Before the first black family moved onto our block in June of 1963, the civil rights movement had dominated the news for several years. Just as I was entering my teens, I saw the effects of the racist Jim Crow laws that denied blacks the freedom promised to them a century earlier.
On TV, I watched black teens, along with some white sympathizers, staging sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters. White boys with ducktail haircuts taunted them. In my neighborhood, boys who swore and smoked and rolled cigarette packs in their short sleeves sported those cuts. They were guys who acted tough and postured, ready for a fight. They were boys I avoided. I saw this same kind of teen on my television, spattering the black kids sitting at the counter with eggs, or grinning while they poured a drink over their heads. My stomach roiled at their cruelty. I’d witnessed local mean kids dumping water on a mentally challenged boy, and I had screamed, “Leave him alone!” They only laughed and told me to mind my own business. I hated them.
I heard the name Martin Luther King over and over. As a Lutheran, I knew Martin Luther as the man who had confronted the Catholic Church over its unjust practices back in the 1500s. I was confused when I first heard the name. Martin Luther was a sixteenth-century German monk. Why did a black man have that name?
At my all-white Lutheran high school, some teachers talked about King in a way that helped me overcome my confusion. Luther had challenged the Catholic Church’s misuse of power in the sixteenth century. One said that today’s Martin Luther challenged whites’ misuse of power over African Americans in segregated southern states. Blacks were forced to acquiesce to whites in every aspect of life. Jim Crow laws denied them entry into swimming pools, amusement parks, and taxpayer-funded public universities. In many southern cities, blacks weren’t even allowed to use the public library. I gained some understanding, but I don’t recall much class time spent talking about the civil rights movement—and it all seemed so far away.
I was nearing the end of my freshman year of high school on May 2, 1963, when more than one thousand African American students marched into downtown Birmingham, Alabama. I couldn’t reconcile the images of these protesting teens with the fear my family and our neighbors had felt toward blacks. The black kids in Birmingham were about my age; they looked and dressed a lot like me. The girls mostly wore dresses, and their hair was carefully coiffed. The boys sported slacks and button shirts. The teens sang and chanted, “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” Even after being arrested, they kept singing through the bars of the paddy wagon—and from their jail cells, where they were stuffed like upright sardines.
Watching TV with my parents, I was flummoxed by competing feelings. On the one hand, I’d never seen protests before, people defying the police. Was that even okay? On the other, I was gripped with horror by the way these well-dressed, singing kids were mistreated. “Why are those kids being arrested?” I asked my parents. “They didn’t do anything bad.”
My conservative dad said, “When the police say to disperse, they’re supposed to disperse. These protests are illegal.” He was against anyone disobeying the police.
Mom agreed. “We’ll have total anarchy if laws aren’t obeyed.”
Mom and Dad were wedded to the status quo. Their immigrant parents had raised them—and they in turn had raised their children—to respect authority. But what about those kids who just wanted to sit at a lunch counter? The black people who were made to move to the back of the bus? I imagined myself in their place—the burn of injustice consuming me. But my parents’ reverence for law and order made sense to teenaged me, too. How could we have a society that didn’t obey the police? I didn’t understand what was at stake.
The next day, I watched a news report showing hundreds of black youths gathered in downtown Birmingham. What happened next made me dizzy: Birmingham firemen turned their fire hoses full force on the young demonstrators! The blast of water drove scores of blacks against fences and rolled them along the ground. I thought of firemen as protectors, but in Birmingham, they were on the attack!
Snarling German shepherds surrounded the protestors. I threw my hands over my eyes when the dogs lunged. Teens were dragged away, their shredded pants exposing lacerated and bloodied flesh. Demonstrators lay helpless and injured on the ground, but the police still beat them with batons. I imagined the searing pain of those sticks cracking my bones, my skull.
“Dad, they’re sending dogs after them!” I cried out. “Remember how you told me the Indians were mistreated by the white man? The Trail of Tears? These police are so . . . so mean!”
“The colored are expecting too much, too fast. You can’t just change society in such a short time.”
That opinion was common among whites we knew. Years later, I read King’s response to the familiar refrain of “Wait.”
For years now, I have heard the word “Wait!” This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” It is easy for those who have never felt the stinging facts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim . . . there comes a time when your cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice. . . .16
By the age of fourteen, I’d heard Dad talk about lynching as our family sat tightly packed at the kitchen table, the steam from our chicken and vegetable soup clouding the air. “In the South,” Dad said, “if a colored man looks wrong at a white woman, a white mob’ll just string him up. No trial. No questions. Just vigilantes doing what they want. They set the Negro on a horse, place a noose around his neck, throw the rope over a tree and tie it tight. Then they smack the horse on the rear. When the horse takes off, the man dangles from his neck till he’s dead. A mob’s a frightening thing.”
The image terrified me, but I had no real knowledge of the torture, humiliation, and lack of basic freedom blacks had endured at the hands of white people. Except for the lynching explanation, I don’t recall my parents ever talking about the unfairness in the South. I had never even heard the term Jim Crow. To me, it seemed as if the civil rights movement had just exploded out of nowhere. It was happening in the South, where black kids couldn’t sit at a lunch counter or go to school with white kids. That doesn’t happen here, I thought. My understanding was that we didn’t want blacks in our neighborhood to protect our property. So when Dad said, “Wait,” it made sense to me. How could the status quo just change overnight?
Were most whites as ignorant as our family was? Years later, I came to see how myopic “Wait!” was, as if blacks had been seeking freedom and equality for just a few months rather than the one hundred years since they were supposedly freed from the cutting chains of slavery. They were still bound, this time by Jim Crow manacles.
But neighborhood whites like my parents weren’t thinking about equality for African Americans. They were focused on their own fear—that they would lose their greatest investment, the value of their homes.