Thank you Sister Rosa.

In 1976 I was an eight year old kid living in the shadow of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in a suburb of Philadelphia called New Jersey.

That year it was announced in my school that something called "Negro History Week" was to be expanded into "Black History Month". I giggled when the principal said "Negro", we all did, because it was such a silly old-time thing to say. Who the hell said Negro? All the black people I knew called each other cousin. I wondered why it wasn't called "Cousin History Week". This is the kind of logic you got from an eight year old who thought New Jersey was a suburb of Philadelphia.

During that February, our teacher would spend each morning telling us stories about influential black people, and their contribution to society. We learned about Frederick Douglass, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and W.E.B DuBois. We read books about the civil war, civil liberties, and civil rights; and the movement that began when one woman refused to give her seat on the bus to a white man when she was told to.

Even though it was only 1976 (just over ten years into the modern civil rights movement) it was inconceivable to me that there could even BE such a thing as a 'white' section of the bus. I couldn't imagine a time when people were called negroes and were made to eat in separate restaurants, or drink from different water fountains. In my world in 1976, black was beautiful, black was powerful. My black aunts and uncles (how I addressed the adults in my life) wore their hair in afros and dressed like the guys in Earth, Wind, and Fire and had names like Chunk-O-Funk and sat wherever they damn-well pleased, and it had always been that way. As far as I knew, Jim Crow and segregation went the way of the dinosaur like, a million years ago.

But, I learned, it had barely been twenty years. Which meant when mom was an eight year old girl like me, she wouldn't have been able to go to a restaurant with any of her band members. When my mom was eight, my babysitters, Grace and Mike, would not have been allowed to be legally married because Mike was white and Grace was black. Uncle Chunk wouldn't have been able to live in that sweet hi-rise apartment complex downtown because back then the only black men allowed inside were there to sweep the floor. There'd only be white kids in my school.

The butterfly effect of what our lives would be like had one woman decided to stand up and give away her seat overwhelmed me. And the knowledge that a single, powerful, non-violent gesture could change the very course of history--ultimately change the law--created and informed every political and social ideal I have to this day.

I learned a lot that year. I even got a better handle on my geography. Like, for instance, I know now that New Jersey is NOT a suburb of Philadelphia.

It's a suburb of New York City.

Posted by Antigeist at October 26, 2005 01:59 PM