Sam Bridgman joined me for a discission a few years back on the Liberty Cafe. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion; you can listen to it here. Sam and I and our families attended church together at the time. I won’t introduce Sam here; you’ll find out a lot about him in the discussion below.
Bill: My guest today is Sam Bridgman.
We have a lively men’s discussion list at the church that Sam and I both attend. And we talk about all kinds of different topics. Sometimes it’s somebody needs to borrow a chainsaw. But other times it gets into more theological discussions. And one of the things we’ve been talking about lately, not surprisingly, is all the problems with racial issues in the country today. The killings by police and the subsequent riots have brought race to the forefront for all of America, and our church community is not immune to that.
I’ve known Sam a little bit over the years, but we’ve had more conversations over our men’s list. And I thought he would be a really interesting guest to have on the Liberty Cafe today. Sam is retired now. He spent 34 years with New York life as an agent and a recruiter, and about 30 of those years as an agent training and management development. In his retirement, he’s now spending his time helping develop grandchildren as basketball players. Sam, tell me a little bit about this career.
Sam: I’ve been involved because basketball is how I was able to leave my own neighborhood in state and get a college education.
And as I like to say, basketball paid a lot of bills in my family when you consider my brother played 12 years in the NBA, I have a cousin that played in the NBA and another cousin that played overseas. And then Jackie, who I taught to play when she was six years old, went to college on a basketball scholarship and plays in Finland professionally. And so we’re really in the third or fourth generation of family members with basketball fifth generation in terms of athletes. My dad was an athlete and played professional baseball in the Negro leagues, which was the best he could do for as a professional baseball player. And he actually was a catcher and caught for satchel Paige. So a lot of sports history sports, as I said, and, and particularly basketball was paying a lot of bills.
Bill: You and I have talked a little bit already about your experiences as a young man and growing up.
And you talked some recently on the men’s list about your experience when it comes to this debate that’s going on between African-Americans being harassed or shot and killed by police and then just the black on black crime. Could you talk a little bit of that, about that, particularly in the context of your growing up?
Sam: Yes. I don’t have any problem discussing that at all.
I didn’t say where I grew up. I grew up in East Chicago, Indiana, which is right next to Gary, Indiana. A lot of people don’t know where Chicago is when you say East. Isn’t East in the Lake. It would be East of Chicago, Illinois, in Indiana, and just a small city away between us and the South side of Chicago. And so growing up, there were a lot of issues with South side of Chicago gangs who would recruit, not just in Chicago, but come into Indiana through East Chicago where I lived in Gary and go all the way up North into Michigan as far North as that they would have members. So being aware of gang and gang issues, and even then they weren’t as violent as they are today, but they were still violent.
That to me growing up was more of a concern. I got stopped by the police, but the police weren’t seen as being the villain by any stretch of imagination like they are today. And as I shared with the men’s email list, growing up I was more concerned about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, dealing with gangs and having to navigate where they are. And if we dated the girl outside of our city, having to figure out how to get in and get out without drawing any attention to ourselves. And that was a lot greater threat.
And as I mentioned, I’ve known at least two people I grew up with that were killed, not by the police, but gang related killings, as well as one or two people I know that were shot. They weren’t killed fortunately. And so from my background, and as I told people before, I played basketball not only because I liked the game and I saw it as a way to possibly get a scholarship to go to college because education was greatly reinforced by my parents. But at that time, if I was a basketball player, what gang members were actually in the Chicago, the town where I grew up, they protected the basketball players. And so I was immune from the gang draft, so to speak. And so that was another major reason to be an athlete and a basketball player.
Bill: You mentioned your family and the focus on education. What role did that play in shaping your understanding of how people of different ethnic backgrounds and race relate together?
Sam: It’s interesting because my parents never brought up racial issues, which is kind of interesting when I look back, but education issues were huge.
I’ll share a couple of things that took place when I was a child. First of all, the first time I even realized that there was a major problem because he, Chicago surprisingly was a very diverse community. And especially where I lived in the Harbor, which was closest to the Lake. And that time, the city was kind of divided by rural tracks, which who actually still is. And if you lived on the side that I lived on, that people kind of look down your nose at the people that live where I live, but where I live was very diverse. When I say diverse, not just black and white in that traditional sense, but Hispanic, Puerto Rican, Greek, Serbian, Croatian.
So growing up there and growing up together and playing on teams together. I was on a little league baseball team at 11 years old. And our little league team played in the suburb and the all-star game. And that was the first time that I ran into what could be taken as being cheated by the umpires and my parents never referred to it as anything racial, even though the other team was all white and my team was mixed dramatically. And I know it was so bad at one point that our players were crying and my parents and all the parents who came, they were totally silent in the stands. And I kept saying, why don’t they say something?
I mean, this was so bad. And so we lose the game. And the next day, my dad is at the dining table, eating breakfast before going to work and I’m complaining. And he says to me, you just have to be better and kept eating. There was no racial undertone or anything like that. And so that kind of set the tone, not only for sports, but for everything else, that you just have to be the best.
And the second thing my dad did is prior to that, when I was 10 years old and my brother junior was nine, he got us up at 5 to 5:30 in the morning. Because he had three part-time jobs that go along with his full-time job and he made us go help him with his part-time jobs. The part-time jobs were a janitorial job, cleaning up a tavern, washing windows at a men’s clothing store, and taking care of a small office building.
Constantly, he would tell us that if you don’t get a good education, this is what you’re going to be doing. And he was very disciplined because he taught us what to do and then he would come behind us and he said, that’s not good enough. Do it again. So he instilled a strong work ethic, but not only a strong work ethic, but when you do work for someone, it doesn’t matter who it is because none of the people that we worked for were black. He wanted us to do the very best that we can do. And so that was keeping in line with what we learned from my mom and actually my grandparents in terms of our faith and because we were in church every Sunday, but my mom’s position was you treat everybody right.
That was her version of the golden rule, by the way you treat everybody until they show otherwise. And she made no differentiation. So we did neither and we weren’t taught to do that. And so those things greatly influenced me and my siblings. I’m the oldest of four. It was how our parents were greatly involved in what we were doing that kept us on the straight and narrow. And my dad’s attitude was also that I’ll keep you too busy to get in trouble. And his famous line was, “If you ever get arrested, you better pray that I don’t come and get you.”
That voice came back to me one time when I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, just with some other kids and didn’t do anything wrong. This was right after Martin Luther King was assassinated. And one of the guys from the basketball team started breaking out windows and yelling, “I don’t want to take this anymore.” A so-called protest. And the police came. It was a good thing I was an athlete because there was no way I was going to get arrested. And I was more afraid of my dad coming to get me.
Bill: Well, that brings up two things for me.
One is that you had a father at home, which hasn’t been the case for a lot of young black men in more recent years. Before we get to that, I’d like to talk a little bit about where you grew up compared to growing up in the South. I mean not that things were all bad in the South, but there tended to be more violence back in the fifties and sixties, as things were erupting down there in the South. And it doesn’t sound like you’ve ever had to face those kinds of things. How do you think that maybe changes the perspective or shape the perspective of blacks who grew up in the South?
Sam: I think of two things. That I was blessed to be in a diverse community.
I think many of the people in the South during that same time period that I grew up were in more segregated communities. Their perspective to me is a lot narrower and because of maybe difficulties or hearing about difficulties and things like that shape their expectations. The closest I came, I got elected to represent my high school at a Northern Indiana conference that they were doing. And afterwards, we went with a Jewish couple, a couple of us students, and I’m in the back seat behind the driver and the dad stops to get some chips and drinks at 7-11 and acar pulls up next to me. And I don’t know where we are.
I know we’re in a white suburb somewhere. And, and then the guy in the car looks over at me and I look at him and he looks as if could kill us. The dad comes running out of the 7-11, and says, we gotta get you out of here. I don’t know what’s gone on. And, all of a sudden, I’m in a, a really a panic. What he just said and looked at this guy gave me. And he said, well, this guy is the local club’s clan leader. And so in a panic, he gets us out of there. And so if you’ve had that kind of experience in the South, I think it might color how you see the world.
I saw that difference when I was a manager prior to my career with New York life. I was a manager out of college for Sears Roebuck and Company as a customer service manager at a Sears store. There was a gentleman who was the assistant store manager from Texas. And he had the Southern kind of draw. I thought it was a good guy. And we had trainees at the time, and we had a black trainee. First, the assistant store manager came to me saying that I’m trying to help this guy, but everything I say or do doesn’t seem to make things work. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I want to see this guy succeed, can you help me? At that particular point in time, I had no idea what was going on. And ironically, about 15 minutes after this assistant store manager left, the trainee came in the same day and he sits down and he says, I think this guy’s out to get me. I asked him, “What do you base that on?” He responded that he’s always asking me about stuff, trying to help me do things. I think he wants to get rid of me. And that’s when it struck me about the differences in culture between many blacks and whites.
Then I was married to a different lady at that time that I am today. I’m happy to be married 36 years now to Yvonne. But my wife then was black and a psychology major. I talked to her about the issue when I got tested to become a manager at Sears. The, the psychology guy made a special trip from Dallas up to Denver where I was. And I asked him, was there something unusual about my exam that you made this special trip? He said, I really was looking forward to talking to you because you didn’t exhibit any paranoia, which was typical of most black trainees. And I said, well, what are you talking about? And he said, a paranoia may be too strong, a word, but just a sense of distrust and you never exhibited that. And so I shared the story with how my mom taught me to look at people. And he just was fascinated by that.
And my ex-wife thought that was the worst thing that could ever happen. How can I be that stupid and that trusting? And I thought, well, it has done well for me. I have all kinds of friends that I probably wouldn’t have if I had that paranoid type of attitude. And so I think just talking to the young gentlemen back then and talking to other people, and even recently, because of some posts that I made on Facebook that I see that same type of distrust or paranoia, whatever you want to call it where every white person is the boogeyman. And I just find that so disheartening sometimes, as well as frustrating, when dealing with people, because then you have prejudged the person long before you had any real interaction with them. And you may have missed an opportunity to have a great friend and somebody, especially from a career standpoint, that can help you in your career and move you forward and to become even more successful. You have shut the door because of this preconceived mindset that you had?
Bill: I’d like to get back a little bit to the to the father issue. Have you read Thomas Sowell’s book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals?
Sam: No, but I do like Thomas Sowell.
Bill: Me too. I think he just turned 90 if I’m not mistaken.
I read his book maybe three years ago and it fascinated me because it explained the strife we often see from more of a cultural basis than a racial basis. He gets the title for the book, black rednecks, from the culture that was imported into America from Northern England and Southern Scotland where the people were rough and they were not necessarily the hardworking Protestants that we think of in other parts of England. They came and settled in Appalachia and some other parts of the South. And they developed this Southern culture, which was much more laid back than it was in the North, even lazy. There was also less church attendance, and there was more violence than there was in lots of parts of the North.
Sowell calls that the redneck culture. It didn’t develop here in America. It actually came over from England and Scotland, and then American blacks grew up in that culture because of slavery. Sowell then explains how eventually the white immigrants grew out of that culture. They’ve moved past it, but Sowell said, if you look at the, the state of blacks in many situations, you find that many of them have not. Not everywhere of course, but he’s particularly focused on the welfare state and how the welfare state has helped keep blacks, other people too, but particularly blacks in a situation where they’re not working, where there’s not fathers in the homes, and those types of things, that have continued this redneck culture in black ghettos. I don’t think he puts it quite this way, but he talks about that if there is a problem with racism in our country, it’s the white liberals who have kept many blacks in a position where it’s very challenging and difficult to succeed. And that’s why we see a lot of the problems we see today with blacks such as low and high unemployment rates, poverty, fathers not in home, etc. Sowell says liberalism is more responsible for these situations than white racism. Any thoughts on that?
Sam: Yeah, a lot. I’ll see if I can coalesce them into something coherent here, but I agree.
I’m almost old enough to remember a little bit before the civil rights movement and the social factors that held us together, the social mores that said this behavior is not acceptable. And the impact of the church. I think undermining these was one of those consequences that people weren’t counting on, weren’t expecting, in terms of the civil rights movement. And as we moved on with Lyndon Baines Johnson, LBJ’s, New Deal or Great Society that he was trying to put together, the welfare created and supported that laziness mentality. And to me, that was one of the more detrimental things that happen.
And because there used to be at least some small businesses in the black community and a lot of those businesses that employ blacks that began to instill a different kind of work ethic than the one that you just described that came out of the Southern culture that got eliminated. And then you turn around and create a welfare state that says that work and men can’t be in your life. So it just promoted the things to me that exacerbated the problems that were already there or already growing, just made them a lot worse. I think it is critical that dads be in the home that they represent what they’re supposed to represent and even more so if they can be taught to be godly dads and what that truly means. And right now, when you add on top of everything that the government did with the marriage penalty tax, the welfare state rules, and regulations, human nature just wants to take the path of least resistance.
So if I can get money, then I’ll stay on welfare. And when you put all that together, and then you throw on top of that a music culture that glorifies bad behavior, whether is the so-called gangster or the drug culture, it was all a formula for disaster. And if you follow the money, there’s people making money. I think on the backs of those people and welfare and all the things that come out of that higher crime rates, higher incarceration rates, higher rates of out of wedlock kids and murder. Because there must be, at least I believe that there’s money being made, because our leaders who’ve been in there for years, don’t seem to want to address the root of the problem.
The police to me and the shootings as bad as they are a symptom. The root of the problem starts with the breakdown of the home. And nobody’s really wanting to address that the breakdown of values and from a Christian perspective, not seeing the other person as being made in the image of Christ or being, as even our constitution says, all men are created equal. Even if we could get to that, we would be a lot better off than we are today. Is it any wonder we have all the problems that we have?
Bill: No, no it’s not.
You’ve talked a bit about the focus of the church, responding to these injustices, is basically apologizing and repenting for being white, and how they have missed the real needs and the action that the church should be taking. Could you tell us a little about your thoughts about how the evangelical church is missing the mark and what they should be doing better?
Sam: To me, it’s kind of almost, if it wasn’t so sad, laughable.
The church needs to do what the church is called to do, and that is share the gospel and go out and make disciples. And to do that, we have to get out of our comfort zone. Making disciples of people that are just like those in the church is fine. But the call is to go out into the world. And sometimes we’re more likely to want to send a missionary to another country than we are to another neighborhood in our own town. And to me, that’s where it should be. Apologizing does not do a lot of good far as I’m concerned. And if you really want to show the love of Christ, you do that by talking to people, finding out and meeting them where they are dealing with their physical needs and then their spiritual needs.
And just like I said, the person needs food. You just don’t tell him go away and feel warm. They need food and clothing, you can help with, but you do it in such a way where you’re able to go out and share the gospel. And that’s what the church should be doing. It should be looking at opportunities right around or as close as possible to where the church is. And so maybe the church is not near a black neighborhood. Doesn’t have to be, it can partner with ministers at a black church. Hopefully that the theology is not so far skewed that we can’t come together on that issue and then find out what can we do to help you reach your people, to make a difference in the lives of the community.
It’s that type of action that is needed, not sitting around and saying, “We’re sorry for what our ancestors did.” And even if it’s just previous church leadership in the denomination we’re in right now, it doesn’t matter what they did. And we shouldn’t be held accountable for what somebody did 20 years or 30 years or 200 years ago. The question should be what are we going to do now to move towards the future that Christ has called us to do, which is to go out into the world and make disciples. The church already knows what it should be doing because we’ve read it. It just needs to do it.
Bill: I couldn’t agree with that more.
As you know, I have a background in public policy. And I’ve spent a lot of time coming up with different ideas for how government can reform what it’s doing to improve things. But it’s the same thing in that area as what you’re talking about here. All those ideas are fine about how we can decrease poverty or increase prosperity or deal with racial strife, those kinds of things. But none of that is ultimately going to make a difference unless the church is doing its work. Of course, the Holy spirit will do its work, but it sure would be nice if the church, all of us, got on board and worked along with it.
Sam: Absolutely. Because ultimately, it is a heart issue.
The heart of man, whether in the black community, white community, green, yellow, whatever, it’s the heart of man and all the government policies, all the so-called education and retraining, whether you’re talking about police or any other institution is not going to work. If the heart stays the same and the only people, what the answer for that is the church.
Bill: Amen. Thank you very much, Sam, for being with me today on the Liberty Cafe. It has been a pleasure.
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