How do we tell the story of the civil rights movement, which has now entered into the core narrative of American history, a generation after the events? For many of those who now write about the civil rights movement, it is a dim or nonexistent memory. The narrative of the civil rights movement is a heroic one, most often written by people who experienced it directly, or remembered it clearly. But a generation after the events, we find that it is difficult to separate memory from history. As we write the history of the movement from our own moment in history, we find that the separation between the past and the present constantly breaks down. This is the story of one example of such a collapse.
JAMES BALDWIN: Black people need witnesses; in this hostile world which thinks, um, everything is white.
INTERVIEWER: Are you still in despair about the world?
BALDWIN: I never have been in despair about the world, I’m enraged by the world.
INTERVIEWER: Enraged, alright.
BALDWIN: I don’t think I’m in despair. I can’t afford despair. I can’t tell my nephew, my niece; you can’t, you can’t tell the children there’s no hope.
—from James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket
What do we tell our children? What stories do we pass along so that they know their past? For them to learn the past that belongs to the nation, that typically mythic narrative of exceptionalism and citizenship, is unavoidable. They will get this narrative in their school assemblies, through advertisements, via the media. The past that belongs to an aggrieved people—in James Baldwin’s case and dare I say my own—is a different narrative. Of course, the African American past is no less exceptional than the mythic American narrative of belonging, but it is crafted in an often-cruel juxtaposition to that same notion of belonging. Stories of denial need to be passed along, to be sure, but it is important to ask when and how our children need to learn that the American narrative may not belong to them.
Baldwin’s angry declaration that “you can’t tell the children there’s no hope” registers clearly at one end of a spectrum of citizenship denied. But for some African Americans, the notion of hopelessness and alienation is as strange to them as the American exceptionalist narrative that seemingly declares the entire nation was linked arm in arm with Martin Luther King Jr. when he marched for freedom (and jobs). I am talking here about the privileged classes of African America that for one reason or another actually did enjoy material resources unknown to most of the country, that did enjoy access to those things that embodied the American dream trumpeted in the news, in the advertisements, and on the radio and television.
But the question remains, indeed it has always remained: do you tell the children?
The question remains, of course, because race still has the potential to, at any given moment, strip away all the accumulated material and political privilege that well-placed blacks might enjoy. Our children—Baldwin’s and my own—need to be prepared for a narrative in which they cannot see themselves, their past, or their future.
But when do you tell the children?
Leaving this to the schools means that we can wait for the primary and secondary school social science units that deal with the civil rights movement. Or, we can wait until February (and not co-incidentally these two often line up). In either moment, determined parents have the opportunity to enhance the curriculum with stories about how their family fit into that narrative of American exceptionalism. Indeed, memoiristic opportunities abound at such moments; except, of course, when one’s family feels it “can’t afford”—to use Baldwin’s construction—to tell even those stories.
What happens then? What happens when silence is the determining voice in a narrative about belonging?
Every spring I teach the introductory survey of the postemancipation black experience, African American History: Emancipation to the Present. It is a large lecture course by my university’s standards, and I need a half dozen graduate students, most leading two sections, to cover the necessary number of discussion sections. In any given year I know most, but not all, of the graduate assistants assigned to my course. In this context, the start of the spring term 2010 was fairly unremarkable. My teaching fellows team was a mixture of those with whom I had already worked, those I had taught, and those who were my new acquaintances.
Shortly after our first meeting when we talked about the course expectations, what we each thought we would bring to the class and, more specifically, to each section, I received an e-mail from one of these new colleagues, Chris Johnson. Chris simply wanted to know if he had overheard correctly that I had grown up in Montgomery, Alabama. He had been raised in Lowndes County and Montgomery—both places, as it happens, that by the time we got to the mainstream civil rights history would figure prominently in the course I was about to lead. My response was fairly short but brimmed with the beginnings of many revelations:
Hi Chris,
I was just in Alabama for two years. My father was in the Air Force and taught at the Air War College in Montgomery—Maxwell-Gunther AFB. We lived on Lott Drive (wherever that happens to be).1
My memories of the area are slight—mainly focused on the worldview of a six-year-old. We’re talking my pet hamster, the train that ran past the end of the development around my bedtime, and walking with my older brother and sister to the local 7–11 (although it wasn’t that) to get candy.
Chris’s follow-up was also short, but it pushed me down a surprising path of exploration and discovery:
It’s incredible how many connections people have to Montgomery through Maxwell.
That’s a nice neighborhood. One of the city’s main tributaries, Vaughn Road, runs nearby. The area features some of the more expensive real estate in Montgomery—those homes that aren’t locked inside gated subdivisions that is. I imagine that the neighborhood must have been newly developed then.
My father was a New York cop during the 1970s, but he would visit family in Alabama. He told me that the area near your childhood home was all farmland then, and he kicked himself for not investing when he had the chance.2
I read right past the relatively familiar phenomenon of the less than six degrees of separation that defines the lives of those African Americans who pursue a career in academia. Instead, I was simply mystified by Chris’s residential assessment: my family lived in a nice neighborhood? How far was our home from the Air Force base? Was the sundry store still there? Did trains still rumble down the tracks? We lived in a nice neighborhood?
I sat down at the keyboard, navigated to Google Maps, and typed in “Lott Drive, Montgomery, Alabama.” Simple enough. While I didn’t doubt that Chris’s assessment of Lott Drive was correct for at least some portion of the road, I thought I’d look to see where that road traveled and if the tell-tale signs of railroad tracks would help me figure out where I lived along what had to be a long road.
Lott Drive came up immediately. It was only two blocks long.
I lived in a nice neighborhood?
On a lark I decided to try the street-view function in Google Maps. I knew it wouldn’t work, but why not try?
It worked.
Not only did it work, but the image that filled the screen was of the house that I grew up in, or, more accurately, spent two years in during my early childhood. But perhaps this wasn’t the house. Yes, we did live in a two-story, California stucco–style house, but there had to be more of the same in the development. It turns out that there weren’t. My family lived in this nice neighborhood and owned this stylistically singular corner house. Everyone else lived in large, one-floor, brick ramblers. My first thought was that we must have been very conspicuous. As I would soon discover, we were conspicuous but not for reasons that immediately occurred to me, although they should have.
Our home on Lott Drive.
Still mesmerized by this discovery I zoomed out and began to look for other markers of my childhood. Right there! The railroad tracks. Satellite view tells me that they aren’t in use anymore. Perhaps they are turning into some sort of greenbelt that upwardly mobile professionals can jog along. But then again, perhaps not. In any case, one quick look at the tracks confirmed for me that my spatial sense was on target, though horribly skewed by a six-year-old’s memory. The tracks told me where my home was, all right, but that long trek back from the break in the barbed-wire fence at the edge of the tracks to my family home wasn’t quite two blocks. Lots of memories were made and lost in the meadow that separated the tracks from my bedroom window. I don’t see the meadow now—just homes. For all I know they were there all the time.
What was a six-year-old doing near the train tracks and then wandering back home? I was following my older brother. Every so often we would go to the corner convenience store, buy some Lik-m-Aid or a Mad magazine or Cracked trading cards, and head home. But we didn’t take the path back along the streets. Instead we’d go out the parking lot to the rear of the store and walk to the train tracks. If a slow-moving freight train came along, we would climb the ladder to a box car and ride there to the break in the barbed-wire fence. If the train was moving a lot faster, we’d put a penny on the track to watch it get flattened. The first to find the penny that had been shot off the rails in who knows what perilous direction would get to keep it. I still remember the warmth of the penny on that rare occasion when my brother let me find it. I can only hope that he let my sister or our cousins who lived nearby also have a fair shot at finding the penny. I’m pretty certain I was allowed to find the coin, since it was the best guarantee that I wouldn’t tell our parents where we had gone or why.
Still marveling at these floods of memories, I went back to Google Maps’ street view to see if I could find that convenience store. I knew exactly where to look. A few seconds browsing told me that the store was now gone and had been replaced either by a gas station or an Applebee’s. I’m pretty sure my former source of empty calories and preadolescent gross-out humor is presently the gas station.
Now fully captured by the marvel of Google Maps, I decided to virtually walk my way back to the California stucco I called home—the legit way, not via the train tracks. I didn’t make it a hundred electronic yards before I stopped in a different set of tracks. I knew that building. The second I saw it, I knew that building. Zooming out to satellite view provided confirmation. This was the private school, Montgomery Academy to be precise, for which I took an admissions test when I was about six. For years, my memory told me that I went to take that test with a few other kids from the neighborhood and that they, or rather, their parents, really wanted them to get in. I went along for fun. A few weeks or months later I realized that I must not have done well on that test since I never enrolled.
Some years later—maybe as many as another six or ten—I was talking to my mother about all of this, and she told me that my memory was wrong. In fact, I did quite well on the test, had gotten in, and the school really wanted me to matriculate. For reasons that still confound me, I have no recollection of what she said next, if anything.
All of this—the coincidence with Chris, the Google Maps discoveries, the truncated memory of my school admission—was still operating at the level of a neat story and nothing more. Wanting to share all of this with my brother, sister, and father (my mother had passed away four years earlier and with her went much of our family past), I sent them an e-mail and the URL for that two-floor California stucco.
Within minutes my brother responded.
My memory was correct, that was the house in which we lived. And, yes, those were the train tracks where we braved danger on innumerable occasions. After that, however, his story about those years in Alabama was markedly different than my own. We began to exchange e-mails as I discovered aspects of my family’s history that simply weren’t mine. The first e-mails were short; the latter, more expansive. Both astonished me but in wholly different ways.
The first rupture in my narrative of Montgomery, Alabama, revolved around the school. I had known for years that I had at least taken the school’s entrance exam. My brother’s e-mail—the first in our several days’–long exchange—parted these clouds:
Actually, I don’t know if you were ever told, when you, me and Karen took that test and passed we were the first blacks ever to pass the test [and] get in the Academy. Made the newspapers. Too many Klan kids at the school. That’s why we did not go.3
“I don’t know if you were ever told. . . .” The words lingered like something simultaneously there and not there.
Though spectral, the story was clear: Brian assumed I knew that we all tested for the school. This was news to me. More significant, however, was the fact that Brian, Karen, and Jonathan Holloway had been on the cusp of actually being part of “the movement.” That national narrative of American exceptionalism that I always believed I was too young to have experienced was, it turns out, dramatically close to being my own lived history.
I grew up in a family that I understood to have benefited enormously from the gains of the civil rights movement while never directly engaging it. At least this is what my own gentle perusing through family history could ever indicate. My father was a career officer in the United States Air Force. Although he had turned down two commissions to West Point—something his father could never understand—my father eventually joined the Air Force as an officer. He had lived in seclusion for weeks with his squadron during the Cuban Missile Crisis; flown KC-135 tanker-refuelers during the Vietnam War; been chased by Russian fighter pilots when his plane violated Russian airspace; was convinced for years that he was under surveillance by the Air Force for reasons he never fully divulged, beyond saying that he took on a lot of “extra missions” to secure better pay; and had refused to let my mother attend the March on Washington for fear of her safety and his security clearance.
My maternal grandfather had been in the struggle as a member of Franklin Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet and then as the first executive director of the United Negro College Fund, but somewhere along the line the struggle faded from view.
All of this is to say, it was quite a shock to discover that I was on the verge of being part of the movement myself, only to be yanked back to my safer world, where I worried about a short-lived hamster, securing candy from the convenience store, and hopping slow-moving freight trains back home.
My brother’s follow-up e-mail—the one generated by my almost-frantic entreaties for more information and seeking affirmation that our potential integration actually made the local news—provided a little more detail:
Made all the newspapers.
It was a big deal.
This place was a target for all civil rights activist [sic].
When we all passed it was a BIG DEAL!
And mom and dad were afraid now that we were in the newspapers.
Didn’t want to become the next posters for the next Klan rally.4
In another e-mail, immediately following this one, Brian went on at greater length and in more evocative detail:
It was a very wierd time.
Not steppin in the neighbors yard was no joke.
Living in that neighborhood was no joke.
You were one of the neighborhood darlings, so young, you would go up and speak to Klan folk and they got all nervous and jerky because they liked you and you were so cute.
screwed them up.
over them, the other kids were allowed to play in our yard.
the only neighbors that we could visit were the ones from the military—which oddly enough lived behind us and across the street.
we had all sorts of joy, every day.
when karen and i went to school we would get chastized, harassed, intimidated and [ostracized] by the blacks.
we were the only ones who did not have [a] lunch voucher, and could actually pay for our lunch.
That made it worse.
And we got on the bus with all the white kids after school.
Trouble started when we would actually do our homework and raise our hands in class. Pretty soon, I just stopped talking.
The biggest event in school was when Hank Aaron hit 715 HR, black teachers cried silently because it was too dangerous to celebrate. There was such a joy in all the blacks eyes, the lunch room servers, the janitors, etc. Everyone was smiling with their eyes and saying nothing. It was like “We did it!”
I did not see that again, until Gramma cried when Tiger won the Masters. It was one of those moments.
White teachers were pissed and angry.
Never forget that day.5
Given the various shorthands and typographical errors that are endemic to e-mail communications, I’m comfortable assuming my brother meant to say, “I will never forget that day” or “Never forgot that day.” However, taking creative license when I read that line, I actually see my brother closing the e-mail with literal directions to me: “Never forget that day.” Naturally, this assertion, even fabricated as an assertion, is an impossibility since none of what my brother had to offer was part of my recollected past. Well, I did remember the neighbors behind us and across the street. They were both in the Air Force as well and I only remember them. It never occurred to me that there might have been a larger reason behind this. (It also never occurred to me that because my mother “looked” white, the neighbors I never got to know were probably pushed to the edge of their sensibilities for all manner of reasons.)
I followed up with my sister and father. Was Brian right?
Karen responded that because Brian was two years older, he simply had a different set of recollections than she did. But as she thought more about it, the general ambience of the time sounded true. She wrote,
I was called names myself at Cloverdale—“oreo”—and I had no knowledge of what it meant. The military kids were definitely ostracized. You could try out for teams and stuff but there was a townie flavor to decision making. . . . I remember mom saying that it blew them away when cousins (Brian, Pam, and I) could perform at the highest levels. Unheard of!6
Although less detailed in the retelling than my brother’s e-mail, this was sufficient sibling confirmation. My father, unfortunately, was a different story altogether. This was a man who has never been one to look backward. Rather, this was a man who sprinted. Sprinted to get ahead and always sprinting to leave his past behind.
The only neighbors I ever knew. I’m on the far left.
It was worth a shot, though. Certainly he had something to say about all of this. I remember being very excited when his e-mail arrived. The excitement lasted all of a few seconds, as it took that long to read the entire note:
That was really something to view the old home and to relive all the things that happened during that time in our lives. So many things and so many moments!!!! Remind me to tell you the story of how we bought the home.7
That was it. But still, there was something there.
Too excited about the e-mails that kept coming in from my brother and sister and too intrigued by the closing sentence in his e-mail that suggested a powerful story about busting racial covenants, integrating neighborhoods, or engaging in some quietly subversive civil rights action, I decided to pick up the phone and press my father on the issues.
My mother.
The housing story was something of a bust. It turns out that my father went with one of the leading real estate firms in the city, Blitz and Golinsky. (My father made the conscious decision to go with a real estate firm that had a Jewish surname. He felt that this firm would show him a full range of properties and not just point him in the direction of Montgomery’s black enclaves.) To their credit, the Blitz and Golinsky agents said they’d be happy to work with him to find a place to buy, and in short order he was under contract for a home three doors down from Montgomery’s mayor.
Since we didn’t move into that house, I assumed there was a great story to be told about race, housing, integration, privilege, and access. If the story is there (and, really, how could it not be?), it’s lost to time. My father simply recalls that the sellers wanted to change the closing cost distribution after the contracts were signed. They argued that my father was getting a good deal and shouldn’t be “bitching” about the change. Blitz and Golinsky kept at it and found the place that would become our home.
Reaching out to my father to find out what really happened with the Montgomery Academy was also something of a disappointment. My father recalled that we took the exam and that “something” ran in the newspapers, but he insisted he had no memory of why the Holloway kids never enrolled. But just when I felt I had run into a dead end with him, he started to talk in greater detail about Montgomery Academy and even the neighborhood where we lived.
“It was all part of a greater strategy,” he said. “Montgomery Academy was the place where Montgomery’s power elite sent their children: the bankers, the politicians, the doctors, the lawyers, and the generals at Maxwell [Air Force Base].” He continued:
The generals had a plan for me. You see, I was the first black to teach at the Air War College and they wanted to make me a general. I had been a line officer, meaning I hadn’t spent my career pushing paper around on a desk somewhere but had actually risked my life time and time again. They really wanted to change the face of the Air Force and part of that was finding the right kind of officer and, with him, the right kind of family. Our family was tall, your mother looked right and came from the right background, you kids were all doing well in school and could probably cut it at Montgomery Academy. The generals met with the other leaders at the school and made the case that you three should take the test and, if you passed, be admitted. That’s really all I remember about Montgomery Academy. For them and their small way of looking at the world, we were the right kind of family.
But I didn’t want any of that. I didn’t want to be their poster child. I didn’t want to be a general. I just wanted to get out of the Air Force. They had taken enough of me.8
When we hung up, my mind was reeling. Part of the dislocation was certainly due to the frustration that my newly imagined place in the grand civil rights narrative was being denied by a father who couldn’t remember the most important detail in the story. What was more disorienting, however, was that my father could confirm the immense challenges of the era—soldiers coming home from Vietnam and suffering further degradation and isolation due to their role in that catastrophe, the constant burden of racial tightrope walking—and that all of this was news to me. Granted, I was approaching my seventh birthday when my family left Montgomery, and so, in a very real way, I should be excused from knowing these histories then. But never knowing these things? Never understanding that my father actually broke a color line and made a measure of military history? Never knowing that the reason I could only remember children whose parents were in the military is that these were the only people who would deal with us? How could this be possible?
I understand the desire to protect a young child from a certain ugliness in life, but erasure was a different phenomenon altogether. But, then, in a coincidental moment that one could only describe as cheaply cinematic, just a few days after this part of my family’s past was reconstructed and while I was still processing why it was unknown to me (especially given my professional pursuits and the fact that my family knew I was working on a book concerning memory and identity), I came across a box of our mother’s possessions that my brother had put together and sent to me for Christmas. I hadn’t ventured near the box since it had arrived a month earlier, avoiding the emotions that were going to accompany opening this archive.
I had actually forgotten about the box, even though I practically stepped around it every day when I went to my closet. Perhaps emboldened, perhaps excited, I opened the box and started tracing my own childhood through report cards, pictures, and crude art projects my mother had kept. And then I stumbled across a document that I had never seen before. It is dated July 4, 1968, and addressed to “My dear son.” I wasn’t quite one year old at this point, so before the end of the first line I knew that I wasn’t the “dear son” in the letter.
July 4, 1968
My dear son,
You recently questioned me as to “why” I would take the time to fight for America when this same America has placed so many troubles in the path of black men. I know that my answer has been long in coming but your question was so honest, so full of deep, pointed thought! I must confess, an answer seemed very hard to find and even harder to express. But as I worried about your throwing fire crackers against my orders and reflected on my thoughts of the deadly “firecrackers” we Americans are using to kill and wound an enemy, I found your answer. I only hope that you can understand a little of what I am saying and wishing for you in my “answer.”
Son, I am here because I belong here! The black people of America have been there during all of the many crises that have faced this most magnificent, most lovely, most confusing country! We have shared these crises with our blood and our strength. It is our continuing heritage to be a part of the building of America, and a part of her strength. We must share in her hope of freedom for all men, everywhere!
I believe that through my sacrifices this year, I can guarantee a little better chance for you to realize the full benefits of a free country! Just as I eagerly joined in the fight for the right to vote, to have a chance to cast my free ballot, freely, so too must I fight for the right of other men to cast their ballot. And son, the thousands of other black men here realize too, that this fight for a free ballot is equally a fight for a free country. To fight for one, you fight for the other . . . guarantee one, and you guarantee the other! We know that the sound of free ballots being cast is the beautiful sound of freedom that we so want for our children and the children of all people wherever they might live.
You must realize that the sacrifice you are making in having your dad away and the sacrifices of the thousands of other black men and white men are forcing the dream of freedom forward.
Yours in love and understanding,
Dad
Having recently discovered how Google Maps could refresh my own understanding of my family past, I went straight back to Google and began to enter in phrases from this letter. I knew it wasn’t Baldwin, but it was in the tradition of the letter to his nephew that prefaced The Fire Next Time. Nothing came up no matter how many different ways I searched for the original author. And then I found myself coming to an inescapable, if unbelievable, conclusion: my father might actually be the author.
My brother, the best family historian we have left, wasn’t sure of this himself. It seemed right to him given everything that was going on in the world and in our home, but he didn’t remember the letter. I called my father back, and he confirmed, without going into any details, that it sure sounded like a letter he wrote. He didn’t recall giving it to Brian though, but I simply had to understand that his memory wasn’t what it used to be and, after all, it was such a challenging time.
I was left with one question: whose father was this? I now understood that he broke barriers at the Air War College and that the generals there wanted him to break even more. I had long known that he didn’t want his family, especially his wife, to be too conspicuous for fear of some sort of professional or political backlash—a fear that he felt was substantiated by the fact that immediately after he left the Air Force, his taxes were audited for five straight years. But, in the privacy of letters that he wrote and maybe never sent, was my father some sort of militant patriotic race warrior? Was his personal silence on these issues something that he felt the need to pass along to his children? Is that what made us the right kind of family? And, if so, what were the costs of being that kind of family? What did we give up, if anything, by living a life of structured silences?
Yes, I lost my (highly romanticized) chance to be a civil rights warrior like the brave souls in places like Little Rock or Birmingham, but since I had no idea that this was even a possibility, I never felt any sort of remorse or loss about this when I was growing up. But now that I know about it, what am I to make of it? The clinical assessment might be that my father insisted on letting the movement’s frontline activists pass my family by and that my family simply rode their coattails to a life of material comfort and advantage. Being the right kind of family certainly allowed for that kind of advantage taking.
But maybe I should make of this something that is much larger than a single narrative of a single family in the civil rights era. In the time since Chris Johnson asked me if I grew up in Montgomery, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to ponder the significance of this found history. Putting aside the exceptionalism that the Montgomery Academy represented and that the Air Force generals desired, what we are left with is a fairly typical story of a family struggling to find a way to fit into a viciously poisoned social and political climate. It is, perhaps, a mundane story of parents working hard to protect their children in the way they thought best, hoping to leave for them a better future than the present and past they had known. Put another way, it is a story of not telling stories with the faith that being the right kind of family would pay dividends that extended beyond a child’s ability to imagine a heroic past.