The Bus Station

Hello again,

Kind friend Dale Lincoln checks in again with a story in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King that is not yet complete:

The Bus Station

A year of sea duty with the U.S. Navy was behind me. Prior to reporting to a new duty station in California, there was time for a round trip to Maine. I took advantage of an inexpensive military flight on a cargo plane from Santa Ana, CA to Cherry Point, NC. It was my first ride on a large airplane. From the air in early September the farmlands of “the land of the free” were beautiful. They looked like home-made quilts with patches of green, yellow, and brown. The year was 1958. A glimpse of living in the USA that I had not previously noticed was about to happen.

It was late in the afternoon when the plane landed as scheduled. It had been a long flight. I was tired and still many miles from home as a taxi transported me from the military base to the bus depot in New Bern, North Carolina. Observations inside the bus station and on the bus shouldn’t have been a surprise, but like many other people at that time I was naïve to the fact that segregation was a way of life.
The lobby was divided with a railing that went to the ticket window. One side was plainly marked COLORED; the other side WHITE. The WHITE side of the station had been freshly painted. The COLORED side looked like it hadn’t been painted for twenty years.

Upon boarding the bus I found a window seat near the middle of the bus. It didn’t take me long to realize that I occupied the last seat in the WHITE section toward the front of the bus. When the passenger’s tickets were being checked, the young, black lady directly behind me told of her family emergency and convinced the driver that she had lost her ticket. I heard her sobbing through the night as the bus traveled toward New York City. ( I still have good thoughts of that bus driver for letting the young lady remain on the bus.)

Two years after my round trip across the USA (1960) my boss on an oil tanker often said to me; “You should be able to do everything! “You’re free, white, and twenty one!” Until then I had spent very little time thinking about my God given gifts or why He had given them to me. Those three items gave me advantages over millions of people in the USA. The attitude of that same Chief Engineer made me aware of one of those advantages: A new officer, an African American, joined our ship. He was a Mate-in-training and I was an Engineer-in-training. We worked the same hours. On his first day, at lunch time, he arrived in the Officer’s Mess room ahead of me. With extra officers aboard, there was not enough room at the table for all officers to have a dining spot to call their own. The new Mate happened to sit in the place where I usually ate my meals. When I arrived in the mess room I made a welcome greeting to the new officer, sat down where the engineer with the afternoon watch had recently vacated, enjoyed my lunch, talked, and made a new friend. Later that afternoon I was shocked when the Chief Engineer approached me, used profanity, and said: “Knock off fifteen minutes earlier tomorrow morning so that ‘NEW GUY’ won’t get your seat!” The Mate stayed on the ship for only a few days but my education about people’s attitudes continued. That same summer John F. Kennedy was running for President of the USA. I listened to heated discussions in the Officer’s Mess room. Many times the people near me at the table made it known that they hated “African Americans,” Catholics, Jews, and Mexicans. For some reason I guessed that my attitude, opinions, and living up North didn’t place me on their “best buddy list”! A few weeks later I wasn’t sorry to leave that ship.

In 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. His words: “A person should be judged by the content of their character not by the color of their skin” have been heard many times. I join many people that are in agreement with those words.
Each year as the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is observed I will be thinking of the many atrocities that happened to people of the USA both before and after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made his famous speech. It is easy to learn about them, but changing the attitude within a person’s heart that will prevent man’s inhumanity to man from happening today, or in the future, is extremely difficult. For me it’s easy to stay in my comfort zone and return to having the same attitude I held as a young man, before arriving at the bus station: “If it isn’t happening to me, my family and friends, it really can’t be happening!. The shameful part is that I know better but continue to do very little about it. I learned to respect Dr. Martin Luther King , Jr. He made a great effort and helped many people in the USA.

Dale Lincoln
Zephyrhills FL
January 13, 2008