What the Struggle Was All About

At the 1:45 mark, note the coffee and catsup thrown

on the sit-in protesters by the nice white people.

And the unresisting, nonviolent response.

Some of you younger folks do not remember a world where the races were legally segregated. I do. Here's one video that shows some scenes from that day and time, to bring to mind exactly what Dr. King and all the civil rights activists were fighting for: an end to the blind, unreasoning, hateful, hate-filled attitudes that were deeply held, cherished, by millions and millions of people here in the South - and sponsored, promoted, fanned into flame by not a few churches.

All this was in my lifetime. And I'm not anywhere near ready for the rocking chair yet, boys. I remember those days vividly. There were no civil rights protests in the town where I lived, not that I ever remember hearing about - but I have only to close my eyes, and I see again very clearly all the separate water fountains, entrances, restrooms, schools, libraries, hospitals, the signs everywhere: White. Colored.

And all this seemed perfectly normal and natural when you grew up in it. Just part of the ordinary course of the universe, The Way Things Are. All the grown-ups thought it was just fine. Indeed, they all bristled at the suggestions that rippled into this whites-only world from time to time, that things should be any different. Impossible; the world would come to an end if that happened.

Because of course they had been taught by their parents - and their teachers and their preachers - that this was the only right way things could be. The Bible said so.

The Bible also clearly proved that Negroes, or to be polite, colored people were inferior beings. Doomed by the long-ago curse of God to be forever servants to their white "brethren." You could look it up. Preachers were fond of looking it up for you, and declaiming loudly that this was God's firm, immutable law. Who could argue with God?

And so you simply grow up accepting it all as a truth, as sure as the sun rising in the east, and the moon and stars coming out at night, Captain Kangaroo and cornflakes for breakfast. Just the Way Things Are. And so you naturally see blacks as not merely different - but inferior. Ugly. Bad. Nasty. You didn't call it hate, oh no. You would deny all day long that you hated them. That wouldn't be Christian.

But you would never, ever allow that they were equal to you. Oh no. Impossible.

Not when even your own dear parents - college graduates, professionals, intelligent, kind, caring, wonderful - told you as a certain truth that all black people have syphillis. Which is why they simply couldn't be allowed to use the same restrooms, you see. Or when they repeated the horrible tales about how the blacks ate one another on the Selma March - all black people were of course just one step away from being the cannibals they really were at heart. Which is why they simply couldn't be allowed to vote, you see.

And of course, even though there was always a colored maid, sometimes two, in your house who kept the place sparkling, Negroes were just simply dirty people. Look at the run-down shacks they lived in, the unpaved dirt streets! So of course they simply couldn't be allowed to live in nice, clean white neighborhoods. They would only trash whatever they got, and then all the property values would go down.

Besides, you wouldn't want to live next door to people who smelled. That musk, you know. And oh good heavens, the very idea of little black boys and girls in school next to my child; quite unacceptable, regardless of what any silly judge might say about it. They have their own schools, plenty good enough for them, let them stay over there.

But your parents didn't hate the Negroes either. They never spat on anybody, never called anyone names in public. They were always polite to the maids and the handyman, they helped them out when they were in trouble, stopped to give little old colored ladies a ride to downtown. In fact, they cautioned you most severely as a little boy never, ever to refer to any of them as "black" in their hearing - that would be very rude. You were taught to be polite to everyone, and say "colored."

Nigger, of course, was a word never used in public. Except sometimes, in a casual way, by your grandparents, but they were very old and had different rules. You and your parents only used that word at home. Or with your playmates after school. Eenie, meenie, minie, moe, catch a . . . . Which was quite a funny thing to say, if you thought about it.

Oh no, it was not hatred.

But a thorn by any other name hurts just as much. It tears and rips at the soul. It keeps you at the back of the bus, and the bottom of the list.

The black experience and the gay experience are not the same thing, no.

But the experience of being hated and despised for simply existing and being who you are is very much the same.

And just as utterly, inexcusably wrong.