I was not quite thirteen when the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C.
It was a hot day where my family lived, in New Jersey, and the summer was winding down. This moment preceded the assassination of John F. Kennedy by less than three months. My childhood, such as it was (my mother suffered from muscular dystrophy, so it wasn't exactly normal) was nearing its end.
Air conditioning was still something of a luxury in 1963, and we had none at home. It was hot. I knew a bit about Dr. King, and I knew what he was doing was dangerous, and essential. My father (NOT A BIGOT) hails from the rural South, the Florida panhandle. That summer, and the one before it, we had traveled to Georgia and to Alabama, where my cousins lived. The interstate highway system was not Then completed, and we took mostly two-lane roads. It was my first time in my ancestral homeland south of the Mason-Dixon line, and my first exposure to Jim Crow.
I was appalled.
While today my Jersey hometown is perhaps 25% African-American (twice that in the schools) when I was a kid, you were WASP, Irish, occasionally Polish or Lithuanian, but mostly Jewish or Italian. Maybe 1% of my school was black, there were even fewer Asians, and the few people with Spanish surnames spoke unaccented English and I presume were assimilated.
While one of my (paternal) grandparents was descended from slaveowners (the other side back then were opposed to slavery on religious grounds) my southern kin while religious are low-key about it AND ARE NOT RACISTS. I heard the "n" word only in a locution that actually felt like it was intended to credit the ingenuity of poor black people. So far as I could tell, all of my Southern relations were relieved by the end of segregation. A number of them told me so. I know my Dad was.
So the contrast between my gentle, farm-bred, soft-spoken non-bigot aunts and uncles and the faces of the white Southerners I saw on TV, clenched with rage and fear as white cops pumped water from fire hoses knocking down little black kids, was all the more frightening to me. And, in one sense, 1960s Jim Crow was more abominable than slavery, in that humankind was more than a century onward; slavery, however unjust, served an economic end (PLEASE NO ONE SHOULD ACCUSE ME OF DEFENDING SLAVERY HERE) and Jim Crow was just gratuitous hatred, white people dehumanizing blacks by telling them we don't want to sit in public places with you, nor our children to attend public schools with you, and we, white people of the South, will abase ourselves and behave like fools and moral cripples, to maintain this illusion that, however poor we might be, we are better than you.
Hell, slaves and slave owners had, in some cases at least, some amity, some acknowledgement of their common humanity. (In my father's rural childhood, an aged black woman came by train to visit. She had, yes, been the slave of my great-grandmother, and for years after Emancipation had remained with her, helping raise my grandfather, born in 1864 [he married only at 50, so I'm a generation nearer than one might expect to the 1860s] and his seven siblings. The point is that in her old age, and despite the poor conditions of travel in Florida circa 1930, this onetime slave wanted to see my grandfather). Again, I'm not romanticizing or defending slavery, but personally I think the impulse underlying Jim Crow was even worse, and more anachronistic.
Anyway, I watched Dr. King's speech on television. It brought shivers to me then, and it has done so a thousand times since.
"I have a dream," Dr. King thundered in That Voice (if God should chance to be male, I reckon his voice sounds very, very much like Dr. King's) "that one day, in the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be ablt to sit down together at the table of brotherhood."
Although born in New York and raised, mostly, in New Jersey, yes my grandmother was born in the hills of northern Georgia. And I feel blessed that I, a descendant of slave owners, have children (one white, one Asian) who attend a school that is nearly half black-Latino-South Asian, and have not yet, ever, in my earshot at least, expressed a drop of prejudicial distinction, having to do with their classmates or others, based on skin color, ethnicity, or religion. While I didn't grow up in the segregated South, I grew up in the segregated North, which is to say that "of color" people were awfully rare in my childhood.
I'm not doctinaire in my "multiculturalism," in that I have no issue with people who prefer to marry within their religion or ethnic group, or even prefer the company of people like themselves. The world's big enough, live and let live. But personally, I love diversity (PROVIDED THE PARAMEDICS AND I HAVE A LANGUAGE IN COMMON WHEN I NEED TO GO TO HOSPITAL) and I think it's great for my kids to know people of quite a few differing backgrounds.
And the above quote from Dr. King came to mind today, in thinking that two of the individuals who are leading the struggle to save our country are a white man and onetime Kluxer, Sen. Robert Byrd from West Virginia, and Rep. John Conyers from Michigan.
I love these guys.
When Sen. Byrd prepares to speak in the Senate, to denounce Torture Guy or whatever rightwing Constitution shredding scumbag they are ramming down our throats this week, I feel the same anticipation that I did as a kid when Mickey Mantle strode to the plate in the late innings. Sometimes the Mick struck out, and Sen. Byrd is on the losing side of a lot of votes these days, but dammit you know Mr. Byrd loves his country, and is not just a grafter who plays a U.S. Senator on TV. When he talks to that creepy, cat-strangling doing-it-for-the-money asshole, Bill Frist, by God you know that Frist is getting a dressing-down by a professional.
And Conyers? The man is on fire: leading everyone on the vote-integrity issue, and now having the brass ones to ask Abu Gonzales, "Torture Guy" himself, to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate violations of the anti-torture act and the war crimes act.
My father and grandmother, with the best of intentions, never spoke frankly to my sister and me concerning the grave and degenerative illness of our mother. It was a mistake, and it made us a little crazy. So, often in my life, in many contexts, I have found myself saying GODDAM IT WON'T THE GROWNUPS, SOMEONE, COME RIGHT OUT AND SAY WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON????
And John Conyers is doing that! He's calling the fucking spade a spade (TORTURE and WAR CRIMES) and he's inserting the spade in the craven sycophantic Attorney General's backside! Yow!
Byrd and Conyers are both well up in years; thank God neither of them has gone into retirement. I suspect Dr. King somewhere, however alarmed at the state of the union, is pleased that a onetime Kluxer, and a black man in a position he very well might not ever have held, had Dr. King not lived and done all that he did, are distinguishing themselves as they are.
And as these two old men, these eminent Democrats and patriots, are continuing their fight on our behalf despite the advancing years, we too should find energy to keep on struggling. Let us not be satisfied, "until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream." I will go my grave with those words, as spoken by Dr. King, echoing in my ears, and every time I hear them, tears are in my eyes.