Poster "webster" has it right when it came to the rights and circumstances of different groups in the 50s.
Allow me to ramble on a bit about what it was like here in New England in the 50s. I lived in a house in a city until I was seven years old. We had poor families and we had average families. My family was average. They had just bought the house and my dad was fixing it up. I had a nice yard and I could walk to school. My best friend lived down the street in a tenement with no backyard.
In kindergarten we went to school half days and we had all kinds of kids. We even had some black kids. In fact, in grade one, my best school friend was black. I don't know where she lived but she would wait for me on the playground and when she saw me coming her face would light up. She'd clap her hands and I'd start running to her and then we'd hug. I don't know what we saw in each other but while the other kids were playing organized games like tag this girl and I ran loose. We'd race and chase and we were different from the rest. I can still see her standing there with her pigtails with ribbons in them and a pretty dress. At the end of the school day everyone dispersed in different directions to walk home. I don't know if black kids lived in certain neighborhoods in the city; I didn't know where any of my school friends lived, but I still remember some of their names and there were Italian kids--a group that was often looked down upon. I had such a crush on a boy who had an Italian name but my actual first grade boyfriend was not Italian or any other ethic group.
Unfortunately the next year my dad got a great new job. We lived with my grandparents out in the country for most of that year and I went to another school. In third grade I started in the snobby suburban town so my dad could be close to his new job.
It was in this town that I learned about discrimination and hatred. There were no black people at all. I remember only two Italian kids in my grade and they were somewhat "poor" and were looked down upon. I was looked down upon as were the people in my neighborhood of middle class people. We consisted of teachers, retirees, a school principal, a retired school superintendent, a couple of factory workers--my neighborhood was "poor" in that town.
Divisions were severe. The town was divided by religion though, not by race. In my neighborhood my best friend was Irish Catholic and she would tell me (Protestant) that I would go to Hell because I wasn't Catholic. She would ofen duck into her church on the way home from school and tell me that I wasn't allowed. But Catholics and Protestants co-mingled at the expensive, exclusive town country club which neither of our parents could afford.
The third group was Jewish. Those kids got out of school for the afternoon every so often to attend Hebrew School. It left the rest of us with nothing to do but busy work with so many missing. I didn't know it at the time but their parents weren't allowed to join the ritzy country club. I got to be good friends with a Jewish girl and she invited me to the Jewish Community Center where there was an indoor pool! I was really excited and then her mom told her to un-invite me because I was not Jewish. Not too far after that she told her daughter not to be friends with me! We had been such good friends that I could walk right into her house without even knocking. We used to do our homework together. They had a maid (black or white? I don't remember.)
Moving on with the divisions within this snobby, wealthy town, most of us went to a ballroom dancing class once a week right after school. I suffered through one year of it and then my dad learned that Jewish kids did not get invitations to the dancing school. He pulled me right out of there. I was just glad to be out!
We did see a few black people but they didn't live in town. We'd see them sitting on a bench waiting for a bus. They were people's maids. I didn't look down on them. I just thought it seemed weird and as a kid, I didn't understand it.
Around the time I was in 6th grade, there was a feeling of unrest in our middle class neighborhood. A wonderful family (boys were Eagle Scouts, the little girl was adorable, the parents were really nice) were going to move away.
Those two boys used to look out for the younger kids in the neighborhood, even organizing games for big groups of kids after supper until it was time to go in. But there was something else going on too.
When I asked my mother what all the "hush hush" whispering among the neighbors was about, she told me that a family of black people might move into that house. At my age I was puzzled as to what was wrong with that. She told me that it could bring property values down.
People in those days were trying to better themselves, it was a time of opportunity, and if they'd invested in a house, they didn't want to lose out. Ours was an affordable neighborhood of older homes--most were in nice condition--but it wasn't like the rest of the town with its staid old mansions, or picturesque antique homes which had been built hundreds of years ago or planned areas that were designed by famous landscape architects back in the 1920s as refuges for wealthy city dwellers to relax in peace and quiet.
But no worries--no black family ever moved into the neighborhood. As I said, certain ethnic groups were looked down upon and it was said that if an Italian family lived in this town they would have to be in the Mafia to afford it.
I don't think I ever hung out with a Mafia kid but my younger sister did! Her friend lived in a nice house and she took my sister to the city to see the pizza shop where she said her dad and uncle held secret meetings in a back room. (Turned out to be all too true.
) The Italian kids that I knew in town were not well off--no beautiful house, no new car, no cashmere sweaters, no annually redecorated house--I got along well with those kids but they were definitely not on the A List.
Meanwhile in the neighboring town, which had been separated from my town as it was looked down up because it was "the other side of the tracks" there were kids of all kinds. That town even had a few factories and farms. That town would have been the average all American town back in the 50s in my part of the country. I don't know if they had black people, I don't know if ethinic groups were looked down upon. When my parents moved there after we kids had graduated high school in the snobby town, I found that the people were nice and really down to earth. We probably had moved to that snobby town for its outstanding school system.