Soul Food

Michele Marr

“Now is the time to make justice a reality to all of God’s children.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This Martin Luther King Jr. Day I found myself wondering what King

would think of this world if he were here today. I thought about how

young the man with a dream was when he was assassinated. I reread his

speeches and considered the things he accomplished during a life cut so

short. I can only imagine the kind of love and courage that drove and

sustained him.

King was born in Atlanta, Ga. in 1929, about a year before my mother

was born in Mobile, Ala. Both were depression era babies born in the deep

South. Both would come of age during WWII. These are the threads that

created strong social and cultural bonds among a whole generation.

These shared circumstances aside, my mother was a white baby girl and

King was a black baby boy. They may as well have been born on different

planets. The color of their skin alone would define the boundaries of

their separate worlds. Ask my mother now what she thought of segregation,

or of the poverty of blacks, while growing up in the South and she looks

distant.

She says, “That’s just the way it was. I never knew anything else.”

She and my grandmother never mistreated any black man or woman as far

as I know. They never used unspeakable names to call or describe them.

They never thought skin color -- anymore than any other characteristic --

made any man, woman or child more or less a child of God than the next.

They took their best hand-me-downs, groceries and other odds and ends

to poor black families they knew. But to think that anything or anyone in

this world could change the lot of black people in the South, or in all

the U.S. of A., was beyond their vision.

I, too, was born in Mobile, Ala., just four years before the Supreme

Court ruled that school segregation is inherently unequal and

unconstitutional. Just five years before Rosa Parks was arrested when she

refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man.

But I never heard of Rosa Parks until I was in high school. I never

went to school or to church with a black child in the South. Lunch

counters in Kress and Woolworth served only white folks. Public restrooms

were for whites only. There were drinking fountains for whites and others

for “coloreds.”

The last year I lived in Mobile, my last year in a Southern public

school, was 1959. Black people rode buses along with white people by

then, but they sat in the back of the bus. For all the Supreme Court’s

rulings, nothing else much about the lot of blacks in Mobile had changed.

I visited my hometown a few times during the early 1960s, but it was

1968, three months after King was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., before

I went back thinking I’d live in Mobile again. I had been accepted to the

University of South Alabama.

The campus was beautiful with old-brick buildings on acres of wooded

land shaded by Southern pines. And it was still fighting integration. In

Mobile I discovered my kinfolks thought that was the right thing to do.

I prayed that God would give me the courage to stand up to them and

for what I believed was right. I begged him to show me how to do it

without losing their love and respect. But I didn’t wait for his answer,

instead, I left Mobile and didn’t go back for 20 years.

If we had lived that summer in the world that King dreamed of, a world

where people are not judged “by the color of their skin but by the

content of their character,” I would have been judged low, very low,

indeed.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is the day I try to forgive myself. I

remind myself how young and uninitiated in the world I was in 1968. I

pray that God has forgiven me and that he will, soon, make justice a

reality for all of his children.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer and graphic designer from

Huntington Beach. She has been interested in religion and ethics for as

long as she can remember. She can be reached at o7

[email protected]