November 14, 2022
Greetings from a glimpse in the mirror,
On this morning, sixty-two years ago, Ruby Bridges lived out what the U.S. Supreme Court deemed was fair and legal. She went to school. It was a cold morning in New Orleans, made harsher by the mobs of segregationist demonstrators who screamed obscenities at Ruby as she made her way.
Ruby would become the tip of the spear, the edge of change that ultimately would lead to a tense but lasting change. Black students would attend school with white children. I had only a vague impression of this moment in civil rights history. Instead, it was brought to me in real terms from another direction.
A few years ago, I was rereading the book Travels With Charlie, by John Steinbeck. I went back to read about the author traveling with his dog in search of America, a noble if not ephemeral pursuit. There, in the last third of the book, I saw what I had somehow missed or forgotten.
It was Steinbeck’s first-hand account of the morning ritual as Ruby came to school. Crowds of people came to see the ‘show’, a mob called The Cheerleaders, who would scream foul curses at the little girl. Some of these were celebrities of sorts, women who brought newspaper clippings of their exploits, their vitriol fueled by the attention of the crowd and the press.
On this morning, the real ‘show’ began when a white man dared to bring his white child to school. Steinbeck said, “… a man afraid who by his will held his fears in check, as a great rider directs a panicked horse.” Ruby attended a nearly empty school, and on this morning, it would move toward desegregation.
I read the account again last night and it is not graphic, but it is heartbreaking. The ugliest rancor was aimed at this man and his child, struggling against the crowd and the pressure of peers, to simply attend school. “But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate. In a long and unprotected life I have seen and heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before. Why then did these screams fill me with a shocked and sickened sorrow?” Steinbeck wrote.
A few years later, Norman Rockwell created the painting “The Problem We All Live With”, his depiction of Ruby Bridges’ courage. Rockwell painted his impression of this sad history, a brave step in that time, one that led to his dissolution with the Saturday Evening Post. But his intention was to show us in the middle of the country what was happening in the south. Those of us accustomed to his heartwarming images of family, were suddenly introduced to another ugly reality of our society.
These artists held up a looking glass for us to consider.
I remember standing in the hallway of the elementary school, holding my daughter’s hands, shepherding her three brothers toward their classrooms. The bell rang and the little humans swelled around me like one living thing, a river of life, colors and backpacks, laughing, yelling.
It is a hard thing to resist, that joy. It is one of the most powerful memories in my life. It swept my children, and their friends, down that raucous hall into rooms of learning, of encouragement. They explored some of their first challenges, their early inklings about how they would think and behave with others.
Do you see this contrast? Thirty years beyond the roiling of racial turmoil, which while not solved is at least progressing. Our children have had the chance to heal some of the divides, to learn to dissolve primitive beliefs in our differences. We as parents are learning too. Can you believe we ever behaved in such ways as the parents jeering at Ruby Bridges?
Well.
I listen to stories from parents talking about the battles they want to wage, shaking with moral outrage. Masks. No masks. Peanut allergies. School funding. What books to ban? Who gets to use this bathroom or play sports? What to do to protect students from being shot while studying arithmetic?
These issues, along with those of race and religious divisions that still exist, can be a dark cloud on our culture. But I am not thinking about social structures. I’m thinking about one child. One little girl, your daughter, mine, who goes to school in the midst of debates about what adults believe. She should not be the casualty.
Please don’t read this and assume there is an agenda or a position I want to forward. This is not that forum, in truth I don’t pretend to know the answers to what we all struggle with. My role is only to remind of us of where we’ve been and to hold up the looking glass. I’m only praying for us to solve our disagreements in a civil way, in a way we don’t destroy each other. We can learn from our past, we don’t have to become The Cheerleaders.
I want our children to be proud of us.
Hope this finds you setting the example,
David
Copyright © 2022 David Smith
Comments