Racial Ignorance: A Confession

With all the reports on television about the anniversary of the March on Washington on August 28, 1963 (one day after our wedding), I am painfully reminded of my ignorance about that movement in our nation at the time it happened.  The one and only memory I have of desecration is the incident in Little Rock, Arkansas  when federal troops were called in to assure a child (or was it a group of children?) the right to attend an all white school.  (I googled to discover that happened in 1957.)  I would have been 14 years old and I wonder why this particular event sticks in my mind or came to my awareness.  I don't remember hearing it talked about at home or at school, and we didn't have a television. So now I'm wondering why this event stuck with me. 
  
I graduated from high school in Belton, Texas in 1961 without experiencing desegregation.  Now, on reflection, I'm wondering when the schools in my hometown were integrated.  I finished college in 1966 and Thomas and I moved to Europe to work in Switzerland and Germany for the next sixteen years, and for the most part, we continued to be unaware of the civil rights turmoil in the States. Oh, I occasionally picked up a copy of Time or  Newsweek and read something about Martin Luther King, Jr. without realizing the full implications of what was actually happening.  

When we returned to the States in November 1982, after sixteen years in Europe we settled with our family in Nashville, Tennessee.  Occasionally a public service announcement on television would inform the community of one of the anniversaries of a Civil Rights set-in or demonstration. I remember watching them with disbelief and extreme sadness--actual footage of the brutality, the cruel and sometimes violent reactions to Freedom Riders, lunch counter sit-ins that turned ugly, a church bombing that killed several little girls,  fire-hoses blasting young marchers, dogs attacking students, billy-club beatings, tear gas lobbed into crowds... these were the images that welcomed me back to the United States! 

Seeing these events for the first time even though they were decades old, I slowly began to realize what I was witnessing!  ...and my heart broke.  How can human beings be so cruel to one another?  The events of Bloody Sunday shamed me because I was still living in the States when it happened.  How did I miss it?  How did our local newspaper report it?  Or did they report it?  

To expose my ignorance yet again, I have one last story.  Thomas and I married on August 27, 1963; spent the night in Austin, Texas and drove to Corpus Christi the next day.  The first time I heard of the March on Washington was in 1994 or '95!  More than three decades later!  I was in a seminary class studying the theology of Martin Luther King, Jr.  When my professor talked about the March on Washington that took place on August 28, 1963 the date of the event stuck me--one day after our wedding!  We were in Corpus Christi!  It was in this same class that I learned the statistics on lynchings and  heard the name and the story of Emmit Till for the first time.  That made me wonder if there were other people in the United States who did not know his story or recognize his name.  Was there anyone else in this country as ignorant and as blind as I was?

For the last 30 years I've intentionally devoted my attention to the unfolding of our nation's awareness of our racial ignorance.  I have read and contemplated the spiritual implications of our prejudices, nurtured relationships with people who have helped me understand myself and the issue of race better, and I have even preached sermons on the subject when the texts present themselves and the time is right.    


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