Lanterns Read online

  I do not seek to go back to the segregated indignities of the days before Brown v. Board of Education and am grateful beyond words for the Civil Rights Movement which I was blessed to witness, share in, and benefit from, as did all Americans. So few human beings have been blessed, as I have been, to experience firsthand the convergence of such great events and great leaders. The sacrifices of Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, Alabama, of Jackson, Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee to tear down America’s iron curtain of racial segregation must never be forgotten or repeated. We must fight with all our might the racial, religious, and gender intolerance and hate crimes resurging today in our schools, homes, and communities. Black citizens gained the right we should always have had to sit anywhere on a bus and in a restaurant, to drink colorless water without the indignity of separate Black and White fountains, to play in public playgrounds and read in public libraries, and to escape decrepit schools without books, supplies, and well-paid teachers. But as Littleton, Colorado’s massacre of children by children, New York City’s police brutality, and a recent Texas lynching demonstrate, skin color or “differences” defined by someone’s arbitrary standards can still trigger unjust violence.

  The Civil Rights Movement immeasurably lightened the physical, mental, and emotional burden of growing up Black in America. My children and yours may find it unimaginable that my generation was not able to go to the bathroom when we had to, to drink when we were thirsty, and to eat when we were hungry—natural behaviors that required unnatural thought and preparation if you were a Black child growing up in the segregated South. What Black adult today does not painfully recall holding in urine as our parents searched for a place to stop? Who in my generation was not accustomed to packing lunches to eat in the car because there was no restaurant where we could stop and be served? And who among us cannot regurgitate the feelings of rage and resentment from having to “stay in your place,” watch your words, cover your back, and hide your fear, the consequences of being born Black or different from prevailing cultural standards of beauty or acceptability.

  Yet as I drive past the endless clutter of fast food restaurants on our interstates and ugly sprawling city outskirts, and am glad to be able to stop and eat and go to the bathroom, I wonder whether all the hamburgers and fries and fried chicken, which I so love, are good for me, my children, or anybody’s health. I worry about the loss of dinner rituals—preparing balanced meals together, setting the table, family conversation—in this era of fast foods and instant gratification. I worry about how children will learn to cook and develop good table manners and conversational skills without seeing and doing these things regularly with parents and other adults. I worry about children not feeling useful and not learning how to take care of themselves and of their families and others through regular chores. And I worry about millions of children not learning in public schools how to read and write and compute at grade level and falling behind in our knowledge-based national and global economies. Providing all our children—ninety percent of whom are in public schools, the crucible of our democracy—equitable and quality education is a challenge the world’s super power is failing to meet today at its peril. Military readiness is hollow if our children are not school-ready. National security means nothing if a child is not safe at home and at school.

  Finally, I look around with concern at the loneliness and neediness of so many children who are trying so hard to grow up and who need parents, and other caring, reliable adults to see, hear, listen to, and spend time with them in our too careless, too fast, too busy culture. So many children are killing themselves and others because they lack enough adults in their homes, schools, communities, public life, and culture to show them a different way and to reflect lives with positive purpose and integrity. Adult hypocrisy is confusing and deadening our children’s spirits and minds as they struggle through an American landmine of drugs, guns, violence, and greed poised to shatter their bodies, minds, dreams, and futures.

  But I look ahead with faith and determination, firmly believing we can together build newer healthier lives, strong families, strong communities, and strong children who are good human beings. This will require reshaping national priorities and reclaiming the enduring values of compassion, fairness, and opportunity that are the bedrock of the great experiment called America.

  I celebrated my sixtieth birthday in 1999 (I can’t believe it and don’t feel it!) and am blessed with a good husband, three great adult sons, enough money, and more honors than I can pack away. And yet I feel an urgent need to throw all caution to the winds and to risk all to try to finish the quest for justice and inclusion that our founding fathers dreamed of but did not have the courage to constitutionalize and practice. Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eleanor Roosevelt, Benjamin Elijah Mays, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, Ella Baker, Charles Houston, and Thurgood Marshall did their part to finish America’s unfinished symphony of freedom and justice. It is now time for the next great movement, for our children. It must be led by mothers and grandmothers of all races and faiths, with youths and all others who want to show the world that America is decent enough and sensible enough and moral enough to take care of all of its children. I invite you to join me in the urgent crusade to Leave No Child Behind® so that one hundred and one thousand years from now, our children’s children will call us blessed and God will say “well done,” as I know God has said or will say to the lanterns I thank in this book.

  1

  PARENTS AS MENTORS

  Arthur Jerome and Maggie Leola Bowen Wright

  THE DISTINGUISHED THEOLOGIAN Howard Thurman once described an oak tree in his childhood yard with leaves that each autumn turned yellow and died, but stayed on the branches all winter. Nothing—neither wind, storm, sleet, nor snow—dislodged these dead leaves from the apparently lifeless branches. Dr. Thurman came to understand that the business of the oak tree during the long winter was to hold on to the dead leaves before turning them loose in spring so that new buds—the growing edge—could begin to unfold. At winter’s end, what wind, storm, sleet, or snow could not force off passed quietly away to become the tree’s nourishment.

  My parents were like that oak tree. They hung onto their children until we could blossom on our own and always put our needs ahead of their own. When I think of them, I think of integrity, consistency, high expectations, family rituals and regularity, prayer, meals, chores, church activities, study, reading, service, and play. I think of common sense and sound choices, of sacrifice and bedrock faith, of their unwavering gratitude and belief in the graciousness and presence of a Creator who gave us life, and to whom Daddy entrusted us in his will. I would have been devastated if I had ever found my parents not to be who I believed them to be. They never let us down.

  Breakfast was always ready when we got up, got dressed, and got ready to go to school. A hot dinner was waiting when we came home from school around four o’clock. Our parents worked hard to keep us physically and morally clean and to maintain the rituals of family life and community work.

  Mama was a pillar of Shiloh Baptist Church where Daddy was pastor. She was director of the youth and senior choirs which often practiced in our home or at church, church organist, founder and head of the Mothers’ Club, and fundraiser-in-chief. Mama was a natural-born organizer of people. She organized the Mothers’ Club to emphasize the importance of mothers’ leadership roles at home and in the community. She organized a Cradle Roll Department and many other activities for children and young people. She raised the money to help Daddy build the new church and to pay its bills with all kinds of communitywide events and contests: baby contests; Miss Universe contests; Queen for a Day contests; hilarious male-only wedding contests. The winners who raised the most money got bundles of prizes Mama extracted from local merchants and the acclaim of an always jam-packed Shiloh Baptist Church.

  With her good and faithful women f
riends in the Mothers’ Club, she prepared hundreds of Christmas bags of cheer with fruit and candy and nuts and threw a big party in the church’s educational building, which we called the “hut,” for all. For those who couldn’t make it into the church the church went out to them. With Daddy or Mama and then alone, after we learned to drive, my siblings and I went to deliver food and coal to the poor on Christmas Day. And we were expected to visit and do errands for the poor, elderly, and sick whenever needed throughout the year.

  Mama was the creative entrepreneur in the family. Daddy could not have managed without her. She always had a dime and an idea and a streak of independence that my strong father would try in vain to rein in but could always rely on. He called her “Pal.”

  As I grow older, I look more and more like her. My mother’s strength sustains me wherever I waver in the face of tough challenges. I remember once, after I became a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi, I brought home to visit Mama a small girl who had lost her eye when marauding Mississippi Whites sprayed buckshot through the windows of her family’s house. I’d been instructed by Jeannie’s mother how to remove, clean, and replace her glass eye, which I felt able to do in theory. When confronted by the reality, though, I quavered. Seeing my hesitation, my mother gently pushed me aside, and quickly removed, cleaned, and reinserted Jeannie’s glass eye without missing a beat.

  I do what I do because my parents did what they did and were who they were. I first saw God’s face in the face of my parents and heard God’s voice in theirs as they cooed, read, told stories, and sang to me. I adored Daddy’s affectionate nickname for me—“Booster.” I first felt God’s love in their hands and arms and feet as they held, rocked, fed, bathed, and walked me when I was fretful or sick. I first learned God’s caring by watching them care for me and my sister and three brothers and for others within our family and community. When Daddy’s sister Ira got sick, he moved her and her five children to our hometown of Bennettsville, South Carolina, where she later died. Daddy and Mama helped raise Aunt Ira’s five children all of whom went on to college. When Daddy’s Aunts Cora and Alice got too old to live alone in the red hills of Gaffney, South Carolina, Daddy’s birthplace, they came to Bennettsville, where my parents tended to them. When dignified old Reverend Riddick became homeless and others in the community could not care for him, my parents began the first Black home for the aged in our town. Mama ran it after Daddy died. My brother Julian ran it after Mama died. His daughters, Stephanie and Crystal, have run it since he died. Many of my childhood elders have found a caring haven in Bennettsville when they could no longer care for themselves.

  I learned to speak the truth because it was expected and enforced in my house. I learned profanity was unacceptable after violating this tenet on more than one occasion and having my mouth washed out with Octagon soap. I learned to stand up when an older person entered the room and to give him or her my seat and to say please and thank you and yes ma’am and no sir to adults. (And I want to tell young and older people—White, Brown, and Black—not to dare call Mrs. Rosa Parks “Rosa” or Dr. Maya Angelou “Maya” or Dr. John Hope Franklin “John Hope” if they are not personal friends.) We need to reinstill respect for elders at all levels of our society and elders need to deserve it.

  I learned from my parents that marriage is a struggle and a sacred partnership between two people and a covenant with God and with the children the union brings into the world. I learned that girls are as valuable as boys and that I could go around, under, and over—or knock down—the extra hurdles girls, especially Black girls, face.

  My parents expected their two daughters—my big sister Olive and me—to achieve and contribute as much as their three sons, Arthur, Jr., Harry, and Julian. I recall my father’s palpable disappointment, as I hid behind the tall hedge watching my sister’s fiancé nervously ask my father’s permission for her hand in marriage, that she, only three years out of Fisk University and a teacher at Benedict College, would think of “wasting” her education and talents by marrying so young. His expectation that she would go to graduate school first to enable herself to contribute even more to others before she married stuck with me as I attempted to give back in service the interest on my own education. My sister, a gifted teacher and teacher trainer, has more than paid her interest, and Daddy would be very proud of her as our whole family is. But I never once considered marrying in my early or middle twenties; I was too busy trying to make a difference as Daddy expected.

  The American society outside my home did not share my parents’ egalitarian expectations. During my childhood it was the custom of many Black parents with incomes too limited to educate all their children to send their daughters to school before their sons to make their girls less vulnerable to sexual and other humiliations in the segregated South. This led to many educated women marrying less well-educated men. In my hometown, a core of the pacesetters and mentors were refined, college-educated women. But they befriended and respected their many less formally educated women friends, who often possessed enormous mother wit, integrity, love, strength of will, and spirit that no degree could confer. This book is dedicated to three of these unlettered but kind and wise souls. I always knew deep in my soul that Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer’s eloquence, intelligence, spirit, and courage, like Mayor Unita Blackwell’s brilliance, unhemmed in by the King’s English that I was taught to speak and write at home and in school, were as worthy as the words uttered by those with college and professional degrees. My parents and community co-parents taught me not to put on airs or to look down on others who had had less opportunity. They understood the difference between being able to test well on paper in school and to live and serve well every day.

  My parents taught us to make sound choices and to focus on the truly important. My brother Harry tells about coming home from Morehouse College for Christmas and gently chastising Daddy for allowing the family car to deteriorate. He had a heavy social agenda planned and needed the car. He also noticed that Daddy’s clothes were not up to their usual standards and that his shoes needed to be replaced. Harry called all these things to his attention. Daddy smiled and quietly replied: “My credit is good and I could trade in the car in the morning. I can replace my suits and I can buy new shoes, but your tuition is due in January. I cannot do both. So I have decided to tune up the car, clean the suits, and have my shoes repaired.” Daddy died with holes in his shoes several years later. But he had three children who had graduated from college, my brother Harry enrolled in divinity school, my brother Julian enrolled in college and me, at fourteen years of age, dreaming about what college I’d attend.

  Daddy believed in God, in serving others, and in education. He constantly tried to be and to expose us to good role models. He invited Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, Morehouse College’s great scholar-president, to come speak at our church and to stay in our home. That visit prompted my brother Harry to decide to attend Morehouse. Dr. Mays promised him a job, which was provided in the Morehouse College kitchen when Harry enrolled several years later.

  Daddy would pile us children into our old Dodge and drive us to hear and meet great Black achievers whenever they came near our area. I heard Mary McLeod Bethune and other inspiring speakers at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina—almost 100 miles away. Daddy also would drive us to Columbia to hear Dr. Mordecai Johnson, then president of Howard University, every time he came to speak—usually for several hours—at the city auditorium. I heard illustrious Black artists Roland Hayes, Dorothy Maynor, and my great namesake Marian Anderson sing at Fayetteville State College in North Carolina. I was born a few months after Marian Anderson sang before 75,000 people, including Eleanor Roosevelt, at the Lincoln Memorial, after she’d been barred from performing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. by the Daughters of the American Revolution because she was Black. On a train from New Haven to New York City many years later, I saw Miss Anderson and introduced myself as her namesake. As a brash Yale law student caught up in the throes of the Civil Rights M
ovement, I asked her why she had sung before some segregated audiences. She graciously and patiently explained that sometimes one has to do things one does not like to do in the short term to achieve greater gains in the long term. It’s a lesson that I have experienced repeatedly over the years.

  The great Black poet Langston Hughes came to my hometown twice during my childhood. The first time he did not mean to come. He was traveling through South Carolina on his way to Atlanta University in Georgia and stopped at the home of a White Presbyterian minister in nearby Cheraw, South Carolina seeking a place to spend the night. The minister, no doubt terrified at the thought of putting up or being seen with a Black man in his racially segregated small town, and with no hotels or guest houses where Black folk could stay, drove to Bennettsville, asked where the Black high school was, walked Mr. Hughes into the principal’s office, said Mr. Hughes needed a place to stay, and left. Mrs. Walker, the principal’s wife and my English teacher, told me she wandered into her husband’s office, saw this familiar-looking stranger sitting there and thought, “It can’t be.” He looked at her looking at him and said hello. She said, “You can’t possibly be who you look like.” He answered, “Try me and see.” She said, “You look like Langston Hughes, but you could not be sitting here.” He replied, “I am and I am going to spend the night at your house.” Shocked, she asked if he would read to her class the next day. He said he couldn’t but that he would come back. And he did return and read his poems to the whole school. I especially remember “Mother to Son” and “The Negro Mother.”

  Later, as a senior at Spelman College in 1960, I again heard this great poet who proudly reminds us of our great common Black and human heritage. That he took time to come back to Bennettsville to read to children and that a teacher made sure her students could meet him gave me a special connection to the poet I called in my college diary “marvelous … down to earth and unassuming”—traits my Daddy shared, I’m so proud that a Children’s Defense Fund library at the former Alex Haley farm we now own bears Langston Hughes’ name.