I Moved to a White, Affluent U.S City. Then the Hate Crime Happened

I was born in the South but raised in Cleveland, Ohio, during the turbulent 1970s. For those unfamiliar with the city, race relations were far from harmonious back then.

There were streets and blocks where, as a person of color, you dared not venture without risking your life. The racial segregation was stark, with schools and neighborhoods divided along color lines.

In the first grade, I was bused to a predominantly white school an hour away from my home. I remember my mom waking me up at 6:00 a.m., standing at the bus stop in the dark, cold morning, waiting for the bus to whisk me away.

The school was primarily white, but the kids on my bus were mostly black, although they weren’t affluent. It seemed the welcome mat wasn’t out for us, and while the teachers and faculty were nice, many of the kids wanted nothing to do with us.

My mother dressed me in my finest clothes, and I excelled academically, but I couldn’t fathom why I had to wake up two hours earlier to go to a school that wasn’t all that different from the one just two streets away from our house.

Every day after school, I’d run to the library on my street, asking the librarians to show me books about slavery, segregation, and stories that delved into America’s racial relations. My response wasn’t anger—it was curiosity, an insatiable desire to understand our shared history and why people harbored prejudice against those who looked different from them.

A few years later, my mother remarried, and we moved to Euclid, which at the time, was an affluent, all-white suburban neighborhood in Cleveland. This move felt like my own version of the “Movin’ On Up” ideology made famous by The Jeffersons TV show. However, the start was far from smooth.

Our first night in our new house ended with an alarming discovery. I waved goodbye to the moving van from my bedroom window, which faced a lovely street with a charming cul-de-sac. I was excited about riding my bike up and down the street and making new friends in preparation for my first day of sixth grade the following morning.

When my mother entered my room, she seemed frantic and tried to maintain a brave, cheerful facade, though something felt amiss. I was busy recounting a dream I had the previous night about being in the middle of a war with bombs exploding around me, but my mother’s response was unexpected. “You heard the bombs?” she asked.

As it turned out, that “dream” wasn’t a dream at all. My mother instructed me to get dressed for school and assured me that she’d explain everything soon. Her nervous chatter and shaky hands left me uneasy. As she spoke, I realized that everything wasn’t fine, despite her words.

Voices and doors opening and closing rapidly downstairs caught my attention, so I rushed to my bedroom window. Outside, I saw three white news trucks, one of them labeled Cleveland Plain Dealer, our local paper. There were several police cars and black sedans with tinted windows.

My mother quickly revealed that someone had burned a cross in our front yard and set off small pipe bombs at our front door to frighten us out of the neighborhood. As a kid, I could only feel anger and frustration that some jerk had chosen to ruin my first day of school.

That day, an FBI escort accompanied my parents’ car to school. I was popular, but not in the way a sixth grader dreams of being. Teachers approached me, offering hugs and sympathy, as news of the burning cross and bombs had made headlines.

In less than 24 hours, the FBI had identified the perpetrator through fingerprints found on bomb fragments. It was the son of a neighbor, and his actions were classified as a hate crime with the potential for prison time if found guilty.

My stepfather, however, chose not to press charges. Instead, he opted for an unusual punishment: the young man had to personally repair all the damage he had caused to our property.

He had to clean up the glass, and debris, and fix everything with his own hands so that he understood the consequences of his actions. It was a lesson about the real impact of his actions on real people.

In the end, the young man’s parents were deeply grateful, and he offered a heartfelt apology. The power of forgiveness became evident, and it underscored the importance of seeing people as individuals rather than reducing them to their race. It’s far easier to ignore someone’s humanity when we let biases drive our judgments.

The forgiveness shown by my stepfather was even more profound considering his own experiences growing up in the rural South of South Carolina, where sharecropping wasn’t all that different from slavery.

Sharecropping was a system that kept former slave families tethered to the land, preventing them from pursuing other opportunities. Landlords allowed sharecropping tenants, often descendants of former slave families, to use their land in exchange for a share of the crop.

After the Civil War, many African American families rented land from their former white slave owners, primarily cultivating cash crops like cotton, tobacco, and rice. The system perpetuated a cycle of debt, with landlords often offering equipment, seeds, and food on credit. At harvest, they’d calculate who owed what, but unfair practices and unscrupulous landlords kept sharecroppers deeply indebted.

Laws that favored landowners, restricting sharecroppers from selling their crops to anyone but their landlords or limiting their mobility if they were in debt, effectively continued the legacy of slavery. It was a system designed to keep former slaves tied to the land, unable to break free.

Although I was born decades after sharecropping ended, I had my own experiences of racial discrimination. Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio during the tumultuous 1970s exposed me to the harsh realities of racial segregation and discrimination, from being bused to a predominantly white school to witnessing hate crimes firsthand.

Despite facing adversity, my response was curiosity, fueled by a desire to comprehend America’s complex racial history. Through forgiveness and understanding, I discovered the transformative power of empathy and the imperative of dismantling racial barriers to create a more harmonious life experience.

In my writing, I weave fictional stories about people from different races, backgrounds, and geographical locations who find a way to love and care for each other. My hope is that one day, these stories will become a reality for all of us.

Love Hudson-Maggio is the CEO and founder of Mar Dat, a marketing technology firm. She writes southern women’s fiction with a travel flair about smart people with a lot to learn about life and love. Karma Under Fire is her first novel, with its sequel Bombay Baby forthcoming in September.

All views expressed are the author’s own.

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