Learning to See Where I Am: my crash course on the Civil Rights Movement & slavery in the USA

An hour up the highway from where I sit writing this in my space-cabin, four college students walked into the Woolworth lunch cafeteria in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat at the counter and asked for coffee and pie. The coffee was five cents, and the cherry pie was ten cents. Being young black men, they were refused counter service and instructed to order from the carry-out counter. They politely refused to leave, and thus sparked a wildfire of sit-ins in public restaurants around the south. That was February 1, 1960.

Things have changed so much in such a short time, that time itself gets tricky. Fifty-three years later coffee will run you between two and six dollars and an African-American man is President of the United States. In some ways this change is notable advancement – there is some evidence of a new generation of children who literally do not see things the same way. I like to think I am one of them. And yet, the old hatreds still dance behind new stories of racial equality and desegregation. Systems of oppression take a long time to truly change and the great harms done will take generations to heal.

In the spirit of learning how to be in solidarity with such healing Frankie and I are visitors at the International Civil Rights Museum, built around the very site of the old Woolworth's cafeteria. Our tour guide Anita Johnson is telling us with hands thrown in the air, “Look! Look around you. Right here it happened!” Dramatically she walks us over to the lunch counter, “You see these four chairs? These right here, these are the very seats they sat in.” She goes on to tell us how she remembers coming to this very cafeteria herself as a little girl with her mother, after shopping. She jokes, “Nowadays everybody wants take-out, but back then it was an insult!”

Getting more personal, Anita explains how her mother would make them drink water and go to the washroom twice before leaving home, because she refused to let them use the segregated washrooms and water fountains at the department store – not just on principal, but because they were rarely cleaned and grossly unhygienic. Now here she is, all grown up and telling the story in a museum.

But backing up, our lesson actually began in a field in 1926. For Frankie’s birthday a couple weeks before the museum visit, I said “Let’s go to the city and see a movie. Your choice!”. They chose The Butler. I had no idea what it was even about, but within a few minutes of the fade-to-black we were standing amongst a group of indentured servants in a cotton field, in the southern USA. Therein we witnessed some of the harsh injustices of the day, in this case at the hands of the white antagonist – a drunken plantation owner’s son who rapes the mama of the butler-to-be and kills his father when he tries to intervene. “Oh,” I whispered grabbing Frankie’s arm, “This is it, this is the feeling.”

‘The feeling’ had been discomforting me since I facilitated a workshop at the ReWeaving conference a few weeks earlier. I had noticed that the tone and norms around race relations felt different somehow to me here in the southern USA than I was used to facilitating in Canada. I had the growing awareness that my ‘whiteness’ feels different here. And there it was on the screen, a potent and horrific mirror showing me – this is the legacy you wear when you walk the south in white skin.

Growing up in Canada, and specifically on the West Coast, I realize I didn’t actually learn that much about African-American history. Of course, I stand witness to other atrocious histories, e.g. confronting my settler identity as I learned the true history of the theft of British Columbia from Indigenous peoples. But there were no monuments to a civil war against slavery, no historic settlements of freed slaves, no cafeteria’s preserved where a wildfire of non-violent civil disobedience erupted and helped to change the attitudes of a nation.

It was as if I had to be here on this land before I could truly begin to feel the stories. I slunk down in my plush theatre chair an inch, recalling how I had walked into the conference so very 'white woman' to lead an embodied discussion on economy, with only cursory awareness of the history on this land before me. I recalled the potent moment at the conference when an African-American woman had beseeched a presenter speaking about the history of banking, “How can you talk about the old economy without talking about slavery?!" I walked away from the conference with discomfort tugging at my guts. After the movie, the discomfort became louder and more clear. It whispered me onwards -  Learn the stories. Go beyond fact finding. You need to see it, hear it, feel it. 

Thus, I spent the better part of October ravenously following one link to the next, listening to speeches and interviews on youtube and planned our visit to the Civil Rights museum. Through this research I would hear the names and learn the details of many key events but in the movie they roll by quickly - jumping states and events, an unending, shape-shifting assault against the African-American peoples… Jim Crow laws and lynch mobs, segregation and then violent attacks against peaceful sit-ins, a right-to-vote granted but with impossible criteria in practice, fire-bombings of the freedom rides, police dogs and fire hoses turned on unarmed protesters, the military holding back mobs while a tiny little girl climbs the steps to her new school…And the myriad ways and tactics that people serve(d) as warriors against all this brutal injustice.

My crash course in trans-Atlantic slavery and the American Civil Rights Movement has honed my social justice lens just a little bit more, making me perhaps slightly less blind than I was before, to where I am, who is around me and who I am as I stand here. I hope this will help my facilitation, being more aware of some of the histories carried into the room; and certainly it has called me to do more research on Canadian civil rights history.

In the end I am reminded how much learning and change can come when I pull uncomfortable feelings around privilege and oppression closer rather than push them away; and I wonder now if that discomfort is not the voice of grace itself guiding our hearts along the path of co-liberation.

~sab

from my space-cabin on a farm in the southern USA

A Post-Script on Peacefire

One interesting storyline I followed in my research through several sources started with the question, where did Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent principles come from? The answer caused not only time, but space to shrink before me. First stop - a port in South Africa in 1893.

Gandhi had landed as a new lawyer fresh from Britain to work for the rights of indentured Indians. However, almost immediately after he disembarked the boat, Gandhi encountered the dehumanizing treatment of apartheid by the authorities who considered him ‘black’. It was far worse than he had experienced as a wellborn Indian man, even under colonial rule. While in South Africa, Gandhi devised his Satygraha (non-violence) philosophy based on his inherited religious background, in particular teachings of Jainism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Of course we know Gandhi went on to lead his country to independence with almost brutal moral conviction (known to fast for weeks in repentance when mobs would resort to direct violence against the British!)

A few years after Gandhi’s assassination King was exposed to these eastern concepts by a teacher in his seminary college. He was so taken with Gandhi’s writing he began translating them to the language of the Christian faith, and finding alignments with biblical teachings. Not long after, fresh from seminary school, he was thus ready to seize upon Rosa Parks’ moment of truth in 1955, and mobilize the Montgomery bus boycott, another great spark in the Civil Rights movement.

So from Africa to India to Montgomery to Greensboro, from Jainism to Christianity to a Woolworth’s lunchroom… change spreads truly like sparks from the wildfire burning from one bold heart to the next to the next. May that fire continue to spread until we are all free.