But, I never expected to turn into a sort of
teenage Rosa Parks, until we took the trolley on Bourbon Street in New Orleans,
and I saw a movable sign on top of a seat towards the back of the trolley
reading: COLORED SECTION. When more Whites got on, they just moved the sign
back a row or two, and the Negroes (the term used then, at least in polite
company) got up and the Whites sat down. This at first puzzled me, being from
New York originally; then I left my seat with my parents and sat down in the
Colored Section, while they gestured for me to return. I got some stares and
glares, until we got off the trolley; then I got a lecture to the effect that
while my parents, both loyal Democrats who thought FDR had been pretty close to
the Almighty, thought the New Orleans practice was wrong, still "when in
Rome, do as the Romans do." It
seemed I would probably have made a very poor Roman, but I've never regretted
the gesture, my very first act of defiance.
In the mid-1960s, I began to do some civil rights community organizing on the South Side of Chicago, traveling there from Ohio on weekends. I stayed in the basement of Rev. Jim Bevel's church, listening and learning from him, particularly his saying that: at some point we all have to decide whether we are against tyranny or just a particular bunch of tyrants.
In the late 1960s, teaching in a new college near Atlantic City, New Jersey, I
started a hotel/restaurant management program to train primarily minority
students to attain decent jobs there (this was before the casinos, when some
wages averaged under a dollar an hour.) Unfortunately for me, the crime
syndicate which has always run Atlantic County and City disliked these efforts,
and I was given the message to either move on or move into the Bay
permanently.
So, like many others, I joined the War Against
Poverty (in my case in Binghamton, New York) until we surrendered in that War
and gave up. Still, it was a noble effort, and some programs such as Head Start
and Legal Services are still with us today. But the issue of growing poverty
here is also still with us. Neither major political party has made the reality
that over a third of our population live beneath the poverty line a
campaign issue recently.
I was never privileged to meet Dr. King, and one
of my great regrets is that his historic I Have A Dream speech
fell so near my birthday that I could not get down to Washington due to
long-standing plans my family had made. Then, we were in Pittsburgh at a
Passover Seder when the news of his tragic and horrid assassination came over
the air. The next day, we joined a large inter-racial march there, while cops
with machine guns and police dogs watched us warily.
Fast forwarding to the present, we have a Black
President, all sorts of Civil Rights Laws, at least a semblance of integration,
and now a new activism, the Occupy Movement, a non-violent grass roots
thrust of which Dr. King would have approved. Yes, we've come a long way--but
we surely have a long way to go. Lest we
forget, consider but one example: Had Troy Davis been Caucasian, or educated,
or wealthy, he would never have been executed by the State of Georgia.