Cusick's increased racial awareness
Cusick explains that his racial awareness grew in response to his religious schooling, war experience, and physical relocation from the South.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Pat Cusick, June 19, 1989. Interview L-0043. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- PAT CUSICK:
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Let me deal with my father; that's the easiest. My father came
down to work in the steel mills of Gaston, Alabama. His parents had come
over from Ireland; that's about all I
know—Irish-Catholic. My mother's family has all
the convoluted roots of any Southern historical novel. The Hollingworth
branch of it came over with William Penn and were Quakers. By the time
they worked their way down to Alabama they were Methodists. Another
branch—my great-grandmother was a Lewis, so my third-great
uncle was Meriwether Lewis, who did the Lewis and Clark. One of them
married Betty Washington, George Washington's sister. So I
was supposed to be very proud of all of that type of thing. In my
mother's family, my great-grandfather was the leading slave
owner in Northern Alabama. He was a major in the Confederate army, and
formed the first unit of the Klan in Alabama after the war. There were
two leading families in that county. Now that was the tradition that I
had been raised in. Until recently, until my mother went into a nursing
home, his picture hung on the mantle with the stars-and-bars draped
behind it and the gun underneath. The sword had been lost by the United
Daughters of the Confederacy during some festival. That was the
tradition I had been raised in, learning the poems of the confederacy
and all of this. My grandparents got divorced in
their seventies. When I'd ask about my grandfather and his
family, I was always told, "Well, they're strange.
They live up on the mountain. And as proof of their strangeness, they
were Republicans in the New Deal South." Of course, that ended
all discussion. Obviously that was proof of insanity. Only until I saw a
history of the county, did I find that they were very different
politically. They were Southern abolitionists. They were the Underwood
family. They were the other leading family in the county. The book said
that when my grandparents got married it was a real event because they
came from such opposite families. They supported the Union. They were
Southern abolitionists. They were lawyers and judges, and so it was only
natural that when they Union troop came, my great-grandfather on that
side became a federal judge during Reconstruction. Even though I
don't think we are our ancestors—thank
God—I was delighted to find that this other branch had a much
different tradition, and, in fact, one of the people was the attorney
for the Cherokee nation before the Supreme Court on the forced march,
the Trail of Tears. So I felt very good. A few years ago my cousin, a
retired marine general, was telling me, "You are the only one
of your grandfather's descendants that is like him. All the
rest put great store in making money, but you are as idealistic and as
crazy as he was. Did you know he was a socialist and a close associate
of Eugene B. Debbs in Alabama in 1910?" So I came from very
Southern but very different traditions in terms of the two branches of
the family. But I didn't even know about any of that until
recently, because there had been this divorce, and
they had been totally separate. I was glad, even though we are not our
ancestors. I listened to and met Malcolm when he was in Durham, and
every time I heard Malcolm say, "The sons of slave owners, the
grandsons of slave owners!" In my case that was true. But I was
raised in the segregationist tradition. I guess the first change came
when I went to high school. My mother, who had become a convert to
Catholicism in 1927, sent me to a boarding school in Alabama connected
with the Benedictine monastery in Coleman, Alabama—St.
Bernard. I went there, and some of the priests were constantly positing
the statement that segregation was morally wrong. I used to argue
against it. But there was a lot of discussion. Of course, there
weren't any blacks in the monastery or the high school. By
the time I finished high school, I think I was pretty convinced, at
least intellectually, that segregation was screwed up.
- PAMELA DEAN:
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So this was a really important influence on you?
- PAT CUSICK:
-
Yes it was. The next important influence was on a more practical
level—the Korean war. I went in the Air Force, and that
physically removed me from the South. I not only associated with black
people, my supervisor was a black person. I had been around black people
all my life within that paternalistic way. Not only was he my
supervisor, but he was brighter than I was. I was in air traffic
control, and he was the air traffic control supervisor at Berlin. I
think that helped almost complete the piece. I went back to Rome,
Georgia, where we were living then. I used to wonder what I would do if
one of my friends from the service came to town and
had to ride on the back of the bus. I kept avoiding that question.
- PAMELA DEAN:
-
You compartmentalized.
- PAT CUSICK:
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It took me about ten years. I was a very retiring person. I never would
argue with people very much. That seems hard to believe now;
I'm notorious around here. It took me almost ten years to
come out of that closet, so to speak, of what I could or should do.