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My second week on my new job teaching at-risk kids, I am working with a young man I will call Earl--who is resisting as hard as he can letting me help him.This is a school for kids in the Deep South for kids who have struggled, and fallen further and further behind over the years. Eventually, because of their disruptive behavior, the have been permanently expelled from the regular system. We are their last chance to graduate—or reach eighteen. These kids, all African-American, have been bruised by poverty, bruised by family dysfunction, bruised by racial discrimination—including a defacto segregated school system. Many of them have been served by the foster care system, and some have served time in jail.
These are the kids I connect with, and want to help in any way I can.
Earl’s assignment—I will call him Earl--is to complete a quiz based on social studies material about five grades above his reading level—a daunting task.
Earl—puts his head down on the table and says, in a miserable tone, “I just can’t do it.” I back off for a while, turning to other students. Fifteen minutes later I come back. I say, “You can do it. Let me help with some of these words.” In the end he relents, and he eventually works his way through most of the quiz-items.
Fast forward to our physical ed time…he and I are throwing a football back and forth. He exults in throwing the ball fifty yards in the air to me—with no problem.
We have had our breakthrough. He will let me help him, and his self-esteem is restored.
The arc of the story I want to tell here extends back to my grassroots work in the Obama campaign during 2008, calling voters in North and South Carolina, New Mexico, Indiana, Texas, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Montana. I also travelled back and forth between North and South Carolina on several occasions, to do some canvassing.
Obama came to our little town located in a county that has more cows and horses than people, most likely. He stood at the front of our high school auditorium and spoke frank words to the parents and kids present.
“Parents, turn off the TV, pick up a book, and read to your child.” Folks responded enthusiastically to his overall message, paraphrasing…”We can change America, and the change starts with you, but I will be there to help tear down the walls that divide America, create jobs and quality schools and make sure that rich and poor alike have access to quality health care.”
The arc extends further back to my work, over the years, as an informal advocate for the poor in New England and the South, and further back still to my involvement in the civil rights movement in Gainesville, Florida in the 1960s. In that period of my life I was inspired by the example of Martin Luther King, and his memorable words. For some reason, one brief statement of his has stuck in my mind and won’t let go of me.“It is always the right time to do what is right.”
In one of our protests, I remember that a man showed up on the scene, singled me out for assault, and beat me down to the ground. I retain an indelible memory of the other protesters, all African-American- (I am white), surrounding me with their bodies and signs, forming a shield, protecting me in that moment.
I think I was changed more by incidents like this than all of my studies, though my grades suffered.
I remember an integrated group of us being driven into the surf by a hail or rocks and bottles…driven into the surf by crowd of white men on St. Augustine Beach in the mid-sixties..
And I remember spending countless hours chatting with a black preacher and mechanic named George Fair, and how he helped me with my rattle trap car on more than one occasion, though I had no money to spare, and how I visited him at the junk yard he owned (I remember the goal tied up behind his shack).
The arc of this story extends way back, to the example of my mother reaching out to break down racial barriers, when (in Orlando, Florida) my Mom invited a back minor league baseball player named Dike Wilson over to dinner. The next morning she told me that a charred cross had been burned on our front lawn (though I did not see it).
The point of this article is that the arc of the story of how we treat people of another race or culture, people who may struggling to free themselves from the bonds of poverty, people who may be impacted still by the remnants of slavery and segregation…that arc is not formed in a moment...It begins to be traced in childhood.
