The Japanese-American truck driver who is giving the young black sailor a lift into Honolulu from Manana Barracks, the black naval camp near Pearl Harbor during World War II, keeps staring down in the direction of the sailor’s hips. He asks several times “Are you comfortable?” and apologizes for his uncomfortable truck. The sailor is perplexed, reassures the driver that he is quite comfortable. Finally, the driver blurts out, “How do you fellows manage this?” “Oh my God,” the sailor moans to himself. “Is this guy talking about how Negroes have huge dicks?” It turns out that the driver is worried instead about the sailor’s tail. The white sailors at the naval base have told him all about the tail the coloreds have at the end of their spines.
Apparently the instruction sheet the Navy put out on how to handle “Negroes” didn’t include information about college-educated blacks. It wasn’t just that he was educated; Jarrett was not very subservient. He protested loudly when he and the other blacks were forced to shave off their mustaches. “You don’t know what a mustache means to a Negro,” he tried to explain. For blacks, he insisted, a mustache is a sign of manhood–in that time of Jim Crow it was one of the few symbols of masculinity that a black man could call his own.
He is still protesting injustice (including the injustices blacks commit against blacks), still raising hackles in the white community as he raised hackles in the Navy. But it is not likely that any of Jarrett’s protests will receive more attention than the last one. The evening of November 30, the day that Mayor Harold Washington was buried, Jarrett attended a memorial service being held at the University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion. Jarrett had something to say. WBEZ personality Richard Steele, emcee of the program, recalls turning around to find Jarrett at his elbow and professor Conrad Worrill of Northeastern Illinois University, who organized the event, explaining that Jarrett would now make a few remarks.
“Some . . . demanded that Mr. Jarrett be fired immediately. Some others said that any action against Mr. Jarrett would be terribly unfair and a signal to the proreform people that we as an institution favor machine politicians.
Jarrett heard directly from some of his readers. One letter said, “I only buy the Sun-Times on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays [when Jarrett’s column appears] and I wouldn’t buy it at all if it were not for the tremendous respect I have for you.” Another said, “Thank you for speaking out. Many white people don’t seem to know what our struggle is about–that’s why they’re so quick to censor us.”
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To my response that I was not outraged by Jarrett’s words, Vrdolyak said, “I hope I’m speaking English. You wouldn’t be offended in the slightest to have someone who has a TV commentary and an article in the Chicago Sun-Times three days a week, you would like to have him go to every high school and grammar school in this country and say to them, if they don’t do something about them, they will destroy us before the white man can get to us? What this guy said is the same language the KKK uses, the Nazi party uses, right-wing, far left-wing, crazy groups use, and here it’s what is supposed to be a responsible journalist. The Sun-Times took a lot of heat for it.”
Jarrett was, indeed, very close to the mayor. Washington’s press secretary, Alton Miller, remembers that “Vernon was one of the few people who could show up unannounced at City Hall and be in talking to the mayor for a few minutes between appointments or for very long conversations at the end of the day. He had all the mayor’s phone numbers and called him at any time.”
