The question
has been asked and finally one young adult who made the 50th
Anniversary trip to Selma contacted me
and wondered simply if I would share my motivation and feelings
about both the original 1965 trip and the 2015 return trip. To that young adult, I must apologize on two
counts. First, I did not ignore your
question but at the time that you asked I had the feeling that you deserved a
more complete answer than I was able to verbalize off the top of my head.
Second, as I indicated to all present at
the Friday night discussion before we left for Alabama, I am not a public speaker…I am a writer and a person
who has learned to think before I speak. Therefore, extemporaneous speech is
not my preferred genre.
The decade
of the 1960’s was a tumultuous period for those of us coming of age. The social changes that were coming (much like the changes in process in current
times) caused a lot of furor and consternation among many naysayers of the time. Certain elements of society will fight change
because it frightens them and threatens their “status quo.” As a journalist, it was critical for me to
watch, listen, and analyze events surrounding me. Part of my early training as a reporter
required me to factually describe what I saw and heard without
editorializing (injecting a personal
judgment). Only in editorial writing was I free to touch on
and discuss my analysis of events. (Remember
my “keep your mouth shut” admonition at
the Friday night panel discussion?)
My decision
to make the 1965 trip (like many of my
fellow travelers) was intensely personal, not professional. As my fellow traveler and classmate told of
forging her mother’s signature to the travel permission, I understood her reasoning
very well. Since I was 21 and legally of age as well as a college employee, not
a word was said to my father (until many years later). That adult decision was me keeping myself in
tune and in step with my personal beliefs.
I took my alma mater’s defining motto very seriously, GOD hath made of one blood all nations of
men. I believed that fact then, I
believe it now. By that personal choice to believe….I refuted and condemned any
person’s option to denigrate, demean,
disrespect any other human being’s origin (racial, ethnic, religious, even
sexual) in the nations of men! Did I
fully understand the symbolic cross I had chosen to shoulder? Unconsciously yes, but consciously it would
take me a lifetime to verbalize my decision openly in an understandable manner.
Please do not misinterpret what I say, if Christ
could shoulder His cross for the
sins of mankind, I could certainly take
a stand for the equality of mankind…..all of mankind.
The 2015
trip was for me a pilgrimage, a journey to a place (and time) of moral
significance. In essence I was revisiting my first
pertinent and the most important step
into my witness to the world. There
would of course be stumbling blocks ahead, some foreseen, some unforeseen. The commonality of those stumbling blocks
would be that each one required me to take a stand, an open and therefore
public step into the discussion and the resulting decision.
Who says I can’t vote? I will
vote. Who says
I can’t live here because I am black? That
was the day I discovered that sometimes those who are supposed to police “equal opportunity” are afraid to
use their legal baseball bats. Just because he is male and I am female (or
he is white and I am black) he gets the
job? That was the day I confronted a person bowing down to political
pressure. Because this student comes
from a poor Appalachian family and you think he is undeserving…you the almighty
counselor did not submit his paperwork? The
student lost a full scholarship to a prestigious engineering school and I didn’t
find out in time to confront the counselor. Because this senior student just became a
single parent and you refused to send makeup work home because you are against
high school students who become pregnant, you flunked her for an honors math class? The student was assigned a different
instructor, made up the work and received a full scholarship to college while
raising her son!
There are
times when the voiceless demand that someone stand up and be counted and sometimes we are
the voiceless who must be heard. Through my 35 years in underserved schools, I actively faced the
stumbling blocks and plunged on perhaps in the back of my head also hearing the
words of W.E.B. DuBois in his discussion of the “Talented Tenth.” My one
separation from DuBois is that any/all minorities in the 21st
Century are confronted with “stumbling
blocks” which must be eliminated for the good of all mankind. Now in my seventh decade…I must pass the
torch. You, the young adult generation must face the fight. The battle is not
over and it should not be abandoned!
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