CONFRONTING MY PAST - A DAY WITH MY FAMILY IN TANGLEWOOD PARK
"Did you see any examples of segregation or institutionalized racism when you were growing up?"
"During the 1960s or 70s do you recall hearing or witnessing any events related to desegregation?"
"Have you ever experienced discrimination or racism first hand?"
In answering the latter question, I recounted to her a story that my family (Mom, Dad, Sister and Me) experienced in 1971 at a place called Tanglewood Park. I grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A town that was built by tobacco money. R. J. Reynolds' headquarters were in Winston-Salem when I was growing up. Tanglewood Park was owned by William Neal Reynolds, the brother of Richard J. Reynolds. Upon the death of William in 1951, the property was willed to the citizens (white) of Forsyth County to share as a public recreational park.
Tanglewood Park was a segregated park from 1951 until 1971. A couple of days before the park was to be integrated, my father (Clarence "Big House" Gaines) took our family to visit the park. We were denied entry because of our race. Did my father mistakenly think Tanglewood Park would be open to blacks on that day. I doubt it. My dad was a smart man. I never asked him, but I think he wanted his children to experience the brutality of racial segregation. Tanglewood's past has been whitewashed. In telling my daughter this story, I wanted to know the exact date Tanglewood was desegregated. I cannot find it anywhere on the Internet {Found the year - 1971}, but I did find a wonderful story written by William Etling, entitled "How Far We Have Traveled."
William Etling is from my home town. He is now a real estate broker in the Santa Ynez Valley of California. William is white and the story that you are about to read needs no further introduction. It is simply one of the most well written and authentic articles that I have ever read."How Far We Have Traveled." by William Etling
Barack Obama said at his inauguration, "The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness."
Clearly, progress has been made towards that elusive goal. When I left Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the fall of 1966, aged 13, in the back of my parent's car, local schools were still segregated. Wiley Junior High (white) was a block away from Carver Crest (black). I walked by on the way to cotillion class.
We swam in summers past at Tanglewood Park, a 1,114 acre wooded estate donated to the public by a wealthy tobacco man. William Neal Reynolds, president of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, bought the property in 1921. After his death in 1951, Tanglewood was left to the citizens of Forsyth County for use as a park and playground. Reynolds left 20,000 shares of RJR stock as a permanent endowment.
The bequest restricted use to whites only.
When I returned to a fully integrated Tanglewood decades later with my own young son and told him this fact, he began to cry. Some people are born with compassion.
I had to learn it. I can tell you the exact moment I did. I was ten years old. It wasn't at church or Sunday school, though we went faithfully. It was on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. As I left Sherwood Forest School, a classmate told me President Kennedy had been shot.
I raced for home on my bike. My parents were diehard Republicans. I was a loyal little boy. I foolishly thought they would welcome the news. When I ran through the door, I shouted, "They got him!"
In the kitchen, my mother was collapsed before our little brown radio, crying a river for John Fitzgerald Kennedy. My moral compass was permanently reset in that instant.
In retrospect, looking back over the 45 years since that sad day, no President of my lifetime has equaled Kennedy's charisma and promise. Until now.
Unlike politics, race was not discussed in my younger life, not by anyone. It wasn't a forbidden subject. It just didn't come up. Things were what they were, and the injustice of it all wasn't discussed by anyone I knew, not friends, teachers, or clergy. The black community was hidden in plain sight. Black news was covered by a tiny column buried deep in the back pages of the Winston-Salem Journal & Sentinel, entitled "Happenings Around East Winston."
Immediately after we moved to California for my mother's health, things in the old neighborhood began to change. A young man pioneered integration at the brand new school I would have attended. A few years later, the Black Panthers were leading riots in East Winston.
In 1972, at 18, I left college for a while and went to work in the Caribbean, walking from telephone pole to telephone pole throughout the poorer neighborhoods of St. Thomas, recording data for the Virgin Island Telephone Company. A tiny black child, not more than five, approached me on a shabby street.
He looked up. I towered above him. "White honky pig," the youngster intoned contemptuously. This seemed very sad to me, and I hoped his big brother wasn't around. I got my data and moved on to the next pole.
On that conflicted island where whites were a minority, I'd just gotten a tiny hint of what it might be like to look over your shoulder your whole life, or to be raised in hate. The racial divide in that lush tropical paradise widened when submachine-gun wielding black robbers killed eight whites at the Fountain Valley Golf Course on St. Croix later in the year.
In 1989, I was a planning administrator for Hawaiian Telephone on Oahu. The Hawaiian Islands are the most amazing melting pot. Charming faces thronged Bishop Street with dashes of Asian and Irish, Hawaiian and haole, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, African. The people I worked with were all descended from immigrants from around the Pacific Rim. They were all brilliant, and we all got along swimmingly. But I was told to avoid Makaha, and heard "Haole go home!" and worse, on the back roads of Kauai.
Oahu's public schools had a raging meth problem. Tuition at Punahou, where Barack Obama had matriculated in the late 70s, was around $1,000 a month per student. I had two kids and I had a good job, but I couldn't afford that kind of cash for elementary school. We home-schooled for a while, then moved back to the mainland.
Obama couldn't afford it either. Raise a glass to the scholarship committee at Punahou that gave young Barack a break. Obama made his way from that stellar school on the fire-forged volcanic slopes, on up the long, staggeringly lonely road that led to his tumultuous inauguration before a million supporters this week.
As he said on Tuesday, "Let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are, and how far we have traveled."
And let us judge those we meet on their own merits.
POSTSCRIPT:
I wrote the majority of the introductory to this blog in 2009. I contacted William Etling and shared my Tanglewood story with him via e-mail. His daughter, Leah Etling, sent me this wonderful note:
Thank you for finding my father's column on the Internet and sending it to others. It has really been a proof positive of the power of online media to allow us to connect as humans beyond geographical and cultural lines.
The generational shift between my father's experience and mine is stark. I am 30 and have lived my whole life in Southern California. I'll never forget the trip we took back to Winston-Salem. When he told us that Tanglewood was whites-only, I remember feeling guilty and creepy about my initial enjoyment at its verdant beauty.
That was 18 years ago. Today, I'm just overwhelmingly greatful that your daughter and my brother and I have been able to grow up in a different world than you and my father did. This is a great country and we're blessed with so many opportunities. I'm really glad to hear that the schools where you live are keeping kids in touch with the history it took to get us here. California schools really gloss over that history, because they have fewer immediate examples to give. They should look at busing and de-facto economic segregation to give some equally important lessons.
Thank you again, I know that hearing from you has been the highlight of my father's week.
Leah & I are now facebook friends. Got to love the internet. Speaking of facebook. I shared this story on facebook and my 9th grade football coach, Vernon Glenn, made some profound comments about Tanglewood and the Reynolds family. Vernon is now a trial lawyer in Charleston, South Carolina and he is related to the Reynolds clan. Vernon's comments:
A lot of folks have forgotten (or never knew...) that the Tanglewood Park case went all the way to the US Supreme Court and was decided as part and parcel of two cases where private lands were left to public use for "white citizens" exclusively...the other being what is now known as Stone Mountain Park just next to Atlanta...
My late Uncle Bill Lybrook was Mr. Will Reynolds fair-haired and favored nephew-he ran Tanglewood for Mr. Will and helped move it beyond the Reynolds' bequest that was overturned by the Supremes...Uncle Bill was a strange duck in a in a lot of ways but he handled this with aplomb all while walking quite a tightrope between familial loyalty and responsible citizenry.
....the Reynolds crowd was wild and Uncle Will had to run cover for them all the time....here are some Key Words...just Google/Wikipedia them and there is a treasure trove of info about the Reynolds crowd that you can blow through at your leisure and get a great look at how broad and wild their scope and grasp were...
Smith Reynolds
Libby Holman
Dick Reynolds
I'll track down citation on Tanglewood case sometime today.
I'm still waiting for Vernon to send me the citation on the Tanglewood case, but his comments on Tanglewood provide a great history lesson for all. Since I will send Vernon this blog, I'm certain I'll soon be able to add the citation. {Hint, Hint - Vernon}
Previously, I mentioned that Vernon Glenn was my 9th grade football coach. I attended Summit School in the 9th grade. Summit School, like most things in Winston-Salem, has a connection with the Reynolds family. Summit was founded by Louise Futrell in 1933. Within a few years, Summit outgrew their initial school house, and "in 1944, Mrs. Charles Babcock, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. R. J. Reynolds, offered the school a 4.5-acre plot of land on her Reynolda estate near Reynolda Village." I guess Mrs. Futrell had the right connections back in the day.
I enrolled at Summit School in 1972. I wasn't the first black student to attend Summit, but I was one of two black students to integrate the 9th grade class in 1972. I consider myself a child of the segregated south. Before attending Summit, I attended an all-black Catholic School, St. Benedict the Moor, in Winston-Salem for eight years. In 1971 I was denied entry into Tanglewood Park; by 1972 I was going to an exclusive private school that had educated members of the Reynolds family that was built on land originally owned by them. Yes, William Etling, we have traveled far!
A Park Divided
Why the beautiful grounds of Tanglewood have a uniquely blemished past.
As the brother of tobacco tycoon R.J. Reynolds, William Neal Reynolds was incredibly wealthy. He was also incredibly generous. He and his wife, Kate, gave hundreds of millions of dollars to support local charitable causes over the years. They also championed minorities, giving the lion’s share of funds necessary to build Memorial Hospital specifically to meet the needs of the local black community.
That’s why, given his caring nature, many are perplexed to learn of a request Reynolds made in his will: That his 1,100 acre estate, Tanglewood, be turned into a public park for the citizens of Forsyth County—but only the white citizens.
Of course, it was unremarkably common in much of pre-civil rights America for facilities such as schools, hospitals, and parks to be designated for the use of “whites only” or “blacks only.” Most of the local schools were still segregated at the time.
When Tanglewood was opened in 1954, several parks existed in Winston-Salem in black neighborhoods, but nothing that rose to the beauty or available facilities of Tanglewood. The estate, its petting zoo, kiddie rides, deer park, gardens, stables, restaurant, motel, and Manor House provided a bucolic setting for weddings, family outings, and recreation.
But as Justice Henry E. Frye, the first African-American to sit on the North Carolina Supreme Court, recalls, that beauty was not available to all. An Air Force veteran, Frye and his wife were once invited to picnic at Tanglewood with friends. The invitation had to be rescinded when his friend realized that while he, a Japanese national, could use the park, Frye, a North Carolina native, could not.
When the Civil Rights Act took effect in 1964, the trustees who oversaw Tanglewood were unsure how to satisfy both the requirements of the act which, among other things, outlawed discrimination at facilities that served the general public, and the stipulations of Reynolds’ will, which contained a provision requiring the county to dispose of the property and endowment if it failed to meet the terms of the will. The trustees closed the Manor House, pool, theater, motel, restaurant, and cancelled the annual steeplechase in an attempt to comply.
Though officials worked for a few years to find a legal solution, it would take a suit filed in federal court to force the desegregation of the park. In March 1970, in light of recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court involving, among other places, Stone Mountain Park in Georgia, the court ruled that Tanglewood must be open to all races or close. The judge stayed the order until May 15 to allow a work-around to be developed.
The solution was complicated. The park passed to the W.N. Reynolds Trust as an investment property as allowed by the terms of the will. The trust then leased the park to a nonprofit corporation, which operated the park just as before but made it available to all citizens. As a result, Tanglewood was officially integrated in 1971 following 20 years of segregation. The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, as had long been the case, continued to financially support the park.
While the solution was certainly welcomed, it put the park in danger of being developed in more lucrative fashion. So, after more legal wrangling—this time between the various trusts involved—the county offered to buy the park outright. In 1976, using $2.05 million in bonds and $3.2 million from the Smith Reynolds Foundation, Tanglewood finally belonged to the people of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County.
Today, more than 300,000 visitors enjoy the park each year, and few are aware of its complex and divisive past. It’s a history that mirrors our region’s growing pains as few things could.
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