As my father tells the story, he was making his usual Mach 3 time coming down the roads of Alabama, one March day in 1965, when traffic began slowing, and police officers waved him to the side of the road.
He was just coming up on the Edmund Pettus Bridge into Selma. He pulled over, got out, and watched Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lead about 2,500 marchers up onto the bridge, where they prayed, turned around, and walked back in the other direction.
It was part of the fallout of a time very much like what this week has been in America – a young, unarmed black man killed by a white law enforcement officer, violence and pushback following. And it’s one of many snapshots our family has of our brushes with various aspects of the civil rights movement, living in the South at the height of that conflict.
My parents used to say that the differences back then between North and South were that a great many in the South cared about blacks as individuals, but looked down on them as a race … while a great many in the North cared about blacks as a race, but didn’t particularly like being around them. My parents’ experiences, growing up, echoed that.
My dad’s folks lived in Nashville, where his father was vice president of a regional department store chain. He had started out as a boy sweeping floors in those stores, struggling to support his widowed mother and a half-dozen younger brothers and sisters. Later in life, he was fairly well off, but he’d known what it was to be poor.
My dad’s mother had worked hard, too. She left home as a teenager, when her widowed father married a woman my grandmother didn’t get along with. She took her little brother with her, working a variety of jobs across the South to support them both during those Roaring 20’s.
Whatever her experiences, my grandmother became a woman wary of blacks, and the more the tumults of the civil rights movement engulfed her time and place, the warier she became.
As a little boy living in then-volatile Memphis, I took it into my head one year to ask for a “black G.I. Joe” for Christmas. Had my heart set on it. Came Christmas day, and I tore into the G.I. Joe-sized box beneath the tree. It was from my grandmother, and it was … a white G.I. Joe. I was disappointed, but a new toy’s a new toy. The next day, after my grandparents headed for home, my mother signaled me to follow her to an upstairs closet, where she pulled out another package. Inside was the black G.I. Joe.
I remember the thrill at having two action figures … and something my mother said, as she handed me the package. “I’m sorry – but your grandmother would not have understood.”
Whatever her personal discomfits, though, she and my grandfather raised their children to show people of all races grace and respect. He didn’t see a lot of blacks in the management ranks of his business, but he knew all the men who worked in the warehouses – their families, many of their problems, how they were doing financially. He took pains to make sure they were paid well and treated fairly. When he retired, he received a number of kind letters from those men, expressing gracious thanks for his help along the way.
My mother’s folks lived in southern Mississippi. They were very poor, and worked a small cotton farm, planting and picking alongside blacks and interacting with them on a daily basis. Many were good friends, and would come by the house to say hello, maybe bring some extra vegetables. My grandparents enjoyed visiting with them, gave them a glass of something cool … but only on the front porch. In that time, and that place, whites were not supposed to invite blacks inside.
By today’s standards, that might be looked on as bigotry. But bigotry was not what my grandparents, on either side, engrained in their children.
Which is why, years later, my mother got into so much trouble. She was in nursing school down in Florida, and saw that, of the two patients wheeled in before her one evening – one black, one white – it was the black man most urgently in need of immediate assistance. She did what she could for him, then turned and helped the other fellow.
Her supervisor, it turned out, did not appreciate her priorities – Mother came within a whisper of losing her career. But she had no doubt she had done the right thing … and would do it again, more than once, in the years ahead.
One Sunday evening a decade later, my dad was called to the pastor’s office, a little while before the evening service was to begin. Dad was youth minister at our Monroe, Louisiana church, and that morning the congregation had been surprised when a black family slipped in and joined us for worship. Not everyone was pleased.
At an impromptu meeting of some deacons that afternoon, it was determined to meet the family, should they choose to return that evening, on the front steps. With baseball bats. The pastor learned of the plan, summoned my dad, and asked if he’d mind going out to disperse the deacons and take away their clubs. Which Dad did.
We moved to Memphis a year after Dr. King was killed there. Racial relations were still tense, and often violent. I was in third grade when the first black child came into our classroom. It caused quite a stir among the other kids, and I remember trying to figure out why. The boy was exceedingly unhappy to be there, and it took half the year for his anger to settle, for a truce to be reached between him and our teacher, and for him to let us naturally include him in our class activities and recess games.
The next year, something even more radical happened: my school hired its first black teacher, and I was in her class. For the first month of school, I had her practically to myself. The parents of most of the other students kept their children home in protest. It was just me, one little girl, and Ms. Carr.
I don’t remember what those micro-classes were like, or how the other kids eventually drifted back in and repopulated all the empty desks. But I do remember the extraordinary kindness and understanding Ms. Carr showed to me during one of the most difficult years of my young life. She is, to this day, my favorite of all the teachers I’ve ever had.
It is a revealing indication of these tolerant times we live in that so many of us demand that people of all times and all places adhere to the same standards and practices we do.
We make no room for the possibility that people did then what people do now, which is to say, the best they could. To rise above the worst in themselves and others … to learn from, or move past, their own experiences … to embrace what was good, and shake off what was wrong, in what they had seen and heard and been raised to believe.
None of us see the whole picture. None of us fathom all of the details and nuances of the history swirling around us … of the attitudes some flaunt, some hide, some grapple with in themselves.
Things are so different now from what they were when my grandparents were my age … when my parents were young … when I was a child. And so very much the same. The senseless killings and the thrown bricks, the marches and the placards, the sacrifices and the posturing.
We fight to expose the racism. And in many ways, feed it. We expose and magnify our terrible shortcomings, and obscure and belittle our real accomplishments. We drive the wedges between ourselves, by undermining all so many have done, in a million small conversations and kindnesses, across decades upon decades, to heal wounds and change hearts.
Because, for some sad reason, we want to accentuate evil, more than we want to look for – and remember – and celebrate – good.
I hope the man whose life my mom helped save is a grand old fellow now, enjoying his great grandchildren. I hope the family my dad intervened for on the steps of an old Southern church were able to raise their children in faith. And forgiveness.
And God bless you, Ms. Carr, wherever you are.
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