THE MID-1960S WERE HEADY DAYS in the United States. The Civil Rights Act had passed in 1964 and been signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, and the following year President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Medicare and Medicaid provided medical care to (respectively) the aged and the indigent.

President Johnson’s State of the Union address to Congress in January 1964 was heady stuff:
“This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort.

It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. One thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime.

…(T)his year’s legislative program, (is) designed to help each and every American citizen fulfill his basic hopes—his hopes for a fair chance to make good; his hopes for fair play from the law; his hopes for a full-time job on full-time pay; his hopes for a decent home for his family in a decent community; his hopes for a good school for his children with good teachers; and his hopes for security when faced with sickness or unemployment or old age.

Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity.”

It is hard to convey, 50 years later, the atmosphere of idealism and hope that saturated American life in that era. There was a very real expectation that, working together, we could conquer poverty and discrimination as we had conquered tyranny 20 years before during the Second World War.

It was in this context that my parents made the bold decision to move to Richmond. My father was then working at the Chevron Research Corporation offices located adjacent to Chevron’s sprawling chemical plant in the western part of the city. Richmond was then replacing the dilapidated housing that had been built for war workers in the 1940s with shiny new houses and recreation facilities, so it made sense for my Dad to live within bicycle distance of his workplace. My parents bought a new house in the Park Plaza development in the area of the city known then and now as “the Pullman.”

My parents were, by culture, income and sensibility, middle class. In fact, some of my Dad’s work colleagues lived in the nicer parts of the Bay Area — places like Marin County, Moraga, and so on — and were actually upper-middle-class. Consequently, I was and am middle class myself in many respects, but because most of my early childhood was spent in a neighborhood that was probably 98 percent African American, there is another part of me that isn’t. Virtually all my schoolmates and friends were black, as was the principle of my elementary school. When I was little, it mystified me why most of the people on television were white, since I concluded from my environment that most of the non-television world was black.

My time in Richmond gave me a depth of familiarity with the black experience that was unusual for a white, middle class kid. I believe that perspective has given me something to say. I have written several times in this space about my experiences there, and when I’ve done so I have gotten a consistent response: “You should write a book about that.” That advice finally penetrated this thick, Irish skull of mine, and I thought, “Huh. Maybe I should write a book about that.” I have now begun that project.

Now that I’ve made the decision to write it, some of the first questions I’ve asked myself are, “Who is my intended audience, what do I want to say to them, and what effect do I hope to achieve?”
An event I attended in November 2013 gave me at least a partial answer to those questions. The event was a gather at a house in North Berkeley in which a woman named Joy DeGruy discussed her book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing.

Joy is one of those people who seem to glow with intelligence, life and passion. She gave an extended talk on her book and expanded on the issues she raised in it by giving examples and exploring the practical consequences of the titular syndrome, afterward there was a question and answer period. A majority of her audience was African American, and one silent but recurring premise of many of their questions was, “How can we get white people to see us as people?” It was poignant to me because in that implicit question, I heard the echoes of 400 years of grief. I’ve also heard an echo of that question in the theme of the recent protests concerning police shootings of African Americans: “Black Lives Matter.”

Part of the purpose of my writing about Richmond here — and in my book, when it is published — is to try to richly describe the full, complex humanity of the people I grew up with. My time in Richmond gave me a keen appreciation of not just my neighbors’ struggles and pain, but also their holiness and joy. There are spiritual treasures to be found in Richmond cheek-by-jowl with the heartbreak. We should indeed “see them as people”, and I want to do what I can to help that happen.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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