Black History

Sometimes the world is too big.   It's struggles and injustices swirl around us with such power that escape becomes the primary goal at the end of every day.  I can't count the weeks that I've anxiously awaited the arrival of Friday, an end to the fight, a chance to see the light at the end of the tunnel that is reality.  I get caught up too frequently, in the idea that my life is too hard, but once in a while, I get a profound reminder that my struggles in this life are among the least difficult.

Ronald Edens is a tall dark skinned black man in his mid-sixties.  He looks much younger than his age, his skin smooth and his walk, an easy balanced stride. He is quiet but pleasant, a good conversationalist.   I met him less than a year ago when he showed up at my senior center with his friend.  He was shy at first, only looking me in the eye for a few seconds at a time when I sat down with him to fill out the membership forms.  He brought in his computer one day and asked me to teach him how to email.  Once we had that down, I asked him if he wanted to learn Facebook.  "We'd better wait on that." He said with a grin.  "One thing at a time!"

Since then he has gotten internet access at home and I don't know if he ever figured out Facebook.

Today he brought in his high school yearbook and gave me a lesson in history that I didn't know I was missing.  As I thumbed through the musty-smelling pages I noticed only black kids in the photos.  "Was your high school segregated?" I asked

"Yeah, it was." He answered after some thought, and then a discussion about exactly what year desegregation started erupted.

In 1954 South Carolina temporarily suspended its desegregation efforts in the wake of the Brown vs. The Board of Education ruling. Eventually Governor James Byrnes re-engaged in the process after consulting with other state leaders, but desegregation in the South remained slow and painful.  Most schools began by allowing only a few black kids to attend all-white schools as a gesture to show they were "integrated"; however, few black schools were integrated by white students.

 Officially, segregation ended over a decade before Ronald Edens and three other black students entered the doors of Slater-Marietta High School in August of 1965.

"They had the whole school together in the gym," Ronald said, "and then they brought us in.  Boy they showed out!  It was somethin'."  He gestured with his arms in a way that signified how huge the crowd of angry white students were in comparison to him and his peers. Racial slurs were shouted, objects thrown.  They were told to go back to where they came from.  Ronald and his friends were left with no doubt as to whether they were welcome at Slater-Marietta High.  They knew they were not wanted and for the remainder of ninth grade Ronald was reminded daily.

"You'd just say 'Lord let me have one good day.  Just one easy day,' but it never happened. It was every day.  They'd hit us in the back of the head, come up from behind us and knock our books on the floor, call us names, throw stuff at us.  It was terrible."

"Did the teachers not do anything about it?" One senior asked.

"They wasn't nothing they could do.  And some of them were racist too, to tell the truth, so they didn't want to try to stop it.."   Two elderly black ladies sat at the table with us, nodding in agreement, remembering what those years were like for them and their children.

"Nope, didn't nobody try to stop it." One of them said, shaking her head and looking to the floor.

"I had a nervous breakdown." Ronald admitted.  "I told my mama 'I can't go back there anymore.' but she talked me into just staying for the rest of the year.  She said if I finished the year at Slater I could go back to Lincoln for the tenth grade and that's what I did.  I never went back to Slater after that.  I finished the year and went back to my old school.  The band teacher put me right back in there as Band Major, just like before and I did fine in tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades."

I listened to his story and noticed that it caught the attention of other people in the room.  All of us white folks sat dumbfounded at the experiences of this tall, gentle black man.  We would have never guessed that in his lifetime he faced such adversity.  He described years of internal struggle, trying to see the good in white people, and then eventually figuring out with age, that good people come in all colors, as do bad ones.

Ignorance, as it turns out, knows no race, but if whites wanted to corner the market we probably have made a good start.  We all sat and listened with sympathy for what Ronald endured for that year of his youth.  It was a year of adolescence that should have been filled with sports and girls, dances and school clubs, but instead stands forever in the history of this man as a coming of age story from hell.

"It was hell."  He said.  "Every single day being treated like that."

How apropos that on February 24th, the middle of Black History Month, he chose to bring a piece of his own history and share it with us.  Google changes it's homepage to honor black people who accomplished big things, NPR spotlights a different influential black person every morning, and at school my boy has been learning about black influences in the history of our country all month long.  We so often forget that history is not made by one or two, but by many working together to create change.  We credit the Civil Rights movement, its protesters, marches and leaders with the progress we've made thus far, and rightfully so--but the true change?  The true change happened in little schools like Slater-Marietta High where four black kids were marched into a crowd of angry, ignorant, racist white kids to be verbally dismembered.  It happened in hallways all over America when the black kid ended up trying to pick up his scattered books off the floor in the hallway and make it to his next class on time.  It happened in classrooms where kids like Ronald at 14 years old, had to push the hatred and anger aside just so he could focus on learning.  Ronald and those like him, who were bussed into schools as a symbol of integration, made the first small cracks in the facade of segregation.

Because of their bravery, their sacrifice, their pain, I never knew a world where black and white were two separate castes of humanity.  I played on playgrounds with black classmates all my life.  I ate lunch with them, called some of my black classmates my best friends.  To me they were just other people, not lesser people.  Because Ronald and others took on the verbal, physical and mental abuse of ignorance, I grew up in a changed world.

"So Ron, let me ask you this." I said.  "Have things gotten better since then, or have you just learned to ignore or accept that this is how people are?"

"Oh, things are a lot better than they were back then, for sure!" He replied with an incredulous smile.  "There are good white people and bad white people, and there are bad black people and good black people.  There are people of my own race that I don't want to have anything to do with them, and there are white people that are bad too.  I had a hard time for a while, thinking I should hate white people because of what happened to me, but I learned white people can be good too.  Just like black people can be bad.  Race don't matter."

As he packed his yearbook away in a yellow Dollar General bag and got ready to leave, I walked over to him.  Standing beside him I feel very small, not only because he's so tall but because now I know something of the man he is and the adversity he faced to make it to today.  I put my arm around his middle and he rested his across my shoulders.

"You are black history." I told him.  "We hear a lot about the black heroes of the past, but we need to hear more about people like you."

He teared up a little and with his arm still around me said, "You're right.  Nobody knows what we went through.  All of us are black history."

With that he was on his way out the door clutching his Dollar General bag, his history and our country's, to priceless to keep under wraps.