Happy birthday, Dr. King

This year for the first time, I've been discussing Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement with Edith. In earlier years I had the sense that she was still so unaware of race, never mind racial discrimination, that I didn't want to bring it up. But last week she asked about a Martin Luther King display at the YWCA, and I instinctively felt that though she still doesn't have the vocabulary for American racial categories, she was ready for some of the story.

Not all of it, of course. Figuring out how to tell a four year old about America's terrible racial past is tricky. I wanted to steer clear of most of the violence. And while I was prepared to talk about unfair laws, I didn't want to get into the impenetrable depths of racial hatred.

So I stuck with the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins--both early civil rights actions that were largely non-violent, as well as being creative, inspiring, and successful. Plus, Montgomery was where Martin Luther King got his start as a civil rights leader (at age 26, let's not forget), so as long as we were talking about him, it was appropriate to start in Montgomery.

The ensuing conversation included one of my favorite moments as a mother so far.

There's nothing quite like articulating a Jim Crow law to an unsuspecting child to throw its absurdity into starkest relief. It doesn't matter that you've taught the civil rights movement to college students for the last twelve weeks. Forget years of reading and talking about it. Never mind graduate school seminars spent parsing the significance of a color line that never stayed still and that in fact didn't physically separate the races at all. Instead just try explaining it to a child with no historical background:

"There was a law that on the buses in that city, people with dark skin had to sit behind people with light skin. [On some instinct I continued to avoid the labels white and black and used visual descriptors instead.] And if the bus filled up and someone with light skin got on and wanted a seat, the people with dark skin had to stand up and give them the seats."

Edith stared at me and then snorted. "Really? Are you telling the truth? That's a crazy law!"

Yes, it was. There were other crazy laws like that, I told her. She wanted to know more of them. I mentioned Jim Crow water fountains, train cars, movie theaters and schools. I tried to explain disfranchisement.

Then I told her about Rosa Parks, the Montgomery black community's organizing effort under King and others, the bus boycott plan, and after a year of walking and carpooling, ultimate success. She listened intently and smiled at the end.

She wanted another such story. I told her about the whites-only lunch counter at the Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina. (She wanted to know if lunch counters in Chapel Hill had been segregated, too, and I said, yes, they no doubt were.) Then I told her about the Greensboro college students who got together to change that rule and decided to sit in at the lunch counter, wave after wave of them taking the stools as previous students were arrested, until the jails were full and finally, the store relented. Both stories grabbed her. Though they appealed to her often fierce sense of justice, they also were opportunities to emphasize the power of a nonviolent, loving approach to deepest wrongs.

In fact, she has had me tell the stories over and over again this week. The second time was on the way to school. We got there and were taking off her coat just as we got to my brief mention of the white students who heckled the students sitting in at Woolworth's, even pouring ketchup and salt on them as they sat there. I once more emphasized the Greensboro students' incredible calm in the face of the crowd's aggression against them. Edith started pacing back and forth the way she does when she is overcome by an idea.

"Mom," she said finally, gesticulating intensely, "do you know what I would do if my blond-skinned friends were doing that to my brown-skinned friends? Like Torrey?"

"What?" I asked, noting both the emergence of her own categorical descriptors and the fact that she understood who among her friends would have been wronged under Jim Crow.

"I would take my blond-skinned friends, and I would march them right out of there." She trembled and looked determined. I was struck: She had described an option not in the story, imagining herself into the scene as a "blond-skinned" person who could help diffuse conflict by suasion of the wrongdoers. Her own non-violent contribution.

***

But it was actually her thought process on the first day we discussed these stories that really got me. After I'd told each story for the first time she was still processing, and her processing took the form of thinking about crazy rules. Having pumped me on all the crazy racial laws I could think of, she then started making up her own crazy laws.

"Like, it would be crazy if people with brown eyes could eat chocolate but people with blue eyes couldn't."

I agreed. Somehow thinking up discriminatory rules that had no basis in real historical hatreds seemed to be for her a safe way to work through the troubling information she'd received. So we thought up more silly laws. We agreed a few kinds of discrimination were okay: That it was fine to have a law saying adults could drive cars but kids couldn't. And we tried to articulate what made that okay where other discrimination wasn't.

The crazy laws continued to spill forth. And then she said,

"Or it would be crazy to have a law saying that the rich people could sleep on the soft bed but poor people had to sleep under the bed on the hard wooden floor."

I paused. "Well...yes, that would be a silly law. But you know, actually, rich people have a lot of comfortable things that poor people don't have."

"Why?"

"Well, they have more money to buy those things."

"But why do they have more money?"

It should be said here that many of Edith's imaginary games involve poor and/or orphaned children finding their way to a palace where the royals take them in, give them clothes and food, and adopt them. I often have been drafted into playing variations on this theme.

"That's a hard question. Sometimes rich people were born into families with more money. Sometimes they worked to earn that money. You know, some people think that people are rich because they work hard and deserve it, and other people are poor because they haven't worked as hard. So they think it's okay that the rich person gets to sleep on the bed and the poor person sleeps on the wooden floor."

Once again Edith paused and looked at me. "Really? You mean there are really people who think that in our country, still today?"

"Yes."

Edith looked disbelieving. "But we don't think that, do we?"

In his latter days, before his assassination in 1968, Martin Luther King was turning his focus increasingly on class inequity. He spoke out against the Vietnam War as an injustice to the poor--both the Vietnamese peasants and the American drafted soldiers who were disproportionately poor men. He focused on challenges to the more ambiguous, intractable, class-based barriers to equality as the next logical step in the movement, but he faced resistance. Plenty of people who had supported the abolition of de jure racial segregation weren't prepared for an assault on the American class structure. Forty years later, as the health care debate rages and people die in Haiti for lack of roads on which to reach them, I wonder whether we're ready to keep pace with Dr. King.