SEGREGATION AND THE GATED COMMUNITY

The word community sounds egalitarian to most people. And gated? No word yields a fairer portion of safety to airy openness in the image it conveys to the mind.

Florida is a land flowing with gates and communities. It is a Promised Land of sun, leisure, warm pools, and exclusivity. For the past month Bevy Mae and me have been vacationing inside this paradise at a house in one such community near Naples, Florida. It took three references, photo ID, and all cash up front to get in here.

We are grateful for our good fortune. And we are in a really safe place. But when thinking about the state of affairs which has excluded as many as 94% of all Americans from the possibility of living here — if only for a few weeks — it makes me sick to my stomach.

Of course, if you don’t live here, you can’t be here — not even to drive through.

The compound we live in is huge. While biking in it the other day I was amazed to stumble on another gated community inside ours. It’s blessed by God with a lake and huge houses.

What’s strange is the gated occupants of our community aren’t allowed in their gated community even though their community is inside our community. Apparently, there are layers of gated-ness. I never knew that.

As teenager, I lived two years in Key West, Florida. It was before Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was totally segregated there. The only Negro I ever saw was our maid.

Our housekeeper was an articulate thirty-year-old woman and really beautiful. I liked her a lot and talked with her every chance I got, usually about politics. From her, I learned how difficult life was for black people in Key West at that time — and maybe as important, that a lot of Negroes actually lived on the island. Never knew that, either. Somehow, they managed to keep an extremely low profile. 

She said she supported the incumbent Democrat for Congress who was then running against an upstart Republican — a young guy always on the radio complaining about how rich his opponent was. She liked the Democrat, she said, because he once bought park benches for her neighborhood.

At Key West High School, the powers-that-be were considering the admission of a black kid from a “good” family. His dad was an officer in the U.S. Navy. Over lunch in the school cafeteria, I made the mistake of saying I saw nothing wrong with going to school with “Negroes” (as polite people referred to them).

“What!” some kid yelled. “You want to eat with niggers?”  Soon a crowd gathered. I stood my ground, and no one beat me up. The South was changing, I guess, but only a little.

One thing Key West didn’t have back then — no town did in those days — was gated communities. We had a military base that was gated — I lived on it — but the gates were for security against the hated Communists. We didn’t have terrorists or any other sort of enemies of the state. All that was to come later.

After World War II, the South and some parts of the North enforced segregation with a civilian militia called the Ku Klux Klan. It was a quasi-religious/military-style organization self-tasked with extra-judicial punishments of Negroes who violated the unwritten codes of the South.

I know something about it. My grandfather belonged to the Klan for some years, which he said he regretted. He told me things. Everyone he knew then was in the Klan, and yes, they did things they believed righteous but weren’t. 

If a black family bought a house in a white neighborhood, the militia would burn it down. Sometimes, so as not to smoke-damage nearby homes, the KKK bombed the house; or if white children lived close by, they might burn a cross in the front yard to scare occupants into leaving.

Lynchings — common after the First World War — were, by the 1950s, less common.

After dozens of documented actions against Negroes — and perhaps hundreds or thousands of undocumented ones — white neighborhoods did not need gates, or walls, or fences to remain segregated.

Eventually, after years of separation, white people who lived in these communities came to believe — many of them — that black people chose not to live next to them, because they preferred “their own kind.”

Terrorism? It didn’t exist in the United States of America in those days. First time I heard the word was in college. Terrorism, then, was always directed at Israel, for some reason, almost always by Palestinians. Reasons why were never clear.

I don’t know what white people say today is the reason black people don’t live in gated communities of Florida. I haven’t vacationed here long enough to learn.

I would bet that in some town somewhere in this huge state a black family probably lives in a gated community. Maybe more than one, right? I can imagine people pointing to those folks as proof of my being uncharitable to the good people of Florida and to people everywhere who live in these spaces.

But it seems plain to me — fifty years after Congress, the President and the Supreme Court declared segregated housing illegal — black people don’t live in these desirable places.

Why is that?

I don’t know.

I met a black man down here the other day. He told me he had been a Marine who helped liberate Kuwait during the first Gulf War.

He cleans the pool.

Maybe, I’ll ask him.

Billy Lee