I MENTIONED THE CLUB

I will try to put some meat on the bones of this description from a prior post, below, about the failures of a melting pot ideology. There have been failures, and there has been some limited success.

http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2016/08/this-great-melting-pot-illusion.html

The club I referred to did not accept Catholics, even, when I was a kid. They did not accept Jews in my youth and even later. They let black people work there only.

Recently I learned that Ray Arsenault, with whom I have played tennis occasionally, is working on a book. 

There was an episode, which I heard about, as a kid, where Arthur Ashe was told to leave the club, back in the 1960s. He was there practicing for the Masters Tournament at Bartlett Park. I wasn't at the club at the time.

Back then, nothing about that episode surprised me. I was a teenager. 

Ethnic prejudice was commonplace, and not just re black people, as I have mentioned re club policy re Catholics and Jews. 

It was, and still is, actually, part of the crazy quilt fabric  of American so called melting pot life, in an important sense. These different ethnic groups did not suddenly easily mix; they had long, often very unpleasant, histories with each other in many cases.

From what I can conclude, from a side of family history seldom willingly discussed, my father was one quarter Cherokee, having had a grandmother who was a full blood Cherokee. My Cherokee great grandmother, or rather her parents or parent, may have stopped in Mississippi on the trail of tears.....

I don't recall that this issue ever came up regarding whether my father should be able to join the club or not. Maybe clubs like that didn't think to discriminate against Indians, since there were so few of them anyway. Certainly he would not have volunteered it. 

He probably mentioned that he was Methodist, as his father had been a Methodist minister, in the towns around and about Oxford Mississippi. My mother, apparently, was Baptist, of all things, although her family was Methodist too and went to her father in law's church. 

That would have been sufficient for the club.