White Boy in the Shadow of Martin Luther King
A great leader finally has the memorial he so richly deserves
“All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
I remember the day the black kids came to Greenbelt Junior High School. This was not the court-ordered bussing that would begin in 1974. This was integration, and it was 1969. By this day, Martin Luther King, Jr. had already been murdered by some dumb cracker. He wasn’t alone. During the 1960’s dumb crackers were still killing a lot of good men. In the South, looking someone directly in the eye could still be a hanging offense.
“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
In the days leading up to the arrival of the new bus, the morning announcements were followed by speeches from the principal or vice principal aimed at fostering pride in good behavior. I don’t know what they imagined we’d do when these darker skinned kids showed up, but all the speechifying just made us nervous.
On the actual day, the bus lane was lined on one side with police cars and the other side with police officers. About half of the white kids had been kept home by their parents. The black kids arrived, though, without much hullaballoo. The whole big event, witnessed by at least one reporter, took about two minutes from start to finish.
“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
I’m sure the new kids were a little nervous too. They’d gone from a one-room clapboard schoolhouse the day before, to a thirty-classroom building full of white kids they had never met. They had never had a gym or a cafeteria or a library to navigate. But they were determined to walk in with heads held high, and if I’d known just how much character they’d displayed, I’d have admired them.
“Faith is taking the first step, even when you don't see the whole staircase.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
I had grown up knowing that there was a neighborhood of “Negros” somewhere, but I’d never been there and would never think of going there. The old men in my neighborhood had a far less attractive name for Lakeland; one which I won’t repeat here. The neighborhood was nestled in a crook of the Paint Branch where it met Indian Creek. It was bounded on another side by railroad tracks and buffered on the side facing my neighborhood by what we called “The Woods.” There was no lake in Lakeland. It was bottom land, I’d later learn. And it flooded all the time.
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati