August 28

 

On this date in 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

 

A few years ago I entered the Martin Luther King museum in Atlanta feeling small and contaminated. I felt guilty of white Southern racism by mere genetic association with my ancestors.  I was surprised the security guard didn’t scowl at me. I was a minority visitor and felt out of place though certainly not unwelcome. I felt unworthy to be here, that I had not earned the right to be here. I had not suffered. Two opposing convictions prevailed within me: There should be more white visitors at this shrine vs We don’t deserve to be let in. 

  Upstairs I waited behind a black man at the water fountain.  I drank deeply after him, drinking in the irony that we shared a water fountain on holy ground when 40 years ago we would have been sent to separate fountains, separate schools, separate neighborhoods, separate seats on the bus, separate seating areas at the lunch counter.

   I blinked back tears while looking at Dr. King’s personal Bible and handwritten notes.  I felt an overwhelming urge to grasp the arm of an elderly black woman standing near me and blurt out, “I’m sorry; I am so sorry that we did this to you.”  The feelings of embarrassment and shame never left me, the desire to apologize profusely never abated.

I wanted to hold a stranger’s hand. I wanted to be forgiven.

But it wasn’t me who hung men by their necks from Mississippi oaks simply because they were black. It wasn’t me who arrested Rosa Parks, unleashed attack dogs on peaceful demonstrators, dispersed crowds with fire hoses and tear gas, clubbed marchers, or firebombed black churches. I wasn’t among the Caucasian mobs spewing venom and holding signs with phrases I won’t even repeat.  I didn’t threaten those frightened students as they pioneered segregation. I didn’t shoot the gun that April in Memphis.  Yet somehow I felt Sunday as though I had done all of that, like some accomplice. But I was so young in 1968. I didn’t know what was happening around me or beyond me. I was playing with Matchbox cars, riding my bike, playing Little League; I didn’t know that you were fighting for freedoms as basic as breath.

   I’d like to think that if I’d known, if I’d been older, that I would have been one of the few white people linking arms with you at the front of a march. But I don’t know.

Oscar Wilde remarked that “only the shallow know themselves.”  The truth is I don’t know which white person in which photo I would have been. Maybe I wouldn’t have appeared in any photos. Perhaps I’d blend into the background of other stay-at-home Southerners who protested nothing, silent enablers of oppression and abuse, imagining myself neutral and civilized.  But wherever humans are being degraded how is neutrality a personality trait of being civilized?

   To my brothers and sisters of color, can you possibly accept my pale apology? Could you grant me forgiveness that I, that we, don’t deserve? 

The above is taken from a guest column I wrote a few years ago for The Tennessean, Nashville’s newspaper.  I was blessed by the e-mails of gratitude I received from black readers, mostly women. But I have to say that those good feelings were overshadowed by the shock and the disgust I felt from the harsh and angry letters I received from several white males.  It was a painful reminder to me that racism, both subtle and blatant, still breathes and breeds in the swamps of ignorance and hate.

- rLp --

 

Comments

[Genevieve Jones]

Shock and disgust...perfect descriptors. White men are the most insecure males on the planet. They have the most to fear from those of whom they have taken no time to learn about, because they continue to spread ignorance and hate which only serves to give them more false bravado; bravado spoken with hateful words and acted with impotent strength. Ramon, all I can say is...YOU GO WHITE BOY!! Keep speaking the truth and setting the bar higher for racial understanding and sensitivity.