I was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1954--which means that I was born into a segregated society, the U.S.'s version of apartheid. I got the better deal, of course, being white. True, being born female, lesbian and working class presented challenges, but nothing compared to the outrageous daily degradation that African-Americans were subjected to under segregation.
As the extraordinarily wise Martin Luther King, Jr. often noted, segregation harmed Southern whites, too. It endangered the good in our humanity; it twisted into ugly shapes the hearts and souls of those who embraced it. So when he spoke of liberation, he included all of us. We were all in need of it. (We still are, being human and thus being prone to react to differences with animosity or at least the notion that any difference in appearance or thought means that one must be better than the other. But that's a different diary.)
On the day we set aside to remember Dr. King, I always reflect on the impact he had on my generation of white Southerners and those who came after us, and I thank him for challenging us to reject the teachings of our elders, even as he encouraged us to continue to love them despite our difference. In "Letter from Birmingham Jail," he reminds us of Martin Buber's work, that we should aspire to establish "I-thou" relationships, not "I-it," especially with those who differ from us.
Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.
Martin Luther King, Jr. -- "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
The "I-it" of segregation was the backdrop of my early childhood. It was a curious fact of life. On occasions when my mother dressed me up and we'd take the bus to downtown to see a movie or buy something we couldn't order from the Sears catalogue, we took our seats toward the front; black people sat in the back. When we went to the lunch counter of a department store for a hot dog, only whites were there. At my grammar school, the only black people were Luverne, the janitor, and Mary, the maid, and a couple of black ladies who worked in the lunchroom.
However, we lived on the edge of "the quarters," the term for a black neighborhood in those days. I could look down our street to the left and see a sharp dividing line: on one side lived whites and on the other, blacks. When my family sat on the porch on summer evenings, I could look down the street and see black families sitting on theirs. Every day, black people passed by our house on their way to the bus stop on 1st Avenue. And I and my little friends would walk a few blocks into the "quarters" to 3rd Avenue to visit Riashy's Delicatessen, owned by a nice Lebanese couple, to buy penny candy.
Our parents never thought anything of it. Just a ten minute bus ride away were frequent demonstrations received with violence by the police and local white thugs, but, as mother explained to me later, she knew I was as safe in the black neighborhood as I would be anywhere, maybe safer because "I knew there were folks who lived there who watched out for children as much as I did."
It was, to me and to most children, a confusing world with strange rules.
Once when I was seven or eight, I went with my father to the new, big grocery store, Liberty Supermarket, and while he pushed the cart and studied the list, I became thirsty. I had seen a water fountain near the baked goods, and I asked if I could go get a drink. I went by myself to the fountain and froze. It was your basic institutional, tall, gray water cooler of the 60s, with "WHITE ONLY" stenciled on its side in white paint. Next to it was a smaller, old, white porcelain fountain that was my size. But I figured that it was for black people and I wasn't black. The tall fountain was too tall for me and the little fountain was for people of a different color. I had no idea what to do. I knew that if I did the wrong thing, someone would yell--or worse. So I walked away, feeling unsettled.
Despite the fact that it practically abutted a black neighborhood, the school wasn't desegregated until 1966, when the bravest kid I'd ever met began attending my sixth grade class. He was smart, pleasant, self-possessed--and his shirts were always bleached white and starched to perfection. His name was Gregory, and we all liked him immediately. Kids can tell when another kid is good, and Gregory was a very good guy.
That went well, so when the next year school year began, the first couple of days we white seventh- and eighth-graders went to school for half a day. About a half dozen black kids would report after we left, which gave them time to get to know the school and the teachers before we were all tossed together.
This was it: finally, the thing that our parents and teachers and city fathers and George Wallace had feared for years was happening: white kids and black kids were "forced" to go to school together in Birmingham, Alabama. The moment so long dreaded and fiercely resisted was upon us. And how did it go? Kids are kids. Within no time, we were playing together during recess, teasing each other in class, singing Motown and Beatles songs and dancing and learning together. I honestly do not recall any white-black fights. All that drama that our elders seemed to expect to result from integration never materialized. (It did in my much larger high school, but that was because the white teachers and principal expected it so thoroughly that I swear they manifested it.)
My elders were mostly good people, but they were raised with the prejudices of their society. Sadly, my father became even more racist as he aged--though he always opposed violence. After a period in the 1970s when he actually began to consider that all racism was wrong, the 1980s brought the Reagan Revolution. Someone once said that Reagan made racism cool again--and I saw that phenomenon with my own eyes. This, by the way, was when my father ceased to be a Democrat and became a Republican, and it was Reagan's attacks on "Welfare Queens" and his defense of "state's rights" that did it. (Dad knew that "trickle-down" economics was bullshit. He was just relieved to no longer struggle with guilt over his racism. St. Ronnie and the Republicans freed him from that burden.)
My mother privately disapproved of racism, but she was afraid of the consequences of making that known. Any white person who took a stand against segregation was vilified and threatened--or worse, as my older brother learned in 1964 when he wrote an editorial for the University of Alabama student newspaper calling for people to accept integration of schools. The local KKK chapter (or some other yahoo racist organization) found our phone number and the phone rang off the hook with threatening and vile anonymous calls. Fortunately for us, my father was a member of Bull Connor's Masonic Lodge and he got Connor to make some calls and get the goons to back off our family. I'm sure Connor's rationale was something along the lines of he's learned his lesson; he's just young and brainwashed by the commies who teach at the university.
Birmingham's nickname in those days was Bombingham. In fact, we lived close enough to town that we heard, in the distance, the blast that killed Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. I only vaguely remember a particularly tense Sunday morning. A distant boom. "What was that?" Tense silence from my parents. Talking about that day many years later, Mother said we didn't know what had happened--this was prior to 24 hour news--but we all felt that something terrible had happened. That, she said, was when the violent racists went too far for most white adults. I didn't know this until near the end of her life, but she told me that from what she could tell, that was a turning point, that even adults she had heard say hair-raisingly racist things condemned the murder of those children. (Of course it still took 15 years to get the first conviction.)
I had the privilege of caring for Mom during the last four years of her life. She lived with me, having moved far away from Birmingham and up north to my house just a few months before a stroke paralyzed her right side. Leaving the house that had been her home for almost 50 years was hard, as was saying goodbye to her family and her best friend: the saintly, wonderful, funny, wise, loving black woman who had been her neighbor for the past twenty-five years, and who gradually became her friend.
Mom's last Christmas, she was in definite decline and we knew she didn't have much time left. On Christmas Day, as always, she talked on the phone to family and to her friend, Mrs. McGowan. I left the room, with a lump in my throat. But I stayed near so that I'd know when to go back in and help her hang up the phone. At the end of their conversation, Mom said to Mrs. McGowan, "I love you."
My mother was a shy woman, housebound with shyness, really. That she had any good friend outside the family was something of a miracle, but given her upbringing, her deeply rewarding friendship with Mrs. McGowan made it more so. When mother died, Mrs. McGowan and her daughter were received as honored guests by my mother's family at the funeral home. As my brother said, forty years ago, that would have been unthinkable.
Dr. King and all who participated in the Civil Rights Movement made that friendship between my mother and Mrs. McGowan possible--and so many of mine. He and those unbelievably brave and wise souls who marched with him gently challenged us all to open our hearts and clear our minds of the pernicious lies that propped up racial segregation and discrimination.
"Sixteenth Street Baptist Church "
Birmingham, Alabama
May 3, 1963
"Today was a dark day in Birmingham. The policemen were mean to us. They got their violent, angry dogs and turned them loose on nonviolent people, unarmed people. But not only that, they got their water system working. And here and there we saw the water hose, with water pouring on young boys and girls, old men and women, with great and staggering force. Birmingham was a mean city today. But in spite of the meanness of Birmingham, we must confront her with our kindness and our goodness and our determination to be nonviolent. As difficult as it is, we must meet hate with love. As hard as it is, we must meet physical force with soul force...
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
And they did. Over and over. And their soul force won in my life and in my mother's and in so many others.
Martin Luther King, Jr. affirms here that because he believes the cause is righteous, he is willing, if necessary, to make the ultimate sacrifice. He goes on to specify that the cause is to free his children and the children of his brothers and sisters from the ugly distortions caused by racial inequality, and also "...to free...my white brothers from a permanent psychological death."
This white sister, born in Birmingham in 1954, is forever grateful to this extraordinary man for liberating me and many of my generation from the bonds of racial prejudice passed down to our parents from their parents. Dr. King and all who served so courageously with him in the most awe-inspiring movement in American history wanted to free us all from wrong thinking, from the dehumanizing worldview that some people are naturally superior to others and therefore should be privileged. And to an impressive degree, he succeeded. He surely succeeded in changing the world I lived in, and right before my eyes.
I love him.
I thank him.
Mon Jan 21, 2013 at 6:13 AM PT: Remembering Dr. King again today--and always--with gratitude.