...we had an interruption in responsible leadership that respected civil rights which created the vacuum in which these bigots emerged.
I was watching a PBS special about school desegregation, and there was a scene where three women who had been the first in their state/town to integrate a public school went back and walked up the hill where there had been a gauntlet of troopers, reporters, and folks yelling epithets and slurs as they walked up to the school back in those awful days.
One of the things which struck me was the point where they had made it up to the school, surprised how long the driveway seemed today; and the one question that was on all of their minds was, 'why?'
Why would folks act that way toward children seeking to learn at the same school as their white counterparts?
The most revealing thing was found in their recollection of how they had eventually succeeded in establishing themselves at the school - the first school year after integration found these 20 or so black kids with this formerly all-white school all to themselves because the majority of the white kids had been pulled out by their parents.
In fact, most of the white parents and legislators who had been invested in segregated public education in their southern state were willing to just shut the entire system down to avoid integrating and sending their children to school with black kids.
Turns out, the following year, most of the white kids were allowed by their parents and the community establishment to come back to the school(s) in overwhelming numbers and the process of integration that we take for granted today was allowed to proceed.
I remember how, in my town in the early 1980's, how employers were already wary about hiring because of a recession, but there seemed to be a lot of lingering racism which was institutionalized in the remaining imbalance in the levels of power and control of businesses and institutions hadn't yet caught up with the population changes.
About 4 or five years later, as my own children's generation was graduating from high school with their fully integrated and opportune class, employers opened the floodgates and allowed this educated and motivated community to fill the much needed slots in a rapidly expanding economy.
In many ways we never looked back; never looked back. In about a blink of an eye, the barriers which seemed so impenetrable in the recent past seemed to evaporate overnight as the truths of integration outstripped all of the hype and conjecture about racial relationships which had so gripped our community for decades.
It was like that in the past, on a different degree of transformation with the schools and in employment after the passage of equal employment laws and school desegregation efforts. All of the sudden the barriers in folks' minds just fell (for most, it seemed).
At the end of it all, we're just left to wonder -- reflecting on all of the anxiety and angst we'd felt about crossing those artificial barriers to our successes -- just, why? Why did this happen, if it was all so possible to just let it go? Why was all of this perpetrated on a people? Opportunism? Evil? Hysteria?
I don't know. It's the way some humans are, I have to suppose.
What I do know is that it takes leadership from the top, as Johnson provided, to motivate a nation to unite; conversely, as we've seen, it takes just one demagogue to tear it down again.
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