THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 12, 1995 TAG: 9503120279
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: PAUL SOUTH
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
In March 1965, I was 8 years old and living in a white, working-class neighborhood in Birmingham. Across town, in a black neighborhood, Arthur Shores Lee was a 2-year-old toddler.
And people were marching in Selma.
I remember watching the scene on the old black-and-white television set in the living room of our modest frame home. Marchers peacefully trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge were met by Alabama state troopers ferociously swinging clubs at the hymn-singing protesters.
I did not understand it then. And 30 years later, I still don't fully understand why those peaceful folk were attacked so viciously. All they wanted was to be treated like everybody else.
But hate makes people do strange things.
My friend Arthur Shores Lee learned all about that early on. His grandfather, Arthur Shores, was one of the first African Americans admitted to practice law in Alabama. An eloquent spokesman for civil rights, Shores didn't need billy clubs or fire hoses or police dogs to make his point. His weapons were a first-rate intellect and an unwavering belief that indeed, all men and women were equal in the eyes of the creator.
Because he had the courage to take the Birmingham city schools to court in a landmark desegregation case, his house was bombed three times. I'm sure his family didn't understand it every time they heard an explosion that shattered their world anew.
As my family sat in the relative comfort of our home, the Shores family would pick up the pieces and wonder ``Why?''
Those explosions, at the Shores house, and at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church where four little girls were killed, and at the A.G. Gaston Motel near where Dr. Martin Luther King had slept just hours before, were the reasons for Selma.
When I was 8, I thought ``Bombingham'' was the result of some newscaster's funny accent. Now I know different.
``Bombingham'' was part of the reason they marched in Selma.
Years later, the white kid who was 8 in 1965 and the black kid who was 2 crossed paths for the first time. Arthur Shores Lee asked me to become his moot court partner in the senior mock trial competition at Birmingham School of Law.
During months of preparing for trial after trial, we would often put aside the law books to eat and talk. He would mention with pride his grandfather, now crippled with Alzheimer's. He would speak of the bombings at his grandparents' home matter-of-factly. No anger. No bitterness. No hatred.
As we worked through the cases that final year, Arthur Shores Lee became my best friend at the law school. From him, I learned a little law. But more than that, I learned about the power of an idea, and of forgiveness.
And on reflection, I now understand why Selma was important to me. Without the courage of those marchers, and men like Arthur Shores, his grandson and I would not have been allowed to eat together at the same table. Nor would we have been law school classmates. Chances are, we would have never met, separated by a barrier we didn't build.
Without Selma, I would have never made a dear and respected friend.
Thirty years after that bloody Sunday in Selma, the quiet procession that proceeded across the bridge last week firmly and gently reminded us of some things.
First, the world has changed, in many ways, for the better. But despite the progress, hate still lives. It is not clothed in a white robe and hood, or a black leather glove. Racism today often wears a suit and tie or common clothes, shows up in courtrooms and on street corners; its face comes in all colors, and speaks all languages.
That is reason enough to keep marching. by CNB