On The Freedom Trail: So Much To Learn

Monument at Brown's Chapel, Selma, AL

For the last three days I have been on the trail of a man who started his public ministry the year before I was born...and knew almost nothing about until after he was assassinated...well after....like, until now. Sure, by the time I was in high school, I had heard of MLK. I had seen clips of his prophetic speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I knew he was a proponent of nonviolent resistance to oppressive racism and was on various occasions beaten and jailed for his trouble. I knew he was a Baptist preacher who embraced Gandhi and opposed the war in Vietnam. And yet on this trip to Selma, Montgomery and Atlanta, with stops yet to come in Memphis, Birmingham and Sumner / Money Mississippi, I find myself overwhelmed with how much I have never known before. 

Some of my enlightenment has come from a book that should be required reading for everyone in the USA, White Rage by Carol Anderson, which details among other things, the truth about the re-enslavement of (mainly) Southern African Americans shortly after the end of the Civil War. I had heard of Jim Crow...but had no idea what it really meant.

I would like to claim that I can be forgiven for such gross ignorance. After all, I spent my formative years on USAF bases. The US military had been integrated by Truman in 1948. I grew up in integrated neighborhoods (base housing) and went to integrated schools before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 sought to address the slow progress that should have been made in response to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. I had black playmates and friends. Black families went to the Protestant Chapel on-base where my dad served as the Chaplin. They were in my Sunday School classes and Children's Choir. I almost didn't know there was a problem...almost.

Now and then we would visit my folks home town, Chickasha, Oklahoma. I remember being shocked at the harsh language I heard there. I have a faint recollection of my mom's warning that things were "different" there. I heard about how my maternal grandmother, after the death of her Southern Baptist deacon husband, my grandfather, had sometime after his death and long before I was born, found his Klan robe...and burned it in the trash barrel behind her house. I learned my gentle paternal grandfather, who I knew and loved, also a deacon in the Southern Baptist church, the one that stood 20 feet behind his back fence, had also, like most of the young white business men in the area, spent some time in the Klan. I had walked the Chickasha cemetery as a ten year old boy, hunting targets with my BB gun and reading the rusting Confederate Veteran markers on a dozen Chapman graves. I knew things had been bad. I knew there were still some...a few...bitter, ignorant, hateful people.

I knew so little.

My dad was tossed out of the Air Force due to poor vision and we moved to Lubbock Texas, civilians at last. I had a year and a half at a Jr High School named for the Army Colonel who eradicated the Comanche population from West Texas, completely oblivious to that horror, and little noticing that I had no African American classmates. Through my High School career I had one, as did my friends at our cross-town rival school, but somehow suffered no pangs knowing full well there were two other schools on the east side of town, Estacado and Dunbar, that had an almost exclusively minority populations. 

I had one black teacher. He was universally feared by the student body. Mr. Fuller. He taught Senior English. He was by far the smartest, most articulate, most professional and most demanding teacher in the school. If you got Fuller you were going to work your ass off, or fail...and many did. We had assigned seats and when mid-lecture, his finger would fall on a box on his seating chart that held our names, we would be addressed as "Mr. Jones" or "Miss Perkins" and we were expected to stand and deliver with proper diction and intelligence. But he was always one step beyond the school dress code, in a moustache when students were required to be clean shaven and in a full beard when moustaches were allowed. We knew he embodied a subtitle knowing resistance.  And we loved him more than we feared him...and we learned...but not about the struggle. Not about Civil Rights. Not about why he resisted...not really.

Sure we had a TV. Ours was black & white, not color. Maybe that made the evening news reports I certainly saw of ghettos on fire seem unreal. Maybe it was the war and the looming prospect of the Draft. Maybe that somehow overshadowed what was happening to our neighbors at home. We even read, Black Like Me by John Griffin and got some sense of the injustice of poverty...but somehow never had a clue about how it had been forced upon Black America for a hundred years since the end of the Civil War. 

I lived another 40 years as an ignoramus. Sympathetic, to be sure. I have joined protests. I have written letters. I have worshipped in Black churches. I have imagined myself an ally. But I have had no fire. I just didn't get it.

Go to Pettus Bridge in Selma.

Go to the Lynching Memorial in Montgomery.

Go to the Civil and Human Rights Museum in Atlanta.

Go. There is so much nobody told you. The stories are deep and horrific...but there is no way to comprehend the meaning of the sound bites and newsreel clips you have seen until you go. Go. If you are a citizen, go. If you are a human...go. We all need to know.