Dear Senator Bennet,
On Meet the Press you recently commented that you were raised not to call people racist because once they had been called racist it would harden their hearts.
Let me tell you how I was raised. Before moving to Colorado I grew up in the red clay of south Georgia in the city of Albany, GA. Its motto was and is “The Good Life City” but life there was not and still is not good for so many black people. The city was the scene of the Albany Campaign during the Civil Rights struggle.
In early 1961 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized a campaign against all forms of segregation in the city. By the end of 1961 Martin Luther King, Jr. became involved. By early 1962 the campaign had failed to achieve any significant desegregation and King left Albany with valuable lessons that would aid him and the other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham and Selma. As such, it was a pivotal moment in the struggle against desegregation.
I attended Mock Road Elementary School until sixth grade where I was, as the sociologists say, a majority-minority student. After which I moved to the county north of Albany; Lee County. Despite what I am about to tell you the county is not named for Robert E. Lee.
Lee County’s school system was and still is the refuge of white children from the black filled classrooms in Albany. Every year on this date, on the holiday to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr., a group of kids would sneak on to the school grounds and hang a large Confederate battle flag from the school’s water tower to greet students returning on Tuesday. At the small Baptist church I attended less than a mile from my house the deacons would occasionally tell the remarkable story of one solitary black man attending and how they grappled with handling it. I still remember being 10 or 11 and riding the church bus to a water park when one of the older kids started handing out KKK pamphlets. In the 1990s when I grew up there the community was still effectively segregated and remains so to this day.
There are two facts that were never spoken about in school. The first was the Albany Campaign. Despite happening less than 20 miles from the segregated school doors of the middle and high school I attended no one explained that on the same streets we drove to the movie theatre on history had been made in the struggle against racism, segregation, and hate.
The second fact that dare not be spoken was that the county line had been repurposed in the 1960s as a tool of segregation much as it has been in so many cities in America. You see the residents believed that their school system, a school system designated as a “system of excellence” by the state, was not segregated. It offered a better education to its children because the parents in Lee County cared more, they weren’t lazy, fathers weren’t absent in Lee County. The residents did not think their schools were better because white wealth and social capital segregated itself from the black population and no one dared tell them differently.
These are just two of the facts of my youth that were never spoken of, knowledge I had to find for myself in my 20s and 30s. How long could such a system last if spoken about plainly? How fearful are the white leaders in that community of the plain-spoken truth? The plain-spoken truth to racism is the first rumbling of a cave-in when you’re deep in the mine of hatred and bigotry. I know their fear of it. I have seen it. There would be much gnashing of teeth were they to read what I have written here.
As to your theory that it is hard for a racist to be rehabilitated once they’ve been called a racist I say that progress is never made with euphemisms but with hard and factual examinations of the truth. Our President today is a white supremacist. He is a racist. To deny this is to deny the truth, it is to deny the light of the truth.
Dr. King will be quoted a lot today by people who will mostly forget him tomorrow but allow me a quote, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.” In these dark times we can afford nothing less than the love-filled light of truth.