White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (21 page)

Read White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son Online

Authors: Tim Wise

Tags: #History, #Politics, #Sociology, #Memoir, #Race

BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
6.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
IN THE SUMMER
between my junior and senior years at Tulane, living back in Nashville, I worked for Greenpeace Action, the canvassing arm of the international environmental group, famous for its “Save the Whales” campaigns. I had worked there the previous summer too, and although the pay was lousy (and I was a tragically awful canvasser), the camaraderie of the group was worth the shitty income. It was a relief just to be able to hang out with progressives in Nashville, few of whom I had known before those days.
By that second summer though, I was starting to have serious doubts about the work we were doing, and even the people in the organization with whom I was working. Having thrown myself into the study of the civil rights movement in school the previous year—and having had the honor of meeting several movement legends at a conference held at Tulane in spring of 1989—I was finding myself wondering why the environmental movement (and especially its overly-white organizational arms like Greenpeace) said so little about environmental racism, meaning the disproportionate impact that toxic waste dumps and other forms of polluting activity were having on communities of color. And why were our tactics so utterly lame when compared to those of the civil rights struggle?
Never were the movement’s tactics—and issue focus—more selfevidently absurd to me than on the day that summer when it was announced we would be staging a protest at the Burger King restaurant across the street from Vanderbilt University. Specifically, we would be protesting the fish sandwich at Burger King because the fish came from Iceland, and Icelandic fishermen were known for killing whales. So naturally, the 21st Avenue Burger King was complicit with the whale slaughter and we were going to let them know it. Simple, and quite possibly the most ass-backwards demonstration in the history of any social movement. In fact, from a purely tactical perspective it had been ridiculous. Who even knew that Burger King
had
a fish sandwich? Probably nobody until we alerted them to that fact, meaning that we had probably helped them sell more fish sandwiches in an hour than they had sold in the previous week. Way to go hippies.
Thankfully, I would soon get a chance to be in the presence of veteran activists with a far more laudable history and focus. That summer was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi—the voter registration, educational and direct action effort organized by an amalgam of civil rights organizations to break the back of apartheid there. As those with a sense of history will recall, it was during Freedom Summer that three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—the first black and the latter two white—had been murdered by Klan members on the police force and their confederates, and buried in an earthen dam outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi. They had not been found for roughly a month.
An organization called the Philadelphia Coalition had formed to commemorate the anniversary and to renew the calls for justice that had long since been denied in the case, with several of the key participants in the murders never having been punished for their roles in the crime. Hearing of the commemoration and needing to connect to something more substantive than a fish sandwich protest, my mother and I decided to make the drive to Philadelphia.
My mom had been just a bit too young to volunteer for Freedom Summer, though her heart had been with the effort, no doubt to the chagrin of her parents, who came from the “why do they have to go and stir things up?” school of segregationists. They weren’t bigots by a long shot; they just thought Dr. King and the others should have left well enough alone. In their world, whites and blacks had always gotten along so well.
In some ways, perhaps that ho-hum indifference had been almost worse than open displays of racist contempt. After all, to have heard your parents cast aspersions upon Dr. King could be seen as almost pathetic, given the towering greatness of the latter and the rather ordinary mediocrity of the former. But to have had his greatness and that of this movement met with blank stares, with
nothing
, must have been maddening. It’s not unlike the difference between the person who seeks to openly justify the death of civilians in war time with bloodthirsty logic, on the one hand, and the person who blankly stares at the TV screen as it projects images of the death and destruction while not even blinking, on the other. The latter may not openly celebrate the carnage, but their refusal to show any emotion whatsoever is somehow more troubling. At least the celebrant of death is willing to demonstrate by virtue of his agitation that he is indeed alive and capable of feeling something, however grotesque. I have long thought I would prefer a land filled with angry and hateful people than one populated by spectators who watch the drama unfold, and no matter how bad it gets, never miss a single beat of their predictable lives.
Kids dying in Mississippi? Gotta remember to call Betty and make my hair appointment. Water cannons being turned on black people in Alabama? Gotta pick up the dry cleaning and grab a few things at the grocery. Medgar Evers shot down in his driveway? Did I remember to feed the cat?
So far as I know, the only reaction my grandmother ever had to the civil rights movement had been to express concern about shopping downtown during the sit-ins, which hit Nashville in February, 1960. She feared that the completely nonviolent black and white kids who were sitting in at the lunch counters might riot. That the only folks threatening to riot were white segregationists, and that the only violence came from them as well, didn’t occur to her, nor did it alter her perceptions about who the good guys were and who the bad. Even her concern—feeling put out at the limitations placed upon her ability to shop downtown—bespoke numbness. She hadn’t expressed openly contemptuous remarks about the protesters, but simply viewed the whole episode as an inconvenience. At one of the most important moments in the history of her country, she, like so many of her compatriots, had had no idea what was happening, nor had she particularly cared.
But my mother had, and she had passed it on to me. Now, a quarter-century after that fateful day when Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner had met death at the hands of those whom—although they couldn’t have seen it at the time—the three had been trying to save, she would finally make that trip to Mississippi.
We drove to Philadelphia for the anniversary gathering, which took place on the very site, just outside the city, where once had stood the Mount Zion Baptist Church, the burning of which Schwerner had gone to investigate that day in June of 1964. It was that visit to Philadelphia that ultimately had brought Schwerner and his comrades to the attention of Sheriff Rainey, Deputy Cecil Price, and their assorted Klan brothers.
The drive from Nashville takes about six hours, and we made it in almost complete silence. I can remember the miles ticking by as we headed south, and noticing the ubiquity of the kudzu, consuming everything to the side of I-59: trees, shrubs, old highway signs, everything. Kudzu, for those who haven’t spent much time in the South, is a particularly tenacious vine that is every bit as common in Mississippi as the state flower, the magnolia. It is everywhere, thick, dense, and dark green. It spreads over the ditches and gulches just off the shoulder of the roadway. If you were to fall asleep while driving and had the misfortune of hurtling your car into a thicket of the stuff, there is a better-than-average chance that you might never be heard from again. Kudzu is more than a vine though, and it’s no coincidence, I think, that it is to be found almost exclusively in the southern United States. It is the perfect vegetative metaphor for the way in which we southerners have so long sought to cover up our crimes, crimes that are not ours alone but which we, in so many ways, perfected and turned into an art form. Lynchings happened in all parts of the country to be sure, but Mississippi was an entirely different geographic, and, for that matter, historical species. It was the nerve center of white supremacy.
This was so much the case that later that year when I did honors thesis research in the state, I would find black folks still afraid to talk about the events of 1964 for fear that they could even now disappear if word got back to the wrong people—people who were still there, and who knew exactly how those black bodies that would occasionally float to the surface of rivers and lakes had arrived at their final resting places; people who still knew the location of the deepest point in the Tallahatchie; people who had never forgotten, in all those years, how much weight was needed to keep a body submerged until it became impossible to identify it. Mississippi was different, and it still is.
We arrived in Philadelphia just in time for the beginning of the day’s events and had to park well away from the site of the old church and walk the rest of the distance. It was unbearably hot, and there were a few thousand people there already, many from out of state (including actors Jennifer Grey and Blair Underwood who were to star in a made -for-TV movie about the murders the next year), as well as many from around the Philadelphia area, including those who had decided to capitalize on the events by marketing T-shirts to commemorate the festivities. Whether or not the locals had cared about Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner twenty-five years earlier, now, all were quick to wrap themselves in only the finest cloaks of racial ecumenism.
Despite some of the cynicism inherent to the local embrace of this civil rights reunion, the event was incredible, and more than compensated for the heat or the tacky commercial exploitation of the tragedy. I had never in my life been in the presence of so many heroes and sheroes, who had put their lives on the line for justice, and especially never so many white allies in that struggle. Growing up in this country, one learns very little about the role played by such persons. Not only are the contributions of people of color to this nation’s history minimized in favor of a narrative that prioritizes the things done by rich white men, but those whites who resisted and joined with black and brown folks to forge a better way are similarly ignored. Growing up, and even having attended one of the “good” schools in my community, in which I took Advanced Placement American History, I had learned nothing of these people among whom I now stood, and whose contribution to human freedom had been so dramatic, far more so than that of Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, or Andrew Jackson, for example, about whom I had learned plenty in the same class.
To have taught us about these people—and not merely the ones who had died, but the ones who had lived and continued the struggle—would have been dangerous. It would have signaled to those of us born in the years after the height of the movement that we had a choice to make. It would have dared those of us who were white to dream of different ways to live in this skin. It was no coincidence that school boards and principals and the lawmakers who make educational policy wanted no part of such an enterprise, and still don’t.
To see this collection of black leaders and white allies and to be in community that day with them was a source of great inspiration to me at twenty, as it appeared to be to my mother, there with me, at the age of forty-two. That she had been unable to participate in the battle we were celebrating was unfortunate. That she had raised a son to join that battle a quarter-century later had made her contribution every bit as vital.
IMMEDIATELY BEFORE WE
had left for Philadelphia, my mother and I had been out at the home of my dad’s folks, visiting for Father’s Day. We knew that nine days later, my grandfather would be going into the hospital for prostate surgery, was none too happy about it, and could use some cheering up.
Paw Paw had never been in good health. His leg had been amputated at the age of sixteen, the result of an infection that had set in after he was kicked by a horse, and throughout his life there had been various complications from the amputation. Also, his diet was atrocious, consisting so far as I could tell of lox, gefilte fish, butter, and saltines. He also smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes and drank more Chivas Regal than he probably should have. That he had made it to seventy was more than a bit surprising to some.
Two years earlier I had become aware of how rapidly his health was declining when he had come to New Orleans for college basketball’s Final Four. He had driven the eight hours with one of his best friends, Cornelius Ridley, a basketball legend in his own right. Ridley had coached Pearl High School in 1966, the year they became the first black team in Tennessee history to win the state championship against white players, with Ridley becoming the first black coach to win a state title.
Coach Ridley, Paw Paw, and I had gone to the games, which included one of the most exciting finishes in championship history, in which Keith Smart of Indiana hit an improbable baseline jumper at the buzzer to beat Syracuse. But my grandfather had actually missed the ending, having become ill shortly after halftime, his blood pressure spiking and causing him to become so disoriented that he’d wandered back on his crutches to the hotel, thinking the game was over. Coach Ridley and I would find him there an hour later, after both of us had begun to panic about his whereabouts. Though his health stabilized in the months following his trip to New Orleans, by 1989 he was struggling, his kidneys malfunctioning to the point of requiring dialysis, and his blood pressure dangerously high.

Other books

Catalyst by Lydia Kang
An Amish Christmas Quilt by Hubbard, Charlotte; Long, Kelly; Beckstrand, Jennifer
It's Only Temporary by Sally Warner
The Tsarina's Legacy by Jennifer Laam
Finally Found by Nicole Andrews Moore
Brigid Lucy Needs A Best Friend by Leonie Norrington
Undone by the Star by Stephanie Browning
Death of an Old Sinner by Dorothy Salisbury Davis