My daughter asked me the other day what it was like to grow up in the civil rights era. She is 17.
I was 15 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated; 20 years old when Martin Luther King's light turned to night; twenty again when Robert Kennedy's hopes and dreams were vanquished as his life violently ended in a Los Angeles hotel pantry. Ambassador Hotel. So many others died during this era, many have been lost in the amnesia of history. Here is a partial list. It is agonizing.
I started to recite to my lovely, bright, compassionate child the history as I knew it to be. I talked about the pre-civil war abolitionist movement. I mentioned lynching African Americans was a way of life in some parts of our country. I dutifully recited the segregation of African Americans in the army during World War II and Harry Truman's subsequent order to desegregate the armed forces. I recommended a book entitled Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett, Jr. This text is a definitive African American history beginning in the 17th century and ending in 1962. I had read it at the suggestion of a fellow student while I was in college in the 60's. This book made me very angry for I knew after reading a few pages that I had been lied to by my teachers my entire life; that history as it was taught in our schools until then was a fabrication.
But my questioner wasn't interested in history. She is well educated and has learned about these events in her history books. She was interested in how I felt growing up during this era. She repeated her question. Upon the last syllables floating through my heart an image immediately appeared. I was 15 again, in the summer of 1963, pleading with my mother to let me go to the March on Washington being organized by Martin Luther King. I lived in a white working class enclave in Queens, but I had been inspired by the courage of the people I read about in the newspapers. I hardly knew the details, except that people for many years were beaten and killed for merely demanding what was rightfully theirs, whether it be a seat on a bus, at a lunch counter or the right to vote. I had read stories about racially separated water fountains, restrooms and the like and I could not understand why these things existed. Given this atmosphere, my mother refused to let me go. I was old enough to disobey her wishes, but having no money and no other means I gave in to my inevitable absence. A year later, when three students were found dead in an earthen dam in Mississippi, shot by the Klu Klux Klan for their work in Mississippi, the cellular life of my generation froze once again.
I heard Martin Luther King's dream that hot day in August and was never the same. Growing up in the civil rights era without being able to participate as a young child felt like a reed being buffeted by the wind. Trauma after trauma fell upon my generation like rain. I could not fathom what it took to face such overwhelming loathing at the risk of one's life. When children were blown up in a church in Alabama or pummeled by fire hoses and set upon by German Shepherds for marching in protest of racial discrimination I instinctively wanted to rush towards the center of such valor. I was frozen with fear and angry at the injustice. I believed that the entire world felt the same.
Although I was affected by the well known and celebrated being cut down -- Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, etc. -- I was keenly aware that the people making history, transforming a cultural iceberg, were anonymous except to their friends, family and neighbors. Walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965, when you knew that a beating or worse by beefy, hateful police awaited you, required heroism only found in movies and literature. But this was no book; no film. This was life during the 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond. This was the fire through which our country had to walk in order to burn off grand fabrics of slavery that permeated our lives and formed the economic beginnings of our imperfect union. Yet despite these sacrifices and great progress, the odor of racial discrimination continues to waft through our lives.
One day we will breathe freely unencumbered by ignorance and hatred.
My darling daughter. How did I feel to live in the time of heroes? I felt privileged.
Rabbi David Wolpe: Redefining Heroism in the Era of Celebrity-Worship
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