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The more I sit thinking about it, the tougher it gets to write it and the more it brings back the really bad feelings of those days. It's late here, but I promise you I will. Right now it just all seems more sad than righteous.
I think it mattered a lot exactly how old you were when things happened. Some were old enough to participate, some just weren't. A few years seemed to make a big difference. For me, (born in 1951, in the midwest) those guys at Greensboro were a puzzle, but even a kid just learning to read a newspaper knows a bully when he sees one, and every kid in town knew what a treat it was to eat a hamburger at a Woolworth's lunch counter.
Every time something happened, when you learned about it, read about it, it was a private moment and you knew where you stood. Before long, as I've heard so many people say, they had their our own private heroes, then maybe shared with a best friend, or not, but heroes who were brave, righteous. I remember mine was Medgar Evars, and I have no idea why it was him and not someone else.
But when you talked about it with friends or family, as only kids can do when they get excited, you didn't always get the reaction you expected. You might say, euphemistically, that the adults or some other kids didn't always share your enthusiasm. So then the splits would start. Kids learn pretty fast which other kids or adults to trust, which other kids can be friends, which ones to avoid, and when to keep your mouth shut. Along the way we got more sophisticated in our understanding, learned the history and followed the news. Somehow...I don't know, somehow it got into our heads and we followed every move.
I tell you Dan, it was a good time to eavesdrop on "grown-up" conversation. The card parties would get heated, you knew they were taking about civil-rights, something in Arkansas, then there would be an awkward silence and and a neighbor or two would leave and not be around for the next time. Your little mind could go all week trying to figure out what the hell had happened. I asked my Dad once about why we never got together with one family in particular, one that I thought was "cool" and he explained in a clumsy, fatherly, hand-on-the-shoulder sort of way that "they had too much, and didn't appreciate some people well enough". It took forever to figure out what he meant by that. My mom had a favorite uncle who quit visiting, and when I asked about him I was told he didn't like the beer we had in the house and he had complained. I didn't find out until I was an adult and my mom was dying the real reason -which was that in the 1920's he had been a klansman and would spout off at times. I guess I have to come to terms with that one myself.
So, as you say, by 1968 or 1969, that whole way of looking at the world was tangled up in the Vietnam War, but race was always at the heart of it. I think '68 was the year when it started splitting families, and it was the riots and assassinations that had raised the stakes, not the war. War mattered, but hell, hair mattered, music mattered. But I don't know that the Iraq war has split many families and nobody ever split a family over a pop-tune.
Oh yea, I almost forgot about Fred. He was a family friend who thought it was funny to drive the visiting and just arrived out-of-towners(that's me, by the window with those wide white eyes) from LAX through Watts on the night of the 12th, the second night, minutes before the main riots started. Right by the that soon-to-be-burning supermarket. Oh, Fred? Nobody ever saw him again.
Anyway, long-winded and running out of gas here. High schools split. You could have picked any high school and written the news for the next forty years. The neighborhoods split when we brought home black friends. College years some friends would be around over the holidays, and would stay for summer school. Ask them why no holiday at home and it was often the arguments at Thanskgiving. They could argue about the war, often in detail, but race would end in a walk-out. As far as I know, some never went back. Others, like my best friend of those days, would keep contact with his father, but it was never right.
The real clincher was inter-racial dating. It seems like that one could be unforgivable -either complete acceptance or a complete break. It didn't just split off a person or two, it really split them in half. It happened in my ex-wife's family, at Thanksgiving, and it lasted to the end.
Anyway, it didn't always end in a split. My father split with a sister but tolerated his brother, a jokey racist and yellow-dog democrat, right to the end, It hurt everyone whenever he spoke like that, but however many times he was shot down, it didn't matter. It's no consolation to know that his surviving family is just all fucked up.
Woah, a few? glasses of wine and I got farther that I thought I could. I still owe you a finished post with some detail though and I really want to hear much more about your time on your side of the line.
An afterthought -It wasn't the fight that caused the hurt -emphatically, it wasn't. Hear me on that one. Your fight gave us the heroes to fight the fight we needed. The poison was already there, long there. Maybe if there's another hidden story in this, it's that those same bastards prey on white people as well, and that sooner or later we have to free ourselves from their venom too.
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