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| Myrlie Louise Evers with slain husband. |
After hours of impassioned debate, Dr. James Rhatigan, the president of student services, offered his opinion, expressing the need for cross-cultural understanding.
"I'm old enough to remember hearing people cheer when Medgar Evers was shot," Dr. Rhatigan said.
I barely knew who Medgar Evers was. I knew he was some kind of a Civil Rights leader, who like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X, was assassinated. Medgar Evers? Wasn't that the name of the university Denice enrolled at on The Cosby Show?
Last year, I heard Evers murder referenced sadly in the movie, The Help. Still haven't gotten around to seeing the '90s film, Ghosts of Mississippi about the trial and conviction of Evers' murderer Byron De La Beckwith.
I still have much to learn about the man, but I'm getting there. I know he fought for the United States and the Allied Powers in the Battle of Normandy. (The 69th anniversary of this tide-turning and heartbreaking moment in World War II was remembered a few days ago.)
A native Mississippian, Evers went on to enroll at Alcorn State University where he was a football hero and a civic-minded young man, involved with the student government and the school's debate team. After college, he was hired by the NAACP after he sought their help in suing the University of Mississippi for rejecting his admission to its law school. http://www.naacp.org/pages/naacp-history-medgar-evers
The vigorous Evers was working to desegregate Ol' Miss between 1952 and '54, well before a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. would be asked to lead a Montgomery, Ala. boycott of the city's bus transit system. In 1962, James Meredith, escorted by U.S. Marshals, became the first African-American student admitted to the campus.
For his role in leading voting drives and investigating racially motivated murders, Evers was gunned down in his driveway, just hours after Pres. Kennedy delivered a televised address in support of Civil Rights. (You have got to check out this site!): http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/06/medgar-evers-murder-50-years-later/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57588891/for-medgar-evers-widow-husbands-legacy-trumps-personal-bitterness/
There will be a few more anniversaries before the year is out -- the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s march on the Washington Mall, of JFK's assassination and on into 2014 and noting the Beatles getting off the plane in Kennedy Airport. That's part of the story too. Elvis and the Beatles also played roles in Civil Rights history.
The past couple of days I've been contemplating another Civil Rights leader -- Nelson Mandela, the prominent anti-apartheid reformer and South Africa's first black president. I'd been bracing for the worst, but I heard news reports today that the 94-year-old is breathing on his own in the hospital. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/06/08/189705242/nelson-mandela-back-in-hospital-with-health-complications
I knew little about him that fall of 1989 when a group of students on campus led a protest march, chanting, "Free Mandela!" A young lady I worked with, washing dishes in the student cafeteria, said, "A protest? That's stupid." But I figured, "Hell, isn't that what college students are supposed to do?" I interviewed an affable, young African-American man for my campus newspaper.
"So they're going through what we went through in the '50s?" I asked.
Yup.
I sat in the children's section of the library today with my daughter Gabby. We both took turns reading a book about Nelson Mandela. I kept pointing out to her the beautiful paintings by the book's illustrator and writer Kadir Nelson. When freedom was extended to all people "a colorful sea of people celebrated" I read to my girl. http://www.harpercollinschildrens.com/books/Nelson-Mandela-Kadir-Nelson/ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/books/nelson-mandela-by-kadir-nelson-and-more.html
I'm happy for Mandela, that he has lived to see seemingly insurmountable changes come to fruition. A few months back, my wife, Maria, and I were looking through a book of sermons by MLK and came to the sermon he titled, "Shattered Dreams."
"He had a lot of dreams that didn't come true," Maria said.
On Aug. 28, 1963, King told a colorful sea of 300,000 people stretched before the the the Lincoln Memorial of his dream for racial harmony and reconciliation. He talked about the "promissory note," the bounced check that signified America's failure to live up to its Constitutional promise.
A day earlier, W.E.B. DuBois, the African-American leader, who 60 years earlier, had predicted that day would come when blacks would demand their rights, died in the African country of Ghana. A couple of years earlier, he had renounced his American citizen, effectively giving up hope that America would ever cash that check.
Booker T. Washington, the African-American leader engaged in a philosophical rivalry with DuBois at the turn of the century died in 1915 around the time Pres. Woodrow Wilson laid down a serious mission to segregate every facet of the White House, showing that Washington's policy of accommodation was not going to work. So many inroad he had made, gone.
Twenty years earlier, abolitionist and early Civil Rights reformer Frederick Douglas died. Just one year before the U.S. Supreme Court would give legal sanction to segregation --upholding the ugly, dishonestly named pseudo-legal philosophy "separate but equal.'" Effectively, the decree dismantled everything Douglas and his brothers and sisters in the fight had worked for.
Some miracles we see in a lifetime, some we don't. Sometimes a dream is deferred.
In 2009 I watched as former Klu Klux Klan supporter Elwin Wilson apologized on national television to U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga for assaulting him nearly 50 years earlier. Wilson went on to apologize to many people for a lifetime of racist acts. It was, for this old man, a spiritual journey. He wanted to free himself from a burden of sin that had troubled him for years. He sought redemption before God and man.
I know what it's like to feel incomplete, to have a monkey on your back.
It was always the things in the margins that caught my attention. The sidebar stories, details that didn't get the most play. I was in my apartment in Texas, looking forward to a flourishing career as a journalist, when I looked back at my old college history textbook.
I read about cavalry soldiers tearing babies from the arms of their American Indian mothers and slaying them with bayonets, of an African-American service man home from France at the end of World War I, hung from a tree while still in uniform and mutilated in the Deep South.
A wave of sadness overtook me.
Pushing 30, I knew I could no longer put off seeking answers to life's persistent questions. There had to be some spiritual power in the universe to make sense out of everything.
Recently, I was talking by phone to a friend in California. We've known each other since high school. He kept wishing me luck on my "journey." The man likes using freakin' words like that: journey.
"I hope you find peace, Jeff," he said.
I'll manage, we'll get through life. My belief in God is inseparable from my belief in humanity. I gave up on stereotypes a long time ago. You'll never get the good stories if you go that way. Somewhere, there's truth amid the lies.
Filmmaker Paul Saltzman interviewed "Delay" De La Beckwith for a documentary. http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2013/02/25/saltzman-last-white-knight.html The son of Evers' murderer, a man who'd beaten up the young Jewish Saltzman for trying to enroll blacks to vote years earlier, was unapologetic about his racist, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish views. Still, he impressed Saltzman with his candor and the humanity beneath the surface. That's all Saltzman was seeking.In a rare moment of honest introspection, De La Beckwith said, "Maybe I wasn’t taught right."
Driving down the highway, talking to a friend.
"I just figure we're all all right," the voice said. Over Verizon. Beamed over satellites from...
Out there in California.
