traveling together in a car, looking like old friends. Altogether, it seemed a much more relaxed atmosphere than in Mississippi.
I drove on, through rolling, open countryside. There were some cotton fields still, but mostly this was dairy country, with green fields and bright sunshine. In the late afternoon, almost the early evening, I reached Tuskegee, home of the Tuskegee Institute. Founded by Booker T. Washington and developed by George Washington Carver, it is America’s premier college for blacks. It is also the seat of one of the poorest counties in America. Eighty-two percent of the county population is black. More than half the county residents live below the poverty level. Almost a third of them still don’t have indoor plumbing. That is really poor. Where I come from you are poor if you can’t afford a refrigerator that makes its own ice cubes and your car doesn’t have automatic windows. Not having running water in the house is something beyond the realms of the imaginable to most Americans.
The most startling thing about Tuskegee was that it was completely black. It was in every respect a typical small American city, except that it was poor, with lots of boarded shopfronts and general dereliction, and that every person in every car, every pedestrian, every storekeeper, every fireman, every postman, every last soul was black. Except me. I had never felt so self-conscious, so visible. I suddenly appreciated what a black person must feel like in North Dakota. I stopped at a Burger King for a cup of coffee. There must have been fifty people in there. I was the only person who wasn’t black, but no one seemed to notice or care. It was an odd sensation—and rather a relief, I must say, to get back out on the highway.
I drove on to Auburn, twenty miles to the northeast. Auburn is also a college town and roughly the same size as Tuskegee, but the contrast could hardly have been more striking. Auburn students were white and rich. One of the first sights I saw was a blonde sweeping past in a replica Duesenberg that must have cost her daddy $25,000. It was obviously a high-school graduation present. If I could have run fast enough to keep up, I would happily have urinated all down the side of it. Coming so soon after the poverty of Tuskegee, it made me feel strangely ashamed.
However, I must say that Auburn appeared to be a pleasant town. I’ve always liked college towns anyway. They are about the only places in America that manage to combine the benefits of a small-town pace of life with a dash of big-city sophistication. They usually have nice bars and restaurants, more interesting shops, an altogether more worldly air. And there is a pleasing sense of being around 20,000 young people who are having the best years of their lives.
In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren’t available, but at least you did it. Nowadays, American students’ principal concerns seem to be sex and keeping their clothes looking nice. I don’t think learning comes into it very much. At the time of my trip there was an outcry in America over the contagion of ignorance that appeared to be sweeping through the nation’s young people. The principal focus of this nationwide wrist-wringing was a study by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It had recently tested 8,000 high-school seniors and found that they were as stupid as pig dribble. More than two-thirds of them did not know when the US Civil War took place, couldn’t identify Stalin or Churchill, and didn’t know who wrote The Canterbury Tales. Almost half thought World War I started before 1900. A third thought that Roosevelt was president during the Vietnam War and that Columbus sailed to America after 1750. Forty-two percent—this is my favorite—couldn’t name a single country in Asia. I would scarcely have believed all this myself except that
I drove on, through rolling, open countryside. There were some cotton fields still, but mostly this was dairy country, with green fields and bright sunshine. In the late afternoon, almost the early evening, I reached Tuskegee, home of the Tuskegee Institute. Founded by Booker T. Washington and developed by George Washington Carver, it is America’s premier college for blacks. It is also the seat of one of the poorest counties in America. Eighty-two percent of the county population is black. More than half the county residents live below the poverty level. Almost a third of them still don’t have indoor plumbing. That is really poor. Where I come from you are poor if you can’t afford a refrigerator that makes its own ice cubes and your car doesn’t have automatic windows. Not having running water in the house is something beyond the realms of the imaginable to most Americans.
The most startling thing about Tuskegee was that it was completely black. It was in every respect a typical small American city, except that it was poor, with lots of boarded shopfronts and general dereliction, and that every person in every car, every pedestrian, every storekeeper, every fireman, every postman, every last soul was black. Except me. I had never felt so self-conscious, so visible. I suddenly appreciated what a black person must feel like in North Dakota. I stopped at a Burger King for a cup of coffee. There must have been fifty people in there. I was the only person who wasn’t black, but no one seemed to notice or care. It was an odd sensation—and rather a relief, I must say, to get back out on the highway.
I drove on to Auburn, twenty miles to the northeast. Auburn is also a college town and roughly the same size as Tuskegee, but the contrast could hardly have been more striking. Auburn students were white and rich. One of the first sights I saw was a blonde sweeping past in a replica Duesenberg that must have cost her daddy $25,000. It was obviously a high-school graduation present. If I could have run fast enough to keep up, I would happily have urinated all down the side of it. Coming so soon after the poverty of Tuskegee, it made me feel strangely ashamed.
However, I must say that Auburn appeared to be a pleasant town. I’ve always liked college towns anyway. They are about the only places in America that manage to combine the benefits of a small-town pace of life with a dash of big-city sophistication. They usually have nice bars and restaurants, more interesting shops, an altogether more worldly air. And there is a pleasing sense of being around 20,000 young people who are having the best years of their lives.
In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren’t available, but at least you did it. Nowadays, American students’ principal concerns seem to be sex and keeping their clothes looking nice. I don’t think learning comes into it very much. At the time of my trip there was an outcry in America over the contagion of ignorance that appeared to be sweeping through the nation’s young people. The principal focus of this nationwide wrist-wringing was a study by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It had recently tested 8,000 high-school seniors and found that they were as stupid as pig dribble. More than two-thirds of them did not know when the US Civil War took place, couldn’t identify Stalin or Churchill, and didn’t know who wrote The Canterbury Tales. Almost half thought World War I started before 1900. A third thought that Roosevelt was president during the Vietnam War and that Columbus sailed to America after 1750. Forty-two percent—this is my favorite—couldn’t name a single country in Asia. I would scarcely have believed all this myself except that
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