Witness Heroes©

By Jack Schimmelman

My daughter asked me the other day what it was like to grow up in the
civil rights era. She is 17.

I was15 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated; 20 years old when

Martin Luther King’s light turned to night; twenty again when Robert
Kennedy’s hopes and dreams were vanquished as his life violently
ended in a Los Angeles hotel pantry. Ambassador Hotel. So many
others died during this era, many who have been lost in the amnesia of
history. Here is a partial list. It is agonizing.

I started to recite to my lovely, bright, compassionate child the history

as I knew it to be. I talked about the pre-civil war abolitionist
movement. I mentioned lynching African Americans was a way of life
in some parts of our country. I dutifully recited the segregation of
African Americans in the army during World War II and Harry Truman’s
subsequent order to desegregate the armed forces. I recommended a
book entitled Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett, Jr. This text is a
definitive African American history beginning in the 17th century
(before the Mayflower) and ending in 1962. I had read it at the
suggestion of a fellow student while I was in college in the 60’s. This
book made me very angry for I knew after reading a few pages that I
had been lied to by my teachers my entire life; that history as it was
taught in our schools until then was a fabrication.

But my questioner wasn’t interested in history. She is well educated

and has learned about these events in her history books. She was
interested in how I felt growing up during this era. She repeated her
question. Upon the last syllables floating through my heart an image
immediately appeared. I was 15 again, in the summer of 1963,
pleading with my mother to let me go to the March on Washington
being organized by Martin Luther King. I lived in a white working class
enclave in Queens, but I had been inspired by the courage of the
people I read about in the newspapers. I hardly knew the details,
except that people for many years were beaten and killed for merely
demanding what was rightfully theirs, whether it be a seat on a bus, at
a lunch counter or the right to vote. I had read stories about racially
separated water fountains, restrooms and the like and I could not
understand why these things existed. Given this atmosphere, my
mother refused to let me go. I was old enough to disobey her wishes,
but having no money and no other means I gave in to my inevitable
absence. A year later, when three students were found dead in an
earthen dam in Mississippi, shot by the Klu Klux Klan for their work in
Mississippi, the cellular life of my generation froze once again.

I heard Martin Luther King’s dream that hot day in August and was
never the same. Growing up in the civil rights era without being able
to participate as a young child felt like a reed being buffeted by the
wind. Trauma after trauma fell upon my generation like rain. I could
not fathom what it took to face such overwhelming loathing at the risk
of one’s life. When children were blown up in a church in Alabama or
pummeled by fire hoses and set upon by German Shepherds for
marching in protest of racial discrimination I instinctively wanted to
rush towards the center of such valor. I was frozen with fear and angry
at the injustice. I believed that the entire world felt the same.

Although I was affected by the well known and celebrated being cut
down, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, etc., I was keenly
aware that the people making history, transforming a cultural iceberg
were anonymous except to their friends, family and neighbors.
Walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965
when you knew that a beating or worse by beefy, hateful police
awaited you required heroism only found in movies and literature. But
this was no book; no film. This was life during the 50s, 60s, 70s and
beyond. This was the fire through which our country had to walk in
order to burn off grand fabrics of slavery that covered our lives and
formed the economic beginnings of our imperfect union. Despite these
sacrifices and great progress, the odor of racial discrimination
continues to waft through our lives.

One day we will breathe freely unencumbered by ignorance and

hatred.

My darling daughter. How did I feel to live in the time of heroes? I felt
privileged.