When Movies Were In
Black And White

As the parents of two rambunctious boys close to the same age and fighting weight, my Mom and Dad went through their fair share of babysitters. I don’t remember what the going rate for babysitters was back when I was babysat, but I do remember it was not nearly enough for many of the teenage girls in our neighborhood, especially those who had had the misfortune of wrangling with the tag team of Jeff and Greg Eason.

During the Great Babysitter Drought of 1968, my parents found a solution to this problem in the local movie theater in our then hometown of Milton, Florida. Every Saturday my parents would drop us off at the Bijou for a double feature. I remember admission was 35 cents, bottled Cokes were a dime, and large dill pickles served in wax paper were a nickel. I don’t remember how much popcorn cost, but I am sure that it was about 1/100th of what it costs today.

Basically, for about two bucks, my parents could keep us out of their hair for four hours every Saturday…a bargain at twice the price.

Now the fact that I was eight and my brother was six-and-a-half at the time is probably reason enough for my parents to be reported to Social Services if it that happened in the 21st century. But those were simpler times and nobody thought twice about little kids going to the movies by themselves.

I remember most of the movies were the standard kid-fare of the day with plenty of cowboys, Indians and cartoons to keep us sugar-fed young’uns entertained for half an afternoon. Of course, it being a public movie theater, the Saturday lineup would occasionally feature more adult fare. One time we watched The Deadly Bees and Alfred Hitchcock’s horror masterpiece The Birds back to back. It was enough to put me off of birds and bees altogether. Thankfully my hormones kicked in a few years later and I became fairly obsessed with the birds and the bees…but that’s another story.

Another thing I remember about this particular movie theater in the Panhandle of Florida in the mid-60s is that it was still segregated. All of the black kids (called Negroes back then) were forced to sit upstairs in the balcony while we white kids (called white kids back then) sat downstairs in the larger mezzanine area. We white kids thought this grossly unfair, not because we were champions of Civil Rights, but because we thought it was probably more fun to sit up high in the balcony. (There were also rumors of the black kids throwing their used chewing gum into the white kids’ hair, but that never happened to me or any of my friends).

Many people think that racial integration happened overnight, with one swift signature from Lyndon B. Johnson’s big fat ink pen. The truth is that it happened in little baby steps, especially here in the South. One year some of the teachers at our elementary school were black, the next year some of the students were as well. It’s still happening, little by little, and there are still some folks who get steamed when they see an interracial couple kissing on the movie screen.

In Milton, Florida in 1968, an interracial couple couldn’t even sit in the same part of the local movie theater, even if they were there to see Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. I like to remind people about horrible stuff like that when they carry on about “the good old days.”

Since the Civil Rights movement swept the country in the 1960s, many of those people who were once prejudiced against black people have changed their ugly ways. But some of them have simply moved on to other prejudices.

There seems to be a segment of our society that can only define itself by putting down other, different segments of society. Those are the people who get all riled up about gay Americans having the right to marry. Increasingly they are also the ones who want to simplify a very complex immigration issue by suggesting we build a wall along the US-Mexico border or throw out all illegal immigrants, no matter how long they have worked and lived here.

Two North Carolina towns are currently considering making English their official language as a way of fighting illegal immigration (despite the fact that English has been the official language of the entire state since 1987). Officials in Mint Hill, in Mecklenburg County, and Landis, in Rowan County, want to ban business signs that are in Spanish and prevent government buildings such as the DMV from providing bilingual information.

“I rode down Cannon Boulevard and could only read half the signs that were up, and that’s when I really started thinking about it,” said Landis Alderman James Furr. “I’ve always had concerns as far as bilingualism in government.”

Mint Hill’s proposed ordinance goes even further, fining and punishing “businesses that employ, rent or provide goods and social services to illegal immigrants,” even if they do so unknowingly.

Without dwelling on the fact that the elected officials in Mint Hill and Landis probably have more important business to attend to, these proposed ordinances would punish legal immigrants just as much illegal immigrants.

It is prejudice disguised as public policy and it is just as wrong as segregation was 40 years ago.