We were on our way home from a movie when granddaughter Kass, who will be 10 in a few months, said something about “colored people.” I don’t recall the rest of the comment; it was the phrase that caught my ear.
“Where did you hear that?” I asked.
I had not heard it in nearly 40 years.
“We are reading about it in school,” she said. “They had bathrooms for Whites and different bathrooms for Colored.”
I graduated high school and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1965, went off to boot camp at Great Lakes, and soon found myself attending school in Memphis, Tenn. — where signs told “sailors and dogs (to) keep off the grass,” and gas stations had two toilets, one for “Whites” and one for “Colored.”
I had heard about such signs, but never seen them. I was raised in rural New England, where there were few “Colored.” I think I was a junior when a family moved into town. They were not warmly welcomed, and they were gone before the school year ended.
I lived outside of town, and learned in first-person-singular the tribulations of being a “city slicker” in a town where the bully who delighted on pounding the kid from New York while the rest of the town stood by and watched and tsk-tsked.
I watched the evening news in the 1960s as Blacks were beaten and hanged, and rioted in the streets of Los Angeles, and was confused about why people would burn their own neighborhoods.
Destined for a tour in the Vietnam War, I went for a week-long visit to the People’s Republic of North America, a navy-run survival school near Rangeley, Maine, where instructors treated us as though they were the people we would be going off to fight.
Their treatment of us “prisoners” may not have been legally-defined torture, but it was darned realistic to us, and when we were “rescued” and the U.S flag was unfurled, I, and a whole lot of other “POWs” saluted and cried.
I have traveled to many countries, and I learned about folks in other religions, other lands, other skins, who spoke other languages and wore other clothing.
In one of those countries, I dated a young woman who did not want to come to America because she had seen our race wars on television, and nothing I could say would sway her.
I substitute taught a high school class whose members thought this nation was founded on freedom of religion, and were surprised to learn how that worked out for early settlers who did not quite agree with whatever religion ruled their town.
We talked about equality of the genders, the fight for which those students, in 1986, thought had only recently begun. They were surprised to hear that when John Adams worked in Philadelphia to help write the Declaration of Independence, his wife Abigail, still home in Massachusetts, thought it necessary to write him a letter asking him to “remember the ladies” as he and the other men did their work.
“If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies,” Mrs. Adams wrote, “we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
More than 200 years later, the revolution of which she wrote still is being fomented.
In my lifetime, Colored became Black became African-American. Women burned their bras (but for the most part kept their shirts on) and argued for equal pay for equal work.
I have lived in other countries. Some of them I have liked a lot. I could have lived in several of them. I chose this one.
If Barack Obama does not win the presidency, I am certain there will have been those who helped him not win because he is black.
If Hillary Clinton does not win the presidency, I am certain there will have been those who helped her not win because she is a woman.
Just as I am certain if John McCain does not win the presidency, there will have been those who helped him not win because he is “old.”
But it seems the “No” voters have become a minority, and 232 years after Thomas Jefferson declared “all men are created equal,” we finally have arrived at a point where what we have been saying all this time is, for most of us, true.
I am really proud that my grandchildren are growing up in a nation where, if Obama or Clinton do not become president, all indications are the reason will be something other than skin color or gender.
©2008 Contact John Messeder at jmesseder@comcast.net
