In March 2006, I gave the following speech at the New York County Lawyers Association at a program to commemorate the life of Mrs. Coretta Scott King. In it, I share how witnessing the violence perpetrated by the United States government and domestic terrorists during the Civil Rights Movement impacted me as a child.
As soon as I agreed to speak about the Civil Rights Movement through the eyes of a child, I began to feel a sense of foreboding. During my preparation I started to understand why: I did not have the words to articulate what I was feelings during that time and I began crying tears that I had been too paralyzed with fear and shock to shed during those formative years of my life. Looking back, however, gave me the opportunity to put some perspective on the past, and appreciate why a widely circulated photograph of Coretta Scott King at her husband’s funeral where she is embracing her youngest daughter, Bernice, who was leaning onto her lap resonated with me.
I was born at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement in the year of Emmitt Till’s death and three weeks after Rosa Parks’ arrest. By the time Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to prominence, my parents had established themselves in El Barrio where my earliest memories began. In those days, El Barrio was much more diverse than I believe it is today. My mother, who was a housewife, would help me conduct experiments with my little chemistry set, taught me botany using kidney beans to illustrate the growth process of plants, how to sew - to keep me out of her way while she was sewing, took my on trips to the local library, and to the Museum of the City of New York where I was always fascinated with the giant dollhouse display. You could say that I was living a carefree life.
Then one day, my father decided it was time to introduce me to race distinctions. Although African Americans were referred to as Negros and colored back then, he referred to us as black. Since I was too young to think abstractly, what he succeeded at doing was to cause confusion. I remember standing by our front door when my father approached me from down the hall and out of the blue he informed me that I was black. A mental recall of the contents in my crayon box confirmed otherwise: the blue sky matched the blue crayon; the green grass matched the green crayon; but my brown skin did not match the black crayon.
“Daddy, my skin is brown.”
“You’re black!”
I’ll always remember how my father’s body trembled with emotion when he said those words. The emphasis the he placed on “black”. communicated two things: 1. something was amiss; 2. I had better adapt, but to what I had no clue. All I knew was there was a concept of categorizing people by color which lead me to a new dilemma: If I’m black and Andy is white, what does that make Judy? Even though it is always there, nothing raises people’s consciousness of their connectedness to one another than disaster and tragedy, recent examples: Katrina, Tsunami and 9.11. I believe that children, because of their inability to articulate like adults, have a heightened sense of connectedness and with my ability to reason in only concrete terms, I sought an appropriate color designation for Judy. So at five years old, I concluded, based on my father’s logic, that Puerto Ricans were the grey people.
This discourse occurred during the time of the Sit-Ins and just before the Freedom Rides got underway. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my father, who held an MBA in finance, could not get a job on Wall Street. When he showed up for interviews, security showed him the service entrance. When he landed a job at a major department store, he endured the humiliation of people coning to see the black man - if he was even referred to as such - who had an MBA and worked as a clerk. He left that job, worked n government, and eventually used his degree by serving the El Barrio community as a civic leader.
As I became more cognizant of my surroundings, the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, violence seemed more and more prevalent and I felt bombarded with the news of it. There were regular broadcasts of the hostility to southern whites. When the evening news featured Bull Connor and his K9 gang, I learned to subcategorize whites: good white people; bad white people; bad like the one who assassinated Medgar Evers, and Goodwin, Cheney and Schwerner, and used tear gas, whips and clubs against the Selma to Montgomery marchers.
I could barely finish an emotional sigh of relief and savor a sense of hope from the success of the March on Washington, I when less than two weeks later, four little girls: Denise McNair; Cynthia Wesley; Carole Robertson; Adie Mae Collins were assassinated on a Sunday morning when a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Those four little girls were my contemporaries. Those four little girls were killed while engaging in the very activity that I engaged in on Sunday mornings. Those four little girls represented me.
I was too engrossed with my own feelings to think about what Coretta might have been feeling for her own girls.
A couple of months later, just as my class had settled in from recess our principal announced over the public address system that president Kennedy had been assassinated. The streets were devoid of after school activity as I walked home from early dismissal. I remember a little girl of about five years old walking up to me with a worried look ion her small face and asked, “Did you hear about the President?” I nodded yes. “It’s a shame, isn’t it?” Again, I nodded yes. I was too shocked to speak.
I was too consumed with fear to wonder how Coretta might comfort her children.
One Sunday, I overheard my parents in their bedroom arguing about whether my father ought to take my sister and me to hear Malcolm X speak. I recall sitting in the living room feeling apprehensive. Going to see Malcolm X represented part of the gradual, yet significant, transition from the cocoon of childhood and into the incomprehensible world of adults. The issue became moot when my grandfather called from the Audubon to say that Malcolm was gone.
I was too preoccupied with my own sense of dread to wonder what Coretta might have been feeling.
Then one Thursday evening, a television station interrupted my favorite program to bring the special report that Martin Luther kIng had been assassinated.
I was too shocked to wonder whether Coretta had seen the writing on the wall.
Violence was a constant intrusion on daily living and it was not limited to the Civil Rights Movement. The United States was murdering people of color in Vietnam and broadcasting the killings on the nightly news. I recall the discussions at home when the New York City Police Department shot and killed a ten year old black boy under the guise of mistaking him for an adult. and a white man’s attempt at washing the black off of a young adolescent boy. I cannot find the words to impress upon you how frightening and how stressful that was for a child.
Yet in the midst of all this turbulence and confusion, I continued to enjoy childhood activities like the Girl Scouts, piano lesson and slept away camp, but civic unrest filled the airwaves with popular songs that reflected the social climate, and were evident at theBroadway plays we attend which allowed me to examine the social climate in a non-threatening manner.
I was too busy enjoying myself to wonder if Coretta, whose children were living at the heart of the unrest, could give her children that kind of reprieve.
A few years ago, an old family friend who had worked with my father gave me his papers and shared a story of having witnessed a man drawing a gun on my father at a meeting. It was not until I heard that story and read mu father’s papers that I came to appreciate the amount of stress he had been under and the risks he had been taking trying to stabilize the community, all the while protecting my sisters and me form the perils he faced.
With the Civil Rights Movement as backdrop, my father protected us from the indignities that black Americans suffered by maintaining:
the strength to refrain from making disparaging remarks about people of other races;
the expectation that we excel in school and by providing positive black role models to show us the possibilities for our futures in the form of our music teacher, our pediatrician and family physicians, and by chairing strategy meetings in our home with other community leaders;
by providing a stable home life that gave me a sense of security in the knowledge that my mother, who hosted those strategy meetings and assisted my father with speech writing, was home while I was at school and when I returned.
In the thick of the Civil Rights Movement, Mrs. King had the courage and the strength to march with her husband and be a mother to her children, while maintaining an elegant public image; no small feat. Even as a child, the photograph of her that I described represented the source of strength and symbol of protection that parents are for their children, especially in the face of adversity.
Thank you for your time.
اسمي جنيس