As a young
boy growing up in segregated Nashville, Tennessee, I harbored racial prejudice.
But an offhand remark by my third-grade teacher helped to dispel the prejudice
against Negroes, as African Americans were then called, and to instill in me
what became a lifelong commitment to the cause of racial justice.
Born in
1948, I lived in an all-white working-class neighborhood and attended an
all-white church. every Sunday. I enrolled in an all-white public school four
months after Brown v. Board of Education and,
with the slow pace of desegregation, had no black classmates through ninth
grade or in the all-white private high school from which I graduated in 1965.
In my early
life, the only "Negroes" I knew personally were Barnell and Fannie,
the married couple who were the custodians at my elementary school. We called
them by their first names, not their surnames. I thought kindly of them, but I disliked
the musty smell of the janitors' room and must have associated that smell with
blacks generally.
From age
six or so, I can recall being careful not to touch or accidentally brush up
against a Negro on the street, in an elevator, or at a store. I must have
thought of their black as "dirty" and my white as "clean."
My epiphany
came in third grade thanks to a chance remark by my teacher, not in the
classroom but in the hallway. With race relations in the news, she said
something like, "They're no different from us." She influenced me
more than she ever knew or might have expected.
My parents
were not overt racists: I never heard the "n" word in the house. We
drove past a black church every Sunday on the way to ours: nothing was said,
one way or another.
By age 15,
I had become a civil rights liberal, thanks in part to the influence of friends
at my new school and in part to the hopeful excitement of the civil rights
movement itself. My parents disapproved of the marches and protests, but I
wrote a story for the school newspaper in spring 1963 on the college student-led
effort to desegregate the nearby diner.
I must have
watched President Kennedy's televised civil rights address in June 1963. As my school's
representative to the American Legion's civic education program All-State that
summer, I ran for governor and echoed JFK by calling for enactment of a state
public accommodations law.
Five people
had signed my petition, but the reaction to my speech was so strongly negative
that I had to withdraw. One of my signers did not get the word, so I ended up
with one vote: not mine.
Back in
school, I became the editor of the school newspaper and drafted an editorial
calling for the school to integrate. The editorial was censored; I responded
with an editorial attacking the censorship. That editorial was published and
then the earlier one as well. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the principal had
begun before my graduation in 1965 to notify parents and alumni that the school
was preparing to admit its first black students, in the elementary grades.
As a student at Harvard College in
the late 1960s, I had black classmates of course: but acquaintances only, none
of them "close" friends. I covered the "smash ROTC" student
strike in 1969 as a journalist for the student radio station, WHRB. Black
students added a call for an African American studies department to the list of
demands; I was an observer, not a participant, but I thought the proposal
worthwhile and still do.
After college,
I came back to Nashville as a reporter at The
Tennessean, which strongly supported civil rights under the leadership of a
great American journalist, John Seigenthaler. The Tennessean newsroom included three black reporters during my six
years there. All three were friends, but not among my closest friends. The
racial divide is that hard to get across.
In four
decades as a journalist, the struggle for racial justice has been a recurrent
topic, never far from my mind. My current beat is the Supreme Court. I am glad
when the court advances racial justice and was distressed when, for example,
the Roberts Court gutted the Voting Rights Act by falsely denying the
present-day reality of racism.
In the end,
my story illustrates that Lieutenant Cable is only partly right when he sings
in South Pacific, "You've got to
be taught to hate and fear." We are born, I fear, with some innate
aversion to others unlike us: in color, nationality, religion, or the like. But
my third-grade teacher also shows that one can be "carefully taught"
a broader tolerance and appreciation of diversity. That lesson cannot be taught
often enough: by parents, by teachers, by preachers, and by public officials—up to and including, one would hope, the president of the United States.
Ken:
ReplyDeleteUnlike you, I grew up with black people always in my school, but like you, they were never among my close friends. Hate and ignorance, I believe, are the products of fear. Fear that we will not automatically be accorded the respect, status and benefits befitting our natural station in life, whether that be because of our race, our ethnicity or our real strengths and weaknesses. We do need to be reminded that others are no different underneath all of the superficial apparent differences. As we are reminded in the news daily, the flood waters do not discriminate, nor do those who are helping in the wake of disaster.
Thanks for sharing.
Stan