Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [68]
The Elks Club owned a beautiful course that was not as crowded as the Flint public courses, but you had to be a member. So it was with some disappointment when my dad went out to the Elks Club to join that he was confronted with a line printed at the top of the application:
CAUCASIANS ONLY
Being a Caucasian, this should not have been a problem for Frank Moore. Being a man of some conscience, though, it gave him pause. He brought the form home and showed me.
“What do you think about this?” he asked me.
I read the Caucasian line and had two thoughts:
Are we down South? (How much more north can you get than Michigan?)
Isn’t this illegal?
My dad was clearly confused about the situation. “Well, I don’t think I can sign this piece of paper,” he said.
“No, you can’t,” I said. “Don’t worry. We can still golf at the I.M.A.”
He would occasionally go back to the Elks course if invited by friends, but he would not join. He was not a civil rights activist. He generally didn’t vote because he didn’t want to be called for jury duty. He had all the misguided racial “worries” white people of his generation had. But he also had a very basic sense of right and wrong and of setting an example for his children. And because the union had insisted on integrating the factories as early as the 1940s, he worked alongside men and women of all races and, as is the outcome of such social engineering, he grew to see all people as the same (or at least “the same” as in “all the same in God’s eyes”).
Now, here I was, standing there in front of this Elks Club poster next to the vending machine. The best way to describe my feelings at that moment is that I was seventeen. What do you do at seventeen when you observe hypocrisy or encounter an injustice? What if they are the same thing? Whether it’s the local ladies’ club refusing to let a black lady join, or a segregated men’s club like the Elks that has the audacity to sponsor a contest on the life of the Great Emancipator, when you’re seventeen you have no tolerance for this kind of crime. Hell hath no indignation like that of a teenager who has forgotten his main mission was to retrieve a bag of Ruffles potato chips.
“They want a speech?” I thought, a goofy smile now making its way across my face. “I think I’m gonna go write me a speech.”
I hurried back to my room, sans the bag of Ruffles, got out my pad of paper, my trusty Bic pen, and all the fury I could muster.
“How dare the Elks Club besmirch the fine name of Abraham Lincoln by sponsoring a contest like this!” I began, thinking I would lead with subtlety and save the good stuff for later. “Have they no shame? How is it that an organization that will not allow black people into their club is a part of Boys State, spreading their bigotry under the guise of doing something good? What kind of example is being set for the youth here? Who even allowed them in here? If Boys State is to endorse any form of segregation, then by all means, let it be the segregation that separates these racists from the rest of us who believe in the American Way! How dare they even enter these grounds!”
I went on to tell the story of my dad going to join the Elks and refusing to do so. I quoted Lincoln (my mother’s continual stops at Gettysburg whenever we drove to New York would now pay off). And I closed by saying, “It is my sincere hope that the Elks change their segregationist policies—and that Boys State never, ever invites them back here again.”
I skipped dinner, putting the final touches on the speech, rewriting it a couple times on the pad of paper, and then fell asleep listening to Sly Stone.
The next morning, all speech contestants were instructed to show up in a School of Social Work classroom and give their speech. There were fewer than a dozen of us in the room and, much to my surprise (and relief), there was no one present from the Elks Club. Instead, the speeches were to be judged by a lone high school forensics teacher from Lansing. I took a seat in the back of the room and listened to the boys who went before me. They spoke in