly segregated, but it is growing more diverse. “People,” he said, “should be able to move anywhere they want.”

Next week: Gibson hears Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington and gains recognition as an educator while pursuing work as a professional musician.

The link to part 2 -- if you can't wait till next week: http://www.liherald.com/franklinsquare/stories/Booker-T-Gibson-witness-to-history,29236

There's also a video of Booker playing Hoagy Carmichael's "Up a Lazy River" at his North Merrick home recently.


Rich