University of Georgia

Terry College of Business
 
 

When Gregory Howard Williams was 10 years old, his father turned to him on a bus ride to Muncie, Ind., and told him, "Life is going to be different from now on. In Virginia you were white boys. In Indiana, you’re going to be colored boys. I want you to remember that you’re the same today that you were yesterday. But people in Indiana will treat you differently.

The compelling story of just how different that life would be forms the core of Williams’ much-discussed new book, Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He was Black (Dutton, $22.95). Williams left behind the "whites only" schools, swimming pools and move theaters of 1953. Overnight, his racial identity changed.

The memoir is No. 232 on the USA TODAY Best-Selling Books list.

Williams was born to a white mother and a black father when interracial relationships were still against the law in Virginia. His light-skinned father told people he was Italian, and his mother was disowned by her family in Muncie. The couple ran a tavern for servicemen that failed partly because the Korean War ended and partly because Williams’ charismatic father drank heavily. Eventually, Williams’ mother left the family because her husband beat her often and savagely. She took her tow youngest children but left Williams and his brother Mike with their father.

The two sons would not se or hear from their mother for a decade.

With their father, the two boys headed to Muncie, where they discovered that life for black boys was very different than for white boys. "I was the same person, but because my heritage, I was treated very differently," Williams says. Teachers had severely lowered expectations, and Williams was denied an academic award in the sixth grade because of his race. Often going hungry, the two boys lived at first with their paternal grandmother, who had worked at the tavern back in Virginia, where the boys knew her simply as the cook, Miss Sallie. No one had mentioned she was their father’s mother. "She was very angry about that."

Now the dean of Ohio State University College of Law, Williams wrote the book because he had counseled many minority students and they told him how inspiring and affirming his story was. A top student and high school athlete, Williams put himself through Ball State University while working full time as a sheriff. He also attended law school and has published legal textbooks.

When Williams was growing up in Muncie, where the KKK had been active for many years, there was strict racial segregation. Teachers and coaches probed whether Williams was dating white girls in high school. (Black girls were also off-limits because the couple would look interracial.) Williams, now the father of four, including two adopted sons from Honduras, married a white woman he secretly saw during high school.

With fair skin and straight hair, Williams has always looked white. But the issue has "never been skin color - it’s race and racial heritage," Williams says. His white grandmother lived less than 10 minutes away in Muncie, yet brutally rejected the two boys. After they begged for their mother’s address so they could write her, she ordered them out of her car, saying, "I don’t carry messages for niggers!" Only his mother’s youngest sister kept in touch with Williams.

By contrast, his black relatives and their community accepted the two boys after some playground scuffles and taunts. "We became black. Those were the people who were supporting us. I became proud of my heritage. I realized who I was, Moreover Williams had seen his father "pass" for white and the pain he suffered emotionally at this self-denial.

Economically, however, passing generated much more money. Back in Virginia, his father’s businesses grossed more than $50,000 in 1951. After the family moved to Muncie, the best job his 41-year-old father, who had attended Howard University, could get was as a janitor for $50.50 a week.

What saved Williams in the end was a woman named Miss Dora, who took in the two boys, providing them with a stable home. At 52, Miss Dora earned $25 a week as a domestic, yet fed and cared for the boys. "This woman saved my life," says Williams, who dedicated the book to her, his wife and his now-deceased father who, despite his drinking and difficulties, always encouraged Williams to dream and achieve.

His mother, however, remains a wound. Williams understands why she left her husband, but she has never apologized or even admitted that she abandoned two small boys for 10 years. (She periodically returned to Muncie yet never contacted her sons.) When he saw her at age 20, "She didn’t want to talk to us about how we had survived, what we had gone through," Williams says. "She was in denial." When Williams told her recently that the book was to be published, "she was not happy about it."

Williams traveled back to Muncie recently and my heart broke." He visited his elementary school and "life has not changed a lot in 31 years" in terms of what black children can expect from this world. While he believes there have been "some advances in race relations, there continues to be a lot of divisions."

Quite simply, Williams says it is hard for whites to understand how "overpowering and overshadowing the perceptions about blacks in this society can be. It’s very difficult."
 
 

Except
 
 

‘Remember Miss Sallie who used to work for us in the tavern?’

Dad’s lower lip quivered. He look ill. Had he always looked this unhealthy, I wondered, or was it something that had happened on the trip?

‘It’s hard to tell you boys this,’ He paused, then slowly added, ‘But she’s really my momma. That means she’s your grandmother.’

‘But that can’t be, Dad! She’s colored!’ I whispered, lest I be overheard by the other white passengers on the bus.

‘That’s right, Billy,’ he continued. ‘She’s colored. That makes you part colored, too.’. . .

I didn’t understand Day. I knew I wasn’t colored, and neither was he. My skin was white. All of us are white, I said to myself. But for the first time, I had to admit Dad didn’t exactly look white. His deeply tanned skin puzzled me as I sat there trying to classify my own father...

‘I don’t wanta be colored,’ Mike whined. ‘I don’t wanta be colored. We can’t go swimming’ or skatin,’...

I glanced across the aisle to where (Dad) sat grimfaced and erect, staring straight ahead. I saw my father as I never had seen him before. The veil dropped from his face and features. Before my eyes he was transformed from a swarthy Italian to his true self - a high-yellow mulatto. My father was a Negro! We were colored! After ten years in Virginia on the white side of the color line, I knew what that meant.
 
 

From Life on the Color Line