{"id":5071,"date":"2013-01-21T11:38:30","date_gmt":"2013-01-21T17:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/granades.com\/?p=5071"},"modified":"2013-01-21T11:39:39","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T17:39:39","slug":"personal-reflections-on-dr-martin-luther-kings-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/granades.com\/?p=5071","title":{"rendered":"Personal Reflections on Dr. Martin Luther King’s Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

My dad, Ray Granade, is a history professor. Back in 2011, he spoke at the start of school about his experiences growing up in rural Alabama during the Civil Rights era. I’m sharing it as I did with Johnny Wink’s similar talk<\/a> because it captures a time and place that is at once far removed from today and yet not far enough removed.<\/p>\n

\n

At year end, the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s last processor of Kodachrome film, Dwayne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, processed its last rolls. If, like me, you considered Kodachrome 25 the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s color film standard, you probably noticed.<\/p>\n

I was born in the Cradle of the Confederacy in the Heart of Dixie and reared in a small south-Alabama county-seat town of three thousand with a racial divide about 55-45 white. I married a native. My father grew up an hour above Mobile. My mother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s parents lived in Montgomery until their deaths in 1989; that city of just over 100,000 with its roughly 60-40 white racial divide was my second home.<\/p>\n

Until the mid-1950s, my father occasionally preached at Evergreen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s black Baptist church; black pastors never preached in ours. Sundays were strictly segregated, like all other formal social settings. Our movie theater had an outside entrance to the balcony, where blacks sat after buying tickets in the alleyway. Whites had two schools along town\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s main highway; blacks had two newer ones in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the black section.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Black businesses occupied three storefronts\u00e2\u20ac\u201dGant\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s grocery, a barbershop\/beauty salon, and a windowless pool hall\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhere Cary Street left town\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s block-long business district. The black undertaker embalmed at the white funeral home but conducted wakes at the deceased\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s.<\/p>\n

Only in retrospect did I recognize this as a halftone world, where everything appeared only in black or white. Soil was black, cotton white, milk white, Coke and coffee black. Few things, like automobiles and people, came in both black and white. Everything also carried moral weight, a message I absorbed at every Sunday service, Wednesday night prayer meeting, and Saturday matinee. Cowboys\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 white or black hats denoted whether they were good or bad. That halftone depiction simplified relationships in a complex reality becoming ever moreso. Things simply were what they were and, despite flaws, were fine as they were. That was not true in my grandparents\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 hometown.<\/p>\n

Dexter Avenue ascended six blocks of Goat Hill from fountain square east to state capitol. Six blocks south from the fountain, along Perry Street, sat the Governor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Mansion; my grandparents lived around the corner toward town. My younger cousin, Jimmy, and I roamed Montgomery at will, playing at Perry Street Park or following Perry past First Baptist Church to the Carnegie Library or Dexter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stores. Three and a half blocks uphill from that intersection, a block and a half below the capitol, sat Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.<\/p>\n

When I was nine, twenty-five-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. became that church\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s new pastor. At the end of 1955, he began a year-long boycott of segregated Montgomery buses, occasioned by the arrest of Montgomery seamstress and NAACP secretary Rosa Parks. My grandmother employed no domestic, so the boycott lacked direct personal impact. But Montgomery\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s atmosphere changed. Jimmy and I discovered that King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s church did not want young white boys inside its doors; we also found our freedom of movement severely curtailed. Suddenly I learned what it meant to have my comings and goings closely watched and to render an accounting of my time whenever required.<\/p>\n

Simultaneously with the boycott, blacks won a legal battle to prohibit the University of Alabama from rejecting an applicant on the basis of race. Autherine Lucy became the first black to enroll. She and the boycott prompted my first thoughts about race relations.<\/p>\n

Two years later, in 1958, liberal, NAACP-endorsed Alabama Circuit Judge George Wallace opposed Ku Klux Klan-endorsed John Patterson for Governor and lost decisively. That year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s blockbuster, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153South Pacific,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d had us singing \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Some Enchanted Evening\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but not \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve Got to Be Carefully Taught\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u201dunless we focused on \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You’ve got to be taught to be afraid\/Of people whose eyes are oddly made,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and ignored \u00e2\u20ac\u0153And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Alabamians didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t protest the movie; its message didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even register, despite King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s efforts to sensitize us.<\/p>\n

The Montgomery Bus Boycott made King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name a household one, but not in an Evergreen caught up in the Civil War Centennial after 1960. I discovered independently what I would later read from a Southerner\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pen: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The past is never dead. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not even past.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Evergreen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s elaborate pageant depicted brave youth leaving for that war after chalking their names on a chimney in the former county seat\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pre-eminent home. My character inscribed his name first.<\/p>\n

A year later, Alabama elected demagogue George Wallace as Governor. When asked why he started using race, Wallace replied, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He took the oath of office in January, 1963, standing on the bronze star marking where Jefferson Davis became Confederate President. Everyone remembered Wallace\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s last inaugural line: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d As a senior, I played a bass drum in his inaugural parade.<\/p>\n

I attended college in the north Alabama city reputed to be one of the nation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most segregated. Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth vainly addressed Birmingham inequities, but it lived up to its nickname \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bombingham.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d During my lifetime, it had averaged three racially connected dynamite blasts annually. Recent ones had targeted Shuttlesworth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s home, twice, and church.<\/p>\n

King joined Shuttlesworth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Birmingham efforts the spring before I began college, scant months after Wallace\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s inauguration. He planned marches to elicit over-reaction from Public Safety Commissioner Eugene \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bull\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Connor. Connor obliged, turning firehoses and police dogs on marchers and bystanders alike. Marchers dwindled as jails filled. King recruited students into what would be dubbed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Children\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Crusade.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d National media, attracted by King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s presence, celebrated children\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s courage as they faced firehoses, dogs, and jail with other marchers and King. May and the crisis ended together, but King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s non-violent message had broken down in Birmingham.<\/p>\n

In June, Wallace briefly \u00e2\u20ac\u0153stood in the schoolhouse door\u00e2\u20ac\u009d at the University of Alabama to deny admittance to Vivian Malone and James Hood. That August, King led the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153March in Washington for Jobs and Freedom\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and delivered what would become his most famous speech, one line from which struck me: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

I began school that fall with more than the usual trepidation. In Birmingham, I saw my first mixed-race couple. Birmingham public schools began integrating. Violence continued. Civil rights lawyer Arthur Shores\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 home was bombed a week before King spoke his dreams in Washington, then again a week after King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s speech. The third September Sunday, two weeks after King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s speech, another bomb obliterated much of the 16th Street Baptist Church, headquarters of and main staging\/rendezvous point for the recently-completed campaign. Four young girls died. For the only time in my life, I felt the need to go, and went, armed.<\/p>\n

Two months after the church bombing, I learned from students huddled around a transistor radio at the library\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s front desk that Oswald had shot Kennedy in Dallas. When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the summer after my freshman year, the Justice Department made my favorite Birmingham barbecue place, Ollie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, its test case. Ollie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s closed.<\/p>\n

I joined the Male Chorus, the only musical ensemble which required no audition. My sophomore spring, three of us\u00e2\u20ac\u201dTed Stephens, Larry Draper, and Owen Lay\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwere among the 2,000 Alabama National Guardsmen federalized to help guard the fifty miles from Selma to Montgomery. King talked again of equity and equality. Ted, Larry, and Owen told stories from the march route. More importantly, I read about and watched local police and state troopers use billy clubs and tear gas to repel marchers at Selma\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Edmund Pettus Bridge on the cold March day known as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bloody Sunday.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

My junior year, a sociology teacher warned our class that King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s tactics had brought down a government, implying that ours was endangered. A John Birch Society billboard, sporting the legend \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Martin Luther King, Jr. in a Communist training camp in Cuba,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d obscured the view as one drove from my school past Vulcan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s statue and descended Red Mountain to the city proper.<\/p>\n

When I left for graduate school in 1967, most of my authority figures had labeled King a Communist and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153outside agitator.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I had heard stories about the private lives of public figures. I had more questions than answers. But I had lived through the emotional and political high water mark of the civil rights movement on the ground where much of it took place during one of America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most confrontational, polarized, and paranoid eras. My experience changed my worldview from halftone to grayscale. No longer were things cut-and-dried, no longer \u00e2\u20ac\u0153just the way they were.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And that line from King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s speech kept nagging at me.<\/p>\n

By my first graduate school spring, the 1968 Presidential race was fully underway. George Wallace ran for the American Independent Party; Bobby Kennedy sought the Democratic nomination. Martin Luther King, Jr. promoted the cause of Memphis sanitation workers. On my birthday, a man who shared my uncle\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name shot King. In the widespread riots following King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s assassination, someone firebombed the corner grocery by FSU\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s married student housing. The embers were barely cold before the owner nailed a big \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Wallace for President\u00e2\u20ac\u009d poster to a charred doorpost. Two months later, Bobby Kennedy was shot. Two months after that, antiwar protesters disrupted the Democratic Convention in Chicago. In November, Richard Nixon became a minority President as Wallace carried Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Florida State English History teacher Michael B. Pulman introduced me to racial colorblindness.<\/p>\n

In the next few years in Arkadelphia, I would hear Bill Terry\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stories of marching with King in Alabama and Johnny Ware\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s about a black teen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Vietnam experience. I would first hear Paul Simon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s song \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Kodachrome.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I would see Wallace shot in Maryland as he ran again for President. And I would later hear him announce that he was a born-again Christian, apologize to black civil rights leaders for his earlier segregationist views (saying that he had once sought power and glory but now realized that he needed to seek love and forgiveness) and admit, fifteen years after his stand in the schoolhouse door, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I was wrong. Those days are over and they ought to be over.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Racism is a differentiating mechanism, one of many that we all use daily to make sense of our world. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve Got to Be Carefully Taught\u00e2\u20ac\u009d warns that teachings \u00e2\u20ac\u0153before you are six, or seven, or eight,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d remain with you forever. Just as recovering alcoholics count the time since their last drink, so recovering racists count the time since their last reaction. Martin Luther King Jr.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s was one of many voices that helped me discover an antidote to racism, something that doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t cure but counteracts its poison. King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s legacy, for me, lies in that one line that so struck my ear, though it meant something only in retrospect, and only in chorus with others of similar import. A grayscale worldview has its advantages. But God wishes for us, I believe, a Kodachrome worldview. He wants us to see \u00e2\u20ac\u0153those nice bright colors,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to borrow Paul Simon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s phrase, to recognize and celebrate \u00e2\u20ac\u0153red and yellow, black and white.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d It is not a matter of training, but of choice. We can eschew the racist default, the prejudice of that particular differentiating mechanism. We can choose, to use King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s line, to judge by the content of one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s character rather than by the color of one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s skin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My dad, Ray Granade, is a history professor. Back in 2011, he spoke at the start of school about his experiences growing up in rural Alabama during the Civil Rights era. I’m sharing it as I did with Johnny Wink’s similar talk because it captures a time and place that is at once far removed … Continue reading Personal Reflections on Dr. Martin Luther King’s Legacy<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/granades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/granades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/granades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/granades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/granades.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5071"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/granades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5074,"href":"https:\/\/granades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5071\/revisions\/5074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/granades.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/granades.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/granades.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}