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How To Defeat White Racists Using The Only Language They Understand
M y father, Herbert “Big Hub” Dyer, Sr., was a tall, broad-shouldered — “strappin’” — brown-skinned Black man. His canyon-deep bass voice served him well as leader of a gospel quartet called, eponymously, The Gospel Tones.
Born in thoroughly segregated Louisiana in 1922, Big Hub was also a World War II vet. After the war, he stayed in the Army and served his whole hitch in an entirely racially segregated unit right up until the day President Truman issued his Executive Order Number 9981 in 1948. That Order finally desegregated the US military.
How did he end up in the Army? Just weeks before Pearl Harbor, he and his two brothers had literally been run out of Louisiana by white racist planters and like-minded citizens because “the Dyer Boys” had finally refused to continue sharecropping and tenant farming (as their parents and grandparents had been forced to do since the end of the Civil War).
Because of sharecropping, Big Hub achieved only a third grade education and was therefore functionally illiterate. Throughout his life, his literary “skills” extended only as far as his ability to sign his name to his weekly paycheck for his “position” as a laborer in a dark, hellishly hot and filthy iron foundry in Michigan City, Indiana. That place was so dirty that before he could enter…
