David Caldwell Jr. - Being the Son of a Black Cop (clip)

Blanche Brown (BB): So sort of backtracking a little bit, your father is featured in the Courage In The Moment book. Have you seen the book?

David Caldwell, Jr. (DC): Yes.

BB: What was your first impression?

DC: Very impressed. Well you remember the picture, the cover of the book?

BB: Hilliard Caldwell?

DC: That’s my uncle, that’s my father’s brother. It’s just weird to see the activist and the enforcer at the same time, and coming from the same family. And again, like I said, it made the Thanksgiving table very interesting.

BB: Yeah, was there tension?

DC: No, no, no, not at all. They were — we were all very close, very cordial, and you know that was your thing. And the thing about it was that you got to know there were few activists that really knew what was going on with the enforcement, and the same thing very few enforcement [officers] knowing what’s going on with the activists. So it just made all of us more knowledgeable when people were talking. We kind of knew the actual deal — what was really going on, not that we were going around saying “that’s not true.” Just to listen and observe and see what’s going and know the truth when you’re listening to somebody else, it’s like, “Wow, you can’t trust anybody. You can’t, you don’t know what they’re saying.” We know the facts, that type of deal. So that’s the way it was, pretty much.

BB: Yeah. How did your dad feel about being a Black policeman in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement?

DC: He had a family to feed. You know, I don’t remember he or my mom ever having less than two jobs, leaving one and going to the other. So a lot of the stuff we picked up. I mean, I remember them both coming home and my brothers and I had dinner on the table, and clothes washed and folded up, and the kitchen clean, and all they had to do was eat and go to bed and get ready for the next job. So, we did that on lots of occasions and we always understood the sacrifice that they made for us. End of the year was like you graduate and you want a yearbook? Well we knew what it was like, so we’d get one yearbook and he [my brother] would take it one day and get all his friends to sign it for him and I’d take it the next day and get all my friends to sign. You know those types of things that we did. We were always very quick. We knew that as soon as school was out, we were getting a job. We didn’t have to be told, but if you wanted that little bit of independence, you did it. [My father] did not do it [his job] with any hostility to either side. He was–I remember him saying lots of times, “I hate it, but I’m just doing my job. Nothing personal, nothing against you.” My brothers and I had to fight almost every day at Phillips (Guy B. Phillips Middle School) because either he arrested some Black guy’s father or some white guy’s father or whatever. So they were all [like] that’s Caldwell, that’s one of the Caldwells, so my brothers and I were real tight when it came to fighting other people. That was one of the things we had to deal with.