That separateness came to me recently as an answer – or the beginning of an answer – to a question that keeps presenting itself in what I think may be a civil rights bender. Earlier this year I started and actually finished a book called Parting the Waters, the first in a trilogy chronicling “America in the King years” by Taylor Branch. Now I’m well into the second book, Pillar of Fire, which welcomes onto the stage the enchantingly cause-and-effect character of Malcolm X. At the same time, over the past few months I watched a PBS special commemorating the 50th anniversary of the freedom rides, parts of which gave the U.S. and the world a startling view of just how skillfully the word “equality” had been parsed in places like Anniston, Alabama and Greenwood, Mississippi. Then I watched a documentary that was produced in (I believe) the 1980s called Eyes on the Prize.
And now, one dreadful episode at a time, I am watching Roots.
Roots aired for the first time when I was in grade school. In fact, it was aired shortly after the school I’d attended beginning in kindergarten was split down the middle in what must have been the result of some highly localized pulling of various strings. One half of the school remained there and the other half was sent to a new school for the sake of desegregation. The half of the school that remained were the households in a little Catholic borough called Shrewsbury. The house where I grew up was on the new-school side of the boundary, a boundary drawn up by people whose names and faces were not, to the best of my knowledge, ever made public. It was the middle of the 1970s, we were sent off to the black school, and we were terrified.
As I read these books and watch the images on the television screen, it hits me that neighborhoods were torched and people were killed and the jails were crammed way beyond capacity over what boiled down, in my opinion, to seating charts. Many people did not want the particulars of their daily routines to overlap or intersect in any way, shape or form with the routines of black people. When I went to my new grade school in fourth grade, I remember thinking that black people were from a world so separate from mine that it was foreign. They had different dogs. They drove different cars. Their music was different, and the way they talked was, while intriguing, completely baffling. I hate to criticize my parents, but I have questions about why the separateness issue wasn’t discussed and explained at our dinner table. I had no idea that people were being strung up in trees two states away because they had the audacity to think they had the right not only to go to school but to register to vote.
As my bender has progressed, I have become almost bored with the black point of view, and by that I mean it’s as clear as crystal what motivated them: For centuries black people had lived under the rule and law of terrorists and they were, accordingly, terrified. What I am curious about is the white point of view. I have a question about gay marriage as well – I am dying to ask someone who is opposed to two men or two women being married how such a contract would impact his life. I am even more curious to know what a white guy in Mississippi in the 1960s most feared losing by not being able to systematically segregate, oppress and terrify black people. Did the civil rights movement threaten to compromise what must have been seen as sacred remnants of the glorious days of slavery? Was it some sort of Tea Party-ish resistance to the federal government? Or did white people fear payback? Had I known a fraction of the story I sure would have.
I have not found an answer, of course, but I did read a quote that – to put it mildly – gave me pause. And here, in all its breathtaking callousness, from an interview with a white male in Mississippi in the 1960s, are the words:
“We killed two-month old Indian babies to take this country,” one white voter explained succinctly to the press, “and now they want us to give it away to the niggers.” [Pillar of Fire, pg. 68]
