JUAN WILLIAMS IS AN AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST, NEWS ANALYST, AND BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF EYES ON THE PRIZE: AMERICA’S CIVIL RIGHTS YEARS, 1954–1965
The best description of what it was like to be a black child in the 1960s, the time of Lis Wiehl’s new novel Snapshot, comes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In 1963 King led a march of hundreds of children in Birmingham, Alabama, to confront city officials about segregation at stores and restaurants. The young people, with a clear sense of right and wrong and no adult worries about losing their jobs or being arrested, defied a ban on protests and followed Dr. King into the streets.
When he was jailed for leading the march, King wrote a letter explaining why he urged young people to march despite calls for him to wait for a political settlement. In his April 16, 1963, letter, Dr. King wrote it was important that people understand why he could “wait” no longer for racial justice.
“This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never,’ ” he wrote.
King then offered an example of how racial segregation was impacting his own children, specifically his daughter.
When you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?” . . . then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
Lis Wiehl’s story of a fateful street-corner meeting between two girls, one white and one black, reads as an extension of King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” It is in line with Huck Finn, a white boy, finding a friend in an escaped black slave. Childhood friendships across racial lines have been a tradition, a constant in America. Those pure hearts and innocent relationships often fade as they are complicated by the rules of race among adults. But as children, those young minds have no investment in the adult world’s racial hang-ups.
Lisa and Molly, the girls in Wiehl’s book, find themselves caught in the web of history. At age four they have no idea about the larger historical picture. They know nothing about the nation’s two hundred years of struggle with the original sin of slavery; a Civil War in which six hundred thousand died and the Supreme Court’s approval of legal racial segregation—“separate but equal”—despite America’s founding declaration that “all men are created equal.”
The girls also had no clue about the violence that so often surrounds race in America, including the history of lynchings, bombings, and assassinations. And as we see in Wiehl’s book, that violence includes making scapegoats out of black people when a bad guy is needed to satisfy the public’s outrage.
The arrest of a black man for a crime he did not commit is reminiscent of Harper Lee’s book To Kill a Mockingbird. In Lee’s novel, a white Southern lawyer named Atticus Finch defends a black man who allegedly raped a white woman. As he grapples with the prejudice of the Alabama town, he offers his two small children the example of an adult who holds on to values of tolerance and acceptance of all people.
That lesson often involves getting children to open their eyes to the unpleasant reality of racial prejudice.
Two years before Lisa and Molly arrived at the parade, four little girls about their age made real-world headlines. Racists with bombs blew a hole in the side of the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing the four black girls who were attending Sunday Bible school. Their tragic deaths became a story told in books and movies. It is also brought to life in a far more racially diverse America by the poignant personal recollection of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She was a young playmate of one of the girls. Rice would rise from the segregated streets of ‘Bombingham’ to become the first African American woman to be the US Secretary of State. Imagine the loss if America never knew Ms. Rice because she was killed by the bombs.
In Snapshot, the two girls, who wear their pretty dresses for the big day, have no idea of the larger evils surrounding their simple pleasure of being at a parade. They can’t see the hidden hatred, the violent racial agendas about to unfold in the form of assassination, convenient lies, and corruption.
The joyful innocence represented by the two girls watching the parade also extends to their nascent womanhood. They are two girls who look on with marvel in their eyes, with no predisposition about society’s color line cutting sharply between black and white female beauty. A white man’s sexual attraction to a pretty mulatto woman would not have puzzled the four-year-olds. The stunner for them would be the white man’s conflict between his love for this woman and his racist beliefs.
What comes next reveals so much about what happens in America as young people grow up and get caught up in the racist stereotypes, the racial suspicions, and the social norms of racial separation that come to dominate our everyday adult experiences.
In so many ways, that is the genius of Lis Wiehl’s fictional construct for Snapshot. The girls become the personification of the innocence lost during this 1960s period of shifting racial rules. Just as they watched the parade, they also watch as the adults in their world kill, lie, riot, and generally turn on each other even as Congress passes a civil rights law, a voting rights law to advance racial equality in the United States.
Lisa and Molly then come to learn how difficult it can be to communicate honestly across racial lines as they see the complexities of the long history of racial distrust in the United States. The fact that the white girl’s father, an FBI agent, is asked by a black man to help him find the truth, offers hope. It is an example of pursuing truth across racial lines and shows there are adults who grew up in the midst of racial division but never lost their capacity to see truth across the color line. More importantly, they can pass these values on to their children and grandchildren.
Even today, in the early twenty-first century, with America more racially diverse that ever, the heartbreaking divide between children of different races and classes continues to complicate simple friendships.
The complicating factors begin at birth. They range from the higher infant mortality rates for black children to the high rate of out-of-wedlock birth rates that leave black children in poorer, single-parent families and goes on to the disproportionate rate of black high school dropouts. Segregated neighborhoods remain commonplace in America in the twenty-first century. And so do differences between blacks and whites in levels of education, economic class, and attitudes toward gun ownership rights, sentencing for drug crimes, and even how much racism remains in American society.
And when it comes to crime, the instinct to retreat into old racial tribes quickly becomes apparent. Today about half the population in prison is made up of people of color, largely black men like the suspect in Snapshot. This connects directly to the frequency of violent crime committed by poorly educated, unemployed, and often impoverished young black men. This remains a disturbing fact of modern American life. It is still a taboo topic for most discussions in proper, polite society—be it black or white.
Instead the conversation about race and crime moves to small-minded arguments, bickering over the discrepancies in sentencing for crack cocaine versus powder cocaine or the higher incidence of the police stopping blacks on the street as suspects, such as with the New York Police Department’s use of a controversial “Stop and Frisk” program that disproportionately targets black men.
In 1960s America, there was no need to call such a policy “Stop and Frisk” as the two little girls observe in the streets of their town. The reality of a prejudiced, all-white police force was true to the time and harassment of black suspects was commonplace as we see in the novel. That’s no fiction.
And it is no fiction that in 1989 a white man, Charles Stuart, said a black man had murdered his pregnant wife. Later Boston police found out he had done it. In 1994 Susan Smith, a white woman, said a black man hijacked her car and put it in a lake, killing her children. Police discovered she did it so she could marry a man who did not want children.
The challenge that comes from reading Snapshot is in understanding that it is truly a snapshot of our lives and our times. It is a snapshot of racial fear mongering and blame games that still blind us to the possibility of seeing the best in each other or just seeing people doing their jobs. The distortions caused by race become obvious when Stanley Blackstone, the white racist in Snapshot, does not lower his gun because the policeman approaching is black.
The story may be fictional, but its power comes from those two little girls and their very real moment of trust that is ultimately much larger than the adult corruption swirling around them. The final mystery would be whether they could find that same kind of friendship as adults.
To quote Dr King at the 1963 March on Washington:
I have a dream that one day . . . the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood . . . I have a dream that little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character . . . I have a dream that one day . . . little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
Snapshot is fiction. But it takes us along the twisted path of race in America in a way that is closer to the human experience than most history books.