Just as we learn to hate, we can learn to love

The crowd of many colors mingled, hugged, laughed and chattered at the Unity Breakfast on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I was sitting alone contemplating the fact that not too long ago such a gathering could never happen, at least not during daylight hours in an open place like the University of Washington-Tacoma. I remembered when segregation laws stood like an invisible Berlin Wall right here at home, when blacks were forbidden from setting foot on white school campuses and joining whites for a meal.

When the Pride Choir of Jason Lee Middle School took the stage I thought of Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson – killed during Sunday school at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., on Sept. 15, 1963 – when the KKK hurled dynamite into the beloved house of worship.  I was born into the horrors of the war on African Americans three months later.

Keynote speaker, psychologist, educator and author Dr. Terrence Roberts, said that when his life began, he also “stepped into a drama that was already underway.” I thought of my own childhood in Little Rock, Ark., ground zero for a major civil rights battle in which Roberts was front and center. I felt a kinship with him based on that, but also on something much deeper.

As one of the Little Rock Nine, Roberts stood up against segregation when he was just 16. Enrolled in Central High School in 1957 as part of a national plan for desegregation, he and eight other black students literally walked through the valley of the shadow of death every day, the sidewalk lined with screaming, spitting white people, bloodlust in their eyes from their craving to kill these children. “Lynch her! Lynch her!” they shouted at Roberts’ friend Elizabeth Eckford. “They pounded on us every day,” Roberts told the breakfast crowd. The whole affair became one of the most important events in the Civil Rights Movement.  

I listened to Roberts speak of his experience and the non-violent way of life he embraces. I thought of the hatefulness toward blacks I witnessed in my youth. When I was about 8, I saw a neighbor lady point wordlessly through her screen door to the garden hose laying in the blazing Arkansas sun when one of the black sanitation workers knocked on her door for a cool drink of water, drenched in sweat and hat in hand. She said not a word, but he nodded a thank you to her for letting him drink from the hose. He did his best to quench his thirst with hot water that tasted like rubber rather than waste the lady’s water by letting it run until cooler.

I remember the first black family in our all-white cul de sac. Racist neighbors tried to force the realtor into not selling to them. I remember the kindly face of the thin, old black woman who knocked on our door one day, asking if we needed help around the house. No one in the neighborhood invited her inside.  

I never understood why my family and friends felt this way; their fear of black people left me confused. I clung to the little book about Mary McCleod Bethune I had received in first grade, and in my tween years “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” as confirmation to what I felt inside – that black people are people just like me. I could never figure out the hate, but I did figure out that bigotry is learned, not naturally inherited.

Amazingly, all of the Little Rock Nine grew up to make great achievements in their lives. It was a gift to see Roberts standing there before the applauding assembly – to think that he lived to see Americans elect our first black president. Roberts is a beacon of hope for youth of all colors and cultures – even for a 45-year-old white guy like me who will never forget the lessons from Little Rock. 

Commenting rules