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Dixieland: Old Times There Should Not be Forgotten
By Brother Rogers
In recent months and years, leading Mississippi politicians have sparked controversy nationwide with comments about race. Referring to the civil rights movement, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” said one.
For those of us who are under age 50 in Mississippi, these words are hard to believe. How could anyone have lived through the assassination of Medgar Evers, the violent integration of Ole Miss, the brutal murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, church bombings, sit-ins, protests and so forth, and NOT recall that time as bad? If ever there was a time of cataclysmic change, that was it.
So I took an informal, unscientific poll. In other words, I asked some of my family and friends over age 65 how they remembered the 1960s. They all gave me some version of, “I just didn’t know all that was going on or realize it was that bad.” I believe they are telling the truth.
The problem is not selective memory. Rather, they have a blind spot when it comes to race. They aren’t being deliberately ahistorical or insensitive. Instead, they reflect a cloistered worldview that came from living in a closed society. All of us have perceptions that are inevitably skewed by the distorting lens of our background and upbringing.
This phenomenon of a blind spot on race is depicted well in “The Help,” a novel (and soon-to-be movie) by Mississippi author Kathryn Stockett about white women and their black maids in Mississippi during the 1960s.
The white women are not intentionally evil, but they are oblivious to the inequities around them, not to mention the inequities they inflict themselves. Even the worst, Hilly, energetically raises money for “The Poor Starving Children of Africa” as she implements the “Home Help Sanitation Initiative,” a measure to ensure the maids would not share a bathroom with their white employers.
The unpleasantness of the civil rights movement is a subject to be assiduously avoided by respectable white people. When one of the white women, Skeeter, begins to watch a television report about integration at Ole Miss, her mother immediately flips the channel to Lawrence Welk, announcing, “Look, isn’t this so much nicer?” After Skeeter anonymously publishes a book about the maids’ difficult and humiliating lives in “Niceville,” her girlfriends hardly recognize themselves as the perpetrators.
They had a blind spot, a lack of awareness about the race problem and their role in contributing to it. Those who don’t accurately remember the civil rights movement do not have faulty memories. They were simply oblivious to the inequities around them, as we still are today in the midst of our busy lives.
The good news is that a civil rights curriculum becomes mandatory in all public schools for the 2011-2012 school year. Mississippi is the first state to require civil rights studies throughout all grades. This improvement will go a long way toward helping future generations of Mississippians know the truth, the real truth with no blind spots, about the civil rights movement in our state.
It is not a story only of oppression and pain. It is a story of good people, black and white together, rising up from the grassroots and accomplishing God’s work on earth. It is a story of the triumph of good over evil. It is the fulfillment of a vision where all Americans, regardless of skin color, are judged by the content of their character.
It is a story of remarkable progress whose ending is not yet written. During the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, when we pause to reflect on where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are going, we should find our place in the story and do our part to make the next chapter successful.
Brother Rogers is a guest columnist for the Starkville Daily News and works for the Stennis Center for Public Service.
In recent months and years, leading Mississippi politicians have sparked controversy nationwide with comments about race. Referring to the civil rights movement, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” said one.
For those of us who are under age 50 in Mississippi, these words are hard to believe. How could anyone have lived through the assassination of Medgar Evers, the violent integration of Ole Miss, the brutal murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, church bombings, sit-ins, protests and so forth, and NOT recall that time as bad? If ever there was a time of cataclysmic change, that was it.
So I took an informal, unscientific poll. In other words, I asked some of my family and friends over age 65 how they remembered the 1960s. They all gave me some version of, “I just didn’t know all that was going on or realize it was that bad.” I believe they are telling the truth.
The problem is not selective memory. Rather, they have a blind spot when it comes to race. They aren’t being deliberately ahistorical or insensitive. Instead, they reflect a cloistered worldview that came from living in a closed society. All of us have perceptions that are inevitably skewed by the distorting lens of our background and upbringing.
This phenomenon of a blind spot on race is depicted well in “The Help,” a novel (and soon-to-be movie) by Mississippi author Kathryn Stockett about white women and their black maids in Mississippi during the 1960s.
The white women are not intentionally evil, but they are oblivious to the inequities around them, not to mention the inequities they inflict themselves. Even the worst, Hilly, energetically raises money for “The Poor Starving Children of Africa” as she implements the “Home Help Sanitation Initiative,” a measure to ensure the maids would not share a bathroom with their white employers.
The unpleasantness of the civil rights movement is a subject to be assiduously avoided by respectable white people. When one of the white women, Skeeter, begins to watch a television report about integration at Ole Miss, her mother immediately flips the channel to Lawrence Welk, announcing, “Look, isn’t this so much nicer?” After Skeeter anonymously publishes a book about the maids’ difficult and humiliating lives in “Niceville,” her girlfriends hardly recognize themselves as the perpetrators.
They had a blind spot, a lack of awareness about the race problem and their role in contributing to it. Those who don’t accurately remember the civil rights movement do not have faulty memories. They were simply oblivious to the inequities around them, as we still are today in the midst of our busy lives.
The good news is that a civil rights curriculum becomes mandatory in all public schools for the 2011-2012 school year. Mississippi is the first state to require civil rights studies throughout all grades. This improvement will go a long way toward helping future generations of Mississippians know the truth, the real truth with no blind spots, about the civil rights movement in our state.
It is not a story only of oppression and pain. It is a story of good people, black and white together, rising up from the grassroots and accomplishing God’s work on earth. It is a story of the triumph of good over evil. It is the fulfillment of a vision where all Americans, regardless of skin color, are judged by the content of their character.
It is a story of remarkable progress whose ending is not yet written. During the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, when we pause to reflect on where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are going, we should find our place in the story and do our part to make the next chapter successful.
Brother Rogers is a guest columnist for the Starkville Daily News and works for the Stennis Center for Public Service.
