ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602090039
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: The Back Pew
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
We're told that our schools don't do a very good job of teaching about the civil-rights movement in this country. Of course, when it comes right down to it, our schools don't have the primary responsibility for teaching our children anything. We - their parents - must shoulder that burden.
So, we should be telling our children about Brown v. Board of Education or the Civil Rights Act of 1964 regardless of whether the schools are doing it. And we should have been telling them our personal histories, our personal lessons, too.
Here, for my children, is part of mine.
When I was growing up in the small-town South of the 1950s and '60s, racial segregation was simply a way of life. It wasn't complicated. It was rarely discussed, even among those who disagreed with the prevalent notion that blacks were socially, intellectually and morally inferior to whites.
We Southern whites were just beginning to understand that blacks weren't physically inferior. The memory of Jesse Owens and the example of Jackie Robinson were putting that myth to rest already.
On the whole, I remember little venomous talk about blacks, few outward demonstrations of evil intent toward them. But their inferior status as human beings was evident all around.
Happily and luckily, I grew up in a household where the usual casual talk about the so-called ignorance and slothfulness and evilness of blacks was openly rejected and contradicted.
I was taught that it was wrong to hate any of God's human creatures simply because of the color of their skin. I was taught to treat adult blacks with the same respect that was required when interacting with white adults. I was told never, ever, to use the word "nigger."
But the more passive and established social institution of segregation, in particular, was left largely unchallenged.
That, of course, was the truly insidious evil of segregation - the silent message that it was OK; the message that "separate but equal" was better than no "equal" at all.
So, even though I was given enduring, powerful lessons on the wrongs of racism in individuals, the cultural institutions around us were harder to defy.
Part of that may have been a factor in the religious culture in which I was raised - one focused on individual salvation and individual responsibility before God, rather than one fixed on corporate Christian duties.
In any case, while I knew it was wrong to call a black man "nigger," I don't remember thinking about it being wrong to require all blacks to go in the side door and immediately up the stairs to one part of the balcony at the movie theater. I didn't think about it being wrong for there to be separate drinking fountains and bathrooms marked "colored." I didn't dwell on the fact that there were separate schools for blacks in a section of the city that my many of my friends called "niggertown."
Maybe one reason I hadn't had the lessons on those inequalities was because those conditions were an improvement from the days when blacks had no access to theaters, no public toilets and vastly inferior public schools.
By the mid-1960s, however, I and millions of other whites finally had our eyes opened to the inequality of the social institutions in which we lived.
Though there were earlier, important laws and court decisions addressing the inequalities of racial segregation, it wasn't until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that we knew changes - real changes - were coming. For those of us who were in school, that was the turning point.
In North Carolina, where I grew up, there was to be no official policy of massive resistance to the desegregation of public schools. Just the opposite was the case. State officials, finally, would promote the cause of mixing the races for public education.
Near the end of my seventh-grade year, Mrs. Frazier - who taught social studies and physical education - broke the news to us. She informed us that the next year there might be black students in school with us. She then TOLD us - didn't ask or recommend - TOLD us that there would be no trouble when that happened. We would all be students together, and although people in some places - notably in Virginia - had fought the idea, we would not.
It was a powerful message - one I remember more than 30 years later almost as vividly as on that spring afternoon. It was rooted in an acknowledgment that what was morally and ethically right now also was legally right. We were to behave morally in this as in any other situation.
And, you know what? We didn't have any trouble. As it turned out, there were no black students at that school for a couple more years. But as I moved into a desegregated high school there was a zero-tolerance policy for racial friction.
There may have been an occasional rumor of an off-campus run-in between some white student and some black student, but never at school. There were some racial disturbances at other schools, but they were relatively few and they didn't happen where they simply weren't tolerated.
What I discovered was a new world of black friends and acquaintances who instilled in me an understanding of my own past that I hadn't known was lacking anything. They told me how it felt to be excluded, to be reviled, to be ignored. They showed me how my life had been the poorer for my lack of association with people whose skin was darker than mine. They taught me not to trust my own assumptions about the acceptability of the status quo.
My experience isn't a summary of the Civil Rights movement. The history is broader than that, and my view is exclusively from the perspective of a white Southern child growing up in that era of change. During this Black History Month, I hope my children also are hearing and reading about the experiences of black Americans.
But my responsibility now is to pass on to my children the moral and spiritual lessons I learned.
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