BARACK OBAMA, JUDITH WARNER, EXPLAINING HISTORY TO KIDS: MRS. HAMER AND JACKIE ROBINSON

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A dear friend sent me this New York Time column by the sometimes controversial Judith Warner.  In it, Warner muses about the cosmic change we all know came last Tuesday, and her young daughters’ seeming inability to understand the magnitude of what has happened.

“Look,” we said, pointing to the headline “Racial Barrier Falls.” “This is huge.”

We labored to make them understand that their world — art that day,
and orchestra, and Baked Potato Bar at lunch — had irrevocably changed.

But how can you understand change when you’ve only known one way of being?

They were happy because we were happy. They rose to the occasion in
that bemused way children do when adults tell them what they should
feel. They were glad to be rid of George W. Bush and to be saved – for
now – from the specter of Sarah Palin.

Of course one of the reasons for this is that, for younger people, unless they’re well-briefed, it is less of an earthquake.  They know we believe that they are part of something wonderful, but they don’t know as viscerally as we do the terribleness that came before.  It was easier, 30 years ago, with my own children.  They went to a pretty progressive elementary school where Martin Luther King Day was a cornerstone of the winter curriculum.  In the first grade they learned about the kid across the street who wouldn’t play with him, and of the pain that caused.  They watched Eyes on the Prize more than once in class.  When we settled on annual giving, their vote was for the United Negro College Fund.  Their babysitter told them stories about not being able to go into Virginia smoke shops to buy a candy bar, about the scary cruelty that was her childhood.  It came from someone they knew.  It wasn’t history, it was their friend’s life.

But they’re a generation or more older than Warner’s girls and, growing up in Manhattan they knew more, and heard more, from people for whom it was more immediate.  There are fewer of those people now, as Selma and Montgomery fade farther into history.   It will take more work, more commitment by schools as well as parents, to help these small people understand what has happened.  Work worth doing though, I think.

As I’ve thought about this, I’ve recalled that my parents never completely described to me the impact of the Depression on their lives.  They were, I later learned, enormously affected but there really wasn’t a way to explain it – at least for them.  They had suffered too much.  It drove me to study Depression history in college, when much of what I’d wondered about became clear.   That was a sad landmark instead of a proud one, but it’s also about troubled experiences difficult to communicate.  A challenge either met or avoided.

I agree that one way to help younger people understand the wonder of what has happened is just as Warner described it.  Let them be “happy because we’re happy.” Explain as best we can.  Personally though, I’m not against a little indoctrination: the story of Dr. King’s lost playmate, or Jackie Robinson or Fannie Lou Hamer or Rosa Parks (there’s a kids’ song “When Rosa Parks Sat Down, the Whole World Stood Up”) or Charlayne Hunter-Gault.  And the question I used so often:  “How do you think you would feel if that happened to you?”  From the known to the unknown, the familiar to the unfamiliar, just like any other lesson.  Allow the natural compassion of a loving child to emerge, and their sense of justice and wonder will not be far behind.

CAROLYN GOODMAN, WITH GRATITUDE

 

Ben Chaney stood to the side
watching mourners fill a grave with the New York soil that gave Carolyn
Goodman her eternal blanket.

It is Jewish custom for family and friends to bury the dead
themselves, instead of leaving the task to hired hands. In life, Dr.
Goodman was hardly an observant Jew. But on Sunday at Mount Judah
Cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens, she exited this world in traditional
style.

Ben Chaney was there to say farewell. “God put his angels here at
the right moment,” he said as clumps of earth thudded across the plain
pine coffin.

The “angels” were his mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, and Carolyn
Goodman, women whose lives might never have converged had it not been
for a brutal June night in 1964 in Neshoba County in Mississippi.
Each lost a son that night. James Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman, 20,
disappeared, along with Michael Schwerner, 24. Six weeks later, their
bullet-scarred bodies were found in an earthen dam.

The three civil rights workers.

That’s how they came to be linked for eternity — two white boys from
New York, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Schwerner, and a black kid from
Mississippi, killed for daring to affirm the right of black
Mississippians to vote freely. That right was not universally accepted
in the “freedom summer” of 1964. The deaths of the young men at the
hands of Ku Klux Klan members proved a pivotal moment for the civil rights movement.

Now, life has run its unrelenting course for their parents. Mr.
Schwerner’s mother and father died years ago. Fannie Lee Chaney died in
May at 84. On Friday, time ran out for Carolyn Goodman. She was 91.

“It’s been a rough summer,” said Ben Chaney, who was 12 when his big brother, James, was murdered.

Yes, he repeated: “God put his angels here. They carried a hell of a
burden for a long time. A hell of a burden — knowing that your sons
were murdered and the murderers were out on the streets going free.”

Seven Klan members, convicted of federal civil rights violations,
served but a few years in prison. Decades later, in 2005, an eighth
man, Edgar Ray Killen, was found guilty of manslaughter by a state jury
in Mississippi, and is serving a 60-year term.

“Strong women,” Mr. Chaney said. “They were able to endure, and
continued to have faith. They never lost faith. My mother didn’t, and
neither did Carolyn.”

Dr. Goodman, a clinical psychologist who lived on the Upper West
Side, did many things in her long life. With politics that fell
decidedly leftward, she had taken on liberal causes well before Andrew,
the second of her three sons, was killed. But perhaps inevitably, it is
as Andrew’s mother, a civil rights symbol, that many know her.

There she lay on Sunday, beside her first husband, Robert Goodman,
and in front of a long, swooping headstone marking Andrew’s grave.
Robert Goodman, a civil engineer, died five years after his son’s
murder.

“Everybody says Bobby died of a broken heart,” said Judith Johnson, a family friend.

On Andrew’s headstone, three sets of arms reach toward one another,
above words borrowed from a Stephen Spender poem: “He traveled a short
while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with his honor.”

MANY of the 65 people who stood over Dr. Goodman’s grave took turns
remembering her. She was caring but tough, they said. She would hear
out opponents, they said, but not hesitate to speak her mind.

Jane Mark, a relative, told of getting a phone call from Dr. Goodman
in 1999, during the protests and mass arrests over the police killing
of the unarmed Amadou Diallo. “Jane, we’re going to get arrested tomorrow,” Ms. Mark recalled Dr. Goodman as saying.

“On the spur of the moment, she could decide to get arrested,” Ms. Mark said. “But she wanted to have friends with her.”

Stanley Dearman, a former editor and publisher of The Neshoba
Democrat, a Mississippi newspaper that called for justice in the
murders, said Dr. Goodman felt no hatred for the killers. “She was too
fine a person for that,” he said. That point was reinforced by Kalman
Goodman, a grandson of Dr. Goodman.

One day, a man who spoke in a Southern accent went to her apartment
and said he had played a role in Andrew Goodman’s death. He was now
asking for forgiveness.

His grandmother, Mr. Goodman said, told the man: “If you want my
forgiveness, work in your community and help other people. That way
lies forgiveness.”

As far as he knows, the grandson said, the man went home and did just that.

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