Movies and memories honor Martin Luther King
Taking stock on the black Americans of my past and present, and why they matter.
This morning I watched on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) some of the brilliant, but not widely known-about film productions of black writer/producer/director Oscar Micheaux. And the discussion about the importance of his films prompted an evaluation of my own journey toward racial understanding, beginning as a young girl in the 1950s and continuing to this day.
The Birth of the wrong kind of nation
In the early 1920s, Micheaux’s films countered the racist depictions of American blacks that calcified into American culture after D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a 1915 blockbuster film whose popularity served as catalyst for racial segregation and violence against African-Americans, especially in the South.
Its depiction of blacks as inherently violent and different from whites would go on to justify the South’s Jim Crow segregation policies and led almost immediately to the creation of the Ku Klux Klan whose reign of violence terrorized blacks throughout the midwest and South for generations.
Different view
In contrast, Micheaux’s films, such as The Homesteader (1919) and Within Our Gates (1920) often depicted blacks as members of the middle class and as intelligent and kind people with the same aspirations for productive, fulfilling lives as anyone else. Sometimes, Micheaux’s films also called out black on black scams and ripoffs, for which he was criticized.
But Micheaux went to such places anyway, in the interest of exploring truth, good or bad, through his art. Such an exploration was something Griffith could not understand, as both The Birth of the Nation and his subsequent film Intolerance successfully cemented the notion that anyone who disagreed with Griffith was intolerant, and he was not.
Illinois and other ties
One of the many reasons the Micheaux story resonates with me is that we seem to share many of the same values. Born in rural Illinois, he sought a future in urban Chicago where he learned from holding down a variety of jobs, such as Pullman train conductor, shoe shine entrepreneur, and steel worker as part of his ethos of being serious and continuously striving for a greater understanding of the world and higher education. These jobs would help him escape the monotony of rural Illinois in exchange for the chance of a better life.
Separated by time, race and gender, I, nonetheless, shared these values as I worked variously as a waitress, political envelope-stuffer, and barmaid to help pay for my college education. And, similarly, being serious and continuously striving for higher education have often been ascribed to me, as well.
To overcome racial barriers
Micheaux, of course, possessed the added challenge of having to confront racial intolerance in striving for middle class existence, success, and higher education, thanks in large part to D.W. Griffith and The Birth of a Nation.
Years later, in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, my parents fell prey to many of these same attitudes. I was not a convert to them, however. Why? I’m not sure, but I suspect it’s because I did not respect that particular outlook on life, even at the tender age of eight or nine.
Give credit perhaps to my Catholic grade school education–less effective in teaching math and science, perhaps, but good instilling values. Without preaching against racism, per se, a lot was implied via the catechismal wisdom of, “Do unto others as what you would have them do to you”
(Matthew 7:12).
Detroit stories
Before moving to suburban Chicago, I grew up in suburban Detroit, a city which was both a source of jobs for blacks escaping the dangers and hopelessness of the South, and a segregated enclave imposed by racist city leaders. Detroit’s own segregated policies consigned black people to certain neighborhoods and the economic limitations that went with it.
On our way to holiday or Sunday dinners with relatives who still lived in the motor city, we invariably drove through black neighborhoods, where every broken porch step or unhinged screen door would be inventoried by my parents with their usual racist implications.
Angels among us…
Those neighborhoods of my childhood memories would become the same place where, 30 years later after moving back to the area after having my son, I was driving through one of them, and my BMW had a flat tire. My auto insurance was not one with roadside assistance, so my first reaction was to stand outside my car and look lost. Soon I saw a youngish black man come out of what appeared to be a school or office building, approach me, and ask if he could help. I nodded a grateful, “Yes, thank you!”
After he expertly and quickly changed my tire, I offered to pay. But no amount of insistence that I would have spent gobs of money hiring a tow truck would dissuade him. And so we simply smiled, shook hands, and I drove off while he went back to work.
That would not be the last kindness I have experienced from black Americans, as I worked with many of them in various spheres–from newspapers to corporate America to the public school system–and found them inordinately good at what they did, skillful at negotiating the nuances of surviving and excelling in their various lines of work, insightful into all manner of human nature, and skilled at being a trusted, confidential colleague.
Their well-honed survival instincts also made them especially savvy guides on how to identify and avoid trouble-makers and succeed in spite of them. And they were good friends with whom to assess the social, cultural, or political exigencies–and atrocities–of the day.
Many of these treasured co-workers were part of my life during the 11+ years I worked in the telecommunications industry, in the 1980s and 90s–a time a turmoil during the divestiture of AT&T, its break-up into its own competitive entity and the seven Bell Operating Companies, and the ultimate coming together of many of these piece parts after one of the operating companies, Southwestern Bell, bought AT&T in 2005.
Losing touch, getting in touch
It was then all too easy to lose threads as jobs were moved, downsized, or metastasized into different forms, subject to being stationed just about anywhere in the U.S.. Bottom line, I lost touch as I too moved, changed jobs, and then even changed careers by becoming a teacher in 2007. But to this day, I regret not staying in touch.
As an educator teaching seniors and freshmen at a Title One high school in north suburban Illinois, black students made up about 10 percent of the student population. The majority of the student body was Hispianic (80 percent) and the remainder populated by white, Asians, and Native Americans.
I taught the full range of classes ranging from honors to regular to remedial, to make-up. In all, I saw my job as trying to kindle a love of literature however possible, as I knew how much reading and writing had meant to me, a child of parents I did not understand and who did not possess the parental skills to understand me. So I sought out an understanding of myself and the wider world through books.
But I was an educated white woman from one of the more prosperous Chicago suburbs—even though I was not rich, nor ever felt financially “comfortable” as a single mother of a young son.
It was hard sometimes to convince my students I wasn’t there to flaunt my white privilege, but rather to unlock their own unique potential. But that wasn’t always easy, based on feelings revealed in conversations that
cropped up.
Foot, meet mouth. Repeat.
For example, one of my second semester Freshman English make-up classes was about to end in early June, the month of my son’s wedding to a lovely, educated, and professionally accomplished young woman from California. In one of the last “throw away” days at the end of the year, after we had read everything and studied for the final the next day, one of my students asked what I had on my agenda for the summer.
I had previously talked briefly about my son’s wedding and how I had prepared for it by getting a new dress and making reservations to fly out in the next few weeks, so did not feel a need to exclude the wedding from my summer to-do list. Immediately, one of my African-American (male) students objected, saying, “We really don’t want to hear any more about your son’s wedding.” Ouch.
For a young man who was very bright, but whose educational and earning fate was inherently uncertain, again, the wedding thing in California was another finger in the eye. It was a way of saying my son could look forward to a happy future, whereas the cruelty of fate would make that next to impossible for him. Although he may work his way up to middle class existence, it would never come in concert with a lovely California wedding and a probable comfortable future to match.
I should have had a clue a few years earlier when my son and future daughter-in-law began dating, and in another class my students asked how they met. Answer: In the passenger lounge of an airport coming back at Christmas from Washington where both were studying. (Already now in dangerous territory.) Then another asked if she were black. I responded, no, but that wouldn’t make any difference. (Score one point there.)
But then another student asked why she was going to college in Washington, and I responded: because she was in law school there. Just then, in the corner of my eye, I saw Antony, a bright male student newly enrolled in our public high school having come from an educational facility for children of homeless parents. Antony covered his eyes and said something like, “Oh, god,” as if rueing the unlikelihood his life would afford him a similar lifestyle anytime soon, or ever.
Atlanta rising
I got some help from one of the most beneficial teacher-training classes I ever took. The school paid for me and other AVID program teachers to go to a four-day session in Atlanta for instruction on how we could better encourage our often financially-challenged students to learn and excel.
One class taught by an African-American instructor stood out. It was on how to encourage black children with the emphasis on boys who often came to school with more fragile egos than girls. The message: praise African-American boys to the hilt. Use high-fives, noise-makers, anything to recognize contribution, particularly in class when there’s an audience around.
High-fiving
Back home, I applied the advice to my own teaching, and it was easy to do in Literature classes where African-American students often excel in understanding big themes and supporting ideas based on the major life experiences that can make children highly astute in evaluating the human nature of characters in books.
The racism inherent in Of Mice and Men was instinctively obvious to them well before chapter 4 when John Steinbeck focuses solely on the only African-American character, the disabled stable-buck, “Crooks.” The families’ rage against each other in Romeo and Juliet and the violence in Verona is akin to the feeling of “other” they have experienced and the violence they sometimes faced more often than most of us know.
My new-found sensitivities found their way routinely into my reactions to class participation. Whereas I had always been encouraging, I amped it up to new levels with a, “That’s brilliant, Charles! How did you come to that understanding of the character’s motives?” Or, “Jaden, that application of the father-son theme gets right to the heart of the myth’s meaning. Tell us where you spotted that theme and how it led you to the message of the myth!”
Key and Peele-ing Macbeth
My lessons, too, tried to light a love for content through fun assignments that gave wide berth to student creativity. In one senior honors class, for example, I challenged students to select any passage from Macbeth and translate it into “for real” language, much like Keegan-Michael Key did in his “Luther” skits in which he translated President Obama’s always calm words about national events into the kind of angry rants that Obama really felt.
Two African-American girls chose Act II, scene 2, when Lady Macbeth, after Macbeth has killed King Duncan, comes up with the idea of smearing the guards’ daggers in Duncan’s blood to frame them for the king’s murder. A translation of the lazy guards “thinkin’ they as**s so fly they could get Lohaned and curve out on the job” and more, led to a standing ovation, and memories of that class as being my best in my nearly 15 years of teaching at
the school.
Looking back, and ahead
It’s been 108 years since Oscar Micheaux’s time, and 55 years since Martin Luther King’s assassination. Both Micheaux and King tried to change the American story and give it a different ending. Sadly, both men are no longer with us. That leaves the rest of us to finish the job of making all of us equal citizens of a multi-racial country with equal chances to excel and succeed.
My friendships with African-Americans often provided the kind of warm, safe relationships I sometimes missed in my childhood. I learned and grew from them even if now I can only say “thank you” from afar.
(Of note, my parents who grew up mimicking the racist attitudes of their and their parents' generation developed the grace to become much more racially accepting and sensitive as they grew older. And they did it on their own, without any more pushing on my part.)
As a teacher, my experiences with African-American students taught me a necessary humility–one white people need in relating to children who, accurately, see the larger society as unfair for them, but nevertheless find the strength and courage to go on.
On Martin Luther King’s birthday, it’s right to honor a man who helped all of us become better at being American, and all that represents. As much as bad actors are working to take rights away that he and others of his generation fought so hard for, he gave us the inspiration to never give up the hope that we can overcome their harmful aims and deeds.
His legacy is also enough to inspire the rest of us to act more kindly toward, and work with greater purpose on behalf of our fellow citizens still struggling for social and economic justice and opportunity. And we should seek out those kind and strong among us, like my lost friends, who can teach us a thing or two.
—trg