I learned a lot growing up in Niagara Falls during the 1950s and '60s. One of the lessons came as the result of my father's insistence that you have to work hard for everything you need in life, and then you have to work twice as hard to get what you want. He always said that nothing is free, and if you want nothing, that is exactly what you'll get.
My father was not unique. All my friends' fathers and mothers believed and preached the same thing. That's one thing that stood out in our community back then. Everyone at least seemed to hold the same fundamental values. All the parents taught all the kids to work for what they wanted out of life. Ours was a generation of children born of the generation of migrants from the South. Our parents were survivors.
They had seen tough times. They knew what suffering was about. They had lived through the Depression and Jim Crow. They'd had to struggle for their bread and for their freedom, and they did it with little promise of reward for themselves. They did it for their children. They did it for us.
Our parents were driven by their strong faith in us. They believed that if they educated us, taught us right from wrong and pointed us in the right direction, we'd do the right thing, and do the same for our children. They thought that if they showed us how to struggle, we'd do it, and make it to the promised land.
"I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you," said Dr. King. His words were and are an inspiration for millions of men and women, black and white, to struggle; inspiration to fight the good fight even if you know you might not make it yourself, struggle so that your children will.
I was young enough, and now old enough, to have witnessed the birth of the modern civil rights movement.
Just a kid, barely able to read, I was fascinated by the stories in the "Ebony" and "Jet" magazines about what was going on "down South." I will never forget the horrible pictures in "Jet" of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy who had been beaten to death in Mississippi for supposedly, according to different accounts, whistling at a white woman or calling her "baby." The articles made me cry. They still do, but more than sorrow, I felt anger, and from the anger grew my strength, all I needed to deal with the challenge my father had laid out before me to "hit the books."
I was 7 years old when Thurgood Marshall and his incredible team of NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyers, psychologists and others convinced the United States Supreme Court to do the right thing and unanimously decide that separate but equal was a myth, in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case. That was nearly 50 years ago.
I was too young to realize then what it meant, but I was old enough to understand that it was a big deal to my parents and their friends. I remember hearing my father and his good friend, Sonny Kimble, talk about how important it would be for their children. They were saying, without complaining, that their kids would never have to work as hard as they did in the factories. They both had good jobs at Carborundum and I'd hear them say they were lucky to have them. But they were going to make sure that we, their children, would not have to work as hard as they did.
Mr. Kimble spent a lot of his time organizing. He'd get out of his factory work clothes and get dressed in clean, crisply ironed shirts and slacks with creases so sharp they looked like knives. He'd go around the neighborhood and across town signing up people for memberships in the Community Center and the NAACP and making sure that they were registered to vote. Mr. Kimble and my dad got up early every morning and walked together to work, while our moms got us kids ready for school.
They taught me to look ahead more than you look back when you are trying to move forward. It's hard to move ahead while facing backwards. Dad said that you need to look back every now and then, but don't focus on the rearview mirror when you are driving.
When you get to my age, you begin to look around at the long roads you've traveled and the shorter roads that lie ahead. The promised land can't be much farther ahead.
So why are we not there yet? Did we miss a turn somewhere back there? I've begun to wonder what went wrong. Did we fall asleep at the wheel? Take our eyes off the road? Could it be possible that we thought we had arrived before we actually got there? Was it because we thought we had made it? Did we really think that, once we got our degrees, got the jobs and moved away from our old neighborhoods, we did not need to struggle any more?
Wrong!
We need to wake up, look around and get back to work. There is more to do, and though we may not get there with them, we need to educate our children (a job that should not be left entirely up to the schools) and point them in the right direction, toward the promised land, which we may already be standing on now without even knowing it.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 1 2003 |