Civil Rights Museum: Atlanta, Georgia, August 31, 2018
You sit on stools, as if at a lunch counter. You place your hands splayed on the lunch counter matching them with the drawn hands on the counter. You don headphones.
A reassuring voice in your ear, no, not in your ear, in your vitals, insinuating itself deep into your nerve fibers says, “Be still, boy. Take a deep breath, it will be okay.” More deep, slow breaths. Then a sudden hateful voice screaming in your ear firing every nerve in your body, “What’s you doin’ at a white restaurant, nigger. Feel this fork pressing against your neck? I’m going to eat your neck.” Then a crash. Screams. People falling. Then, “Don’t like my hands on your neck, boy? Gotta a spoon here. Good for digging out eyes.” Every nerve screaming for release. Then another huge crash and the seat on which you sit shakes, a sudden jolt. Then: “Oh, you got up, boy. Well just maybe the kitchen knife will do it this time.”
Most, snatching off their headphones quickly, get off their stools, don’t make it the whole three minutes. I did, but am still affected, feeling the tremors just in this retelling two weeks later.
This happened more than one-half century ago, local residents and people streaming in from across the country on busses – “Freedom Riders” who “sat in” at “Whites Only” lunch counters, who had coffee poured onto their heads, sugar poured in their hair, peaceful non-violent protesters who were knocked off stools, beaten, and in some cases, killed.
Boxes of Kleenex line the key stops here in Atlanta at the Center for Civil and Human Rights whose mission is to empower you to take the protection of every human’s rights personally. The Center aims to bring home viscerally the pain, the courage, the deaths and the persistence, and the faith and courage of those refusing to be put down, refusing to quiet their voices, to stop their marches, to disobey “Whites Only” door signs, and to continue to “sit in” at lunch counters.
Then, as now, the faces and words of those victims that fueled my outrage also inspired me, changed my career, propelled me into a lifelong calling. Some the words taken directly from the museum’s walls were words that fueled me:
“This door whites only. Colored in rear”
“Lester Maddox, Georgia Governor, refused to serve African American customers at his family-owned restaurant and chased African American would-be customers away brandishing an ax handle or pistol.”
“Eugene ‘Bull’ Conner, Head of the Commission for Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama, directed the use of fire hoses and attack dogs in 1963 against peaceful protesters, including children.”
“Orval Faubus used Arkansas National Guardsmen to block the enrollment of nine black students who had been ordered to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in September 1957.”
The voices, billy clubs, cattle prods, and dogs were there along with the local ordinances and laws that backed it:
“Separate schools shall be maintained for the children of the white and colored races.”
“Every hospital maintained by the state shall provide equal and separate accommodations for white and colored races.”
“Every railroad carrying passengers shall provide equal and separate accommodations for the white and colored races.”
“The marriage of a white person with a negro or mulatto or person who shall have one-quarter or more of negro blood shall be unlawful and void,” and
“Any person guilty of publishing or circulating printed information in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and negroes shall be subject to a fine, imprisonment, or both.”
The heroes, the saints are there, too. The icons, the unwavering pillars whose seismic work changed America and galvanized me: Bayard Rustin, the brilliant strategist and organizer of the March on Washington, who provided us advice for our civil rights work in Philadelphia, or the electrifying words of Martin Luther King, Jr., who I heard speak in Cambridge, MA, and the then-young John Lewis, now a Congressman from Georgia, he continuing to speak truth to power and annually leading delegations to retrace the steps of the “Bloody Sunday” march of March 7, 1965, at the Pettus Bridge in Alabama where 600 marchers headed for Montgomery were billy clubbed, tear gassed and horse-driven back over the bridge to Selma.
King reflected on what he would want said at his funeral: not the awards, the speeches, the Nobel Prize, but that he, “Wanted to leave…a committed life behind, a life committed to love, justice and truth…that Martin Luther King gave his life to others.”
Major victories were won. Extraordinary progress was made. Seismic changes occurred. There was the tacit assumption that we were evolving, that things were getting better, the progress, tho’ often painful and slow, always pointed upwards towards the better, towards justice. I certainly felt that way.
Not so. We can backslide and with frightening swiftness: Words and attitudes I thought long buried with Bill Conner and Orval Faubus are again heard, words alive, unburied.
The barely hidden anger, the latent fear of “the other,” the poised violence suddenly visible more than fifty years later, violence emerging as public policy not based in love or justice, but on fear, exclusion, degradation. No, not “nigger,” but “dogs, vermin, rapists, murderers” and mocking the disabled now out of the closet, stridently proclaimed by a president who would raise such words to the level of legitimacy, latent words now overt, words that sully our national heart – from an America that welcomes to an America that excludes – no, worse: an America that excludes and demeans.
It’s coming down to “lunch counters” again, individual and collective actions that might mean picketing, marching, testifying in Congress or state houses, TV appearances, local changes in school policy, zoning and gun policy or, for the housebound or shy, postcards to prospective voters or letters to the editor.
We now witness what we never thought possible: that our democracy is frail, not eternally guaranteed but something that must be protected, nurtured, won and re-won. And that we are its protectors, its nurturers. Not someone else: We must decide what we stand for, who we are, and what we will do now for our children and our children’s children.
Written by Jack Calhoun
Mr. Calhoun is an internationally renowned public speaker and frequent media guest, editorial contributor and author of three books. He is the founder and CEO of Hope Matters. For more than 20 years, Mr. Calhoun was the founding president of the National Crime Prevention Council, prior to which he served under President Carter as the Commissioner of the Administration for Children, Youth and Families.
Click on “Contact” to book Mr. Calhoun to speak at your next conference. All speaking topics are available at: www.HopeMatters.org/Speaker
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