Once, a very long time ago, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference struggled to carry on the “Poor People’s Campaign” and Resurrection City grew on the soggy Washington D.C. Mall, I found myself in a Baptist Church listening to Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and a large white woman from South Carolina. It was the kind of event that should have been captured in a diary or a saved church bulletin, but I was young and out to do good that day, with no notion of saving things so that I could think about them a half century later.
Listening to the service for George Floyd in the Fountain of Praise Church in Houston this week sent me back to that night, to another time when white Americans were caught up in the emotional truths of Black Americans’ struggles.
Last night I tried to explain the emotional surge—and truth—of singing “We Shall Overcome” in that church that night to my granddaughter. I remembered peace marches and civil rights gatherings, and Joan Baez marching arm in arm with MLK in Montgomery in 1965. I can hear her now singing—and hear myself singing—“We Shall Overcome some day…”
The white woman that night said that she knew that looking down on n….s was a way of keeping poor whites down, that she knew that she and her kin were the n….s now.
You can mount every rational argument about justice and equality, argue and negotiate your way to legislation, bring new textbooks to the classroom and body cams to the police forces, but in my book the hope for real transformation is in white Americans grasping once again the emotional truths of brown and black experiences.
George Floyd’s service in that black church in Houston brought that home.
# # #
No comments:
Post a Comment