Last week, the day after the election of Donald Trump, I found myself recalling the words of Rodney King, spoken during the 1992 Los Angeles riots: “Can we all get along?” A black former congressman had told me about waking up his nine-year-old daughter that morning. When she heard the news, she began crying, fearful in ways she couldn't exactly articulate, but fearful nevertheless. The following day, I travelled to Pennsylvania and met with two groups of young people, some her age and some a bit older, and, curious as to whether the nine-year-old’s reaction was unique, I began by relaying the story and asking how many of them had felt the same way. Most of the young people, in both groups, raised their hands, eager to share their anxieties and their fears.
The meetings were very different in some respects. One took place at a charter school with an emphasis on art, with students dressed in uniforms in a setting designed to highlight their often amazing artistic talents. The other was at a Boys and Girls Club, populated by students who needed a place to hang out after school until their working parents could come and fetch them. But there was a common denominator: except, I believe, for one child at the charter school, all the students were African-American.
I was initially taken aback by their reactions, even though some adults I know had told me that they were having a hard time dealing with the election. (A friend who is white told me, "I'm just numb.") I told the students a little about my generation's history confronting racism, and about the ways in which that history had shaped my career in journalism—one that aligns with my dear, now tragically departed friend Gwen Ifill. Gwen and I had an instant bond on so many levels—both as "firsts" in several journalism jobs—and Gwen faced overt racial hostility. When she was interning at the Boston Herald American many years ago, a co-worker wrote a note saying, "Nigger go home." But home she didn’t go, a choice I relayed to the anxious and fearful students. Gwen and I were both the children of ministers, and growing up in an A.M.E. household we were taught our history from the moment of consciousness. It is a history that includes the pain and sacrifice of so many of our people in the past, from the slave ships to the lynching trees, to the separate and unequal schools and the places where our parents, though paying customers, could not sit down to eat, to Charleston, where massacre-surviving worshippers at Mother Emanuel (again, A.M.E.) expressed forgiveness for the shooter who murdered many of their own. Gwen and I both loved clothes, but we loved the armor we wore even before we put on a stitch, the armor we wore as we traversed roads not taken by women who looked like us; Gwen took that moral armor into her work as a professional journalist, just as she took her consciousness of race and racism into whatever newsroom she inhabited, unabashedly but gently providing good information that helped cause hateful words or hateful glances to fall to the ground and dry up.
Last year, when I spoke at a National Press Foundation event honoring Gwen, I recalled the words of Viola Davis when she became, just a few weeks earlier, the first black woman to be awarded an Emmy for best actress in a drama. She began by paraphrasing a quote from Harriet Tubman. "In my mind I see a line,” Davis said. “And, over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line. But I can't seem to get there no how. I can't seem to get over that line." She went on to say, "The only thing that separates women of color from anyone is opportunity." Gwen not only got over that line but added color to the outstretched arms waiting in the green fields of our profession, encouraging other women of color to follow in her footsteps. And sometimes, even when there is opportunity, those who seize it—gratefully and productively—still meet resistance.
I told the students that their history is their armor and that they should not be afraid. Not that there wouldn't be challenges. It might be hard for them to imagine the experience of fifteen-year-old Brenda Travis, who, in 1961, joined protesters in McComb County, Mississippi, over the objections of the civil-rights leaders who were worried about the ethics of taking young activists out of school. She sat in a segregated bus station, where black travellers had to use the back door, and was arrested and incarcerated. But Brenda, and the other young people fighting at that time, eventually saw justice done. I told the students in Pennsylvania about the journey travelled by those young people and many before them. And I told the worried students of the need to know that history, so that now and as they age they can embrace and erase their fear and contribute in whatever way they choose, and, in the words of the song often called the black national anthem, they can march on “till victory is won."
I felt so lucky to be able to talk to these students. They need to know that history, but also that it included not only black sacrifice but the sacrifice of white Americans who believed in freedom and justice for all and worked with the black activists toward a more perfect union. When some of the students condemned the attitudes of "white people" in general, I responded first as a journalist, talking to them about the importance of precision in language, and also about the many white people who joined with black people in their quest for justice. I told them about Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and Viola Liuzzo and the Reverend James Reeb and others who died or were brutalized. They lived ubuntu, without knowing that word, so often used by President Mandela: it means I am who I am because you are who you are. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has explained, a person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, and feels diminished when others are humiliated or oppressed.
The people in the country now who are spouting hate-filled words don't seem to know their own American history. There is enough blame to go around as to why. But when it comes to fixing what's wrong with America, one of our priorities should be making more of an effort to put our history into our classrooms in the earliest years, and to educate our teachers, too. I want all of our people—even the haters—to know why we have needed that armor and how we can, while wearing it, remain open to one another.
