The Waters of Prejudice Run Very Deep and Very Wide

“What do you remember about the civil rights movement?” my daughter asked me. It was part of her fourth-grade homework assignment to interview her parents for Black History Week. We also had to make corn bread or sweet potato pie.

She had already done the first part of her assignment, which was to write the proverbial essay on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The essay ended with the sentence, “Dr. King won the Nobel Peace Prize for his poem ‘I Have a Dream.’ ” (My friend Toni quipped, “At least she didn’t say he won it for his sound bite.”)

Every year after King’s birthday, I love going to the school and seeing the essays hanging outside the principal’s office:

“Dr. King was a very brave man. He ate lunch at Woolworth’s. . . .” Or, “Dr. King and his girlfriend Rosa Parks changed history. . . .” Or, “Dr. King lived long ago when you couldn’t drink from a water fountain. . . .”

It’s easy to smile at these simplified and fractured views of history. But I still had to answer my daughter’s question. What I really heard her saying was, “What did you do in the civil rights movement, Mommy?”

I didn’t want to give her an oversimplified view, but time can gloss things over.

I was in high school and college during those years when we watched the news on black-and-white television--dramatic scenes of freedom riders, sit-ins and confrontations. I remember watching the TV in horror as police used dogs and water cannons and cattle prods on people. I couldn’t believe it was America. But in a way, it wasn’t. It wasn’t the America I lived in--Eastern and Western cities. It was someplace else called the South.

What really seems different about that time was a kind of Capra-esque spirit in America: “By golly, here’s a problem. Let’s solve it.” As the civil rights movement raised consciousness of what we used to call prejudice , my friends and I looked for a way we could make a difference. When Lyndon Johnson proposed the War on Poverty programs, we said: By golly, why not? Poverty’s a problem, and we can lick it.

(I thought about this recently when I saw a TV special on the homeless in which one economist said, “Anybody who has a solution doesn’t even believe it will work.”)

In 1966, I got my credential to teach high school in California. I assumed that this was how I would become a fighter in the wars on poverty and prejudice. Like my friends who joined the Peace Corps or Vista, I wanted to work with the poor, in a school district that was designated “culturally deprived.”

I hoped to get a job in Oakland or San Francisco or Richmond, but there was so much competition for these jobs that I ended up taking a position in an all-white suburban school district. I would later see that this was the real hotbed of prejudice I was looking for and a place that had its own form of cultural deprivation.

My first week in class, I began a lesson about the civil rights movement by playing a record for a class of gifted students. These were the cream of the school. I assumed that once they heard Pete Seeger’s album of songs recorded on freedom rides, it would say more than a thousand words. For me, the civil rights movement was clear-cut and emotional, with well-defined good guys and bad guys--bad Southern crackers and noble missionaries who came to teach the backward about Negroes.

I almost cried as we listened to plaintive voices singing “We Shall Overcome” and “If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus” and “There Is a Gate That’s a Berlin Wall in Selma, Ala.”

When the record was over I looked at the class and said, “What do you think?”

One boy, one of the cream of the crop, raised his hand. He said he thought Pete Seeger was a communist, and he saved for me a racist epithet more frequently heard at Klu Klux Klan meetings.

That’s when I first realized this wasn’t going to be easy. That prejudice didn’t stop in the South. That my good intentions, like those of others in my generation, would eventually be overwhelmed by other issues, other wars, other cultural forces. The waters were deep and the waters were wide.

And the hardest thing to explain to my daughter is that now, more than 20 years later, I feel nostalgic for a time when everything seemed to be in black and white.