It's a highlight of my year: a visit to Governor's School at Hendrix College in Conway. That summer program brings together promising young people from every corner of the state during the summer between their junior and senior years in high school. It's an occasion to anticipate the whole year long, then enjoy, and most important of all, to learn from. I always leave refreshed, cheered, buoyed. There's hope after all!
It is the great indulgence of the old to lecture the young, and it is the great kindness of the young to pretend to listen. It is a curious experience to be a guest speaker anywhere, but especially here at this annual school, camp session, and general kumsitz for Arkansas' best and brightest young people--or most interesting, anyway. They're here not because their grades are necessarily the best, but because they seem to be the most interested in things intellectual, artistic, scientific or all of the above, which is what makes them the most interesting.
Here's how being a guest speaker works: You listen to the glowing introduction, then settle back to hear what so august a personage has to say, and then it hits you--You're on! Surprise: That's you who was being introduced.
There's nothing to inspire a little overdue humility--even in a full-time opinionator and therefore egoist--like looking out at an auditorium of several hundred bright young people. Which means they're bound to be judgmental young people. They can't help it, being both intelligent and probing. Though they're much too polite to show it.
That's something else I've noticed about the kids at Governor's School over the years. They're invariably well-mannered. Maybe it's just because they're Southern, or maybe, I'd like to think, it's because they've already discovered that good manners are the best lubricant when it comes to intellectual intercourse. Powerful thing, good manners. They may even induce a minimal humility in us know-it-all types.
This year I had a hopeful theme to elaborate on. Because this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, perhaps the most influential Civil Rights Act in the long succession of them that marked this country's slow ascent out of a history of first slavery, then racial segregation. It's an anniversary worth noting. It deserves more than noting; it's worth celebrating. And, more to the point, its passage half a century ago set an example worth following today.
Lest we forget in all the to-do over how far we've come, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed only after the assassination of an American president, John F. Kennedy, that shocked the nation--and brought home the fragility of American institutions we had long taken for granted, not just law and order but the stability of the whole system.
It would also show that in the end Americans of good will, whatever our party or politics, could still unite to do the right thing. In its own way, the act was a memorial to the slain president.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a legislative vehicle with a lot of moving parts. It contained a long list of reforms, as if America had finally gotten around to cleaning out the gathering collection of skeletons in our national closet. Perhaps its most influential section was the one that gave all Americans equal access to public accommodations--places like hotels, hospitals, schools, restaurants, theaters . . . you name it. Whether they were private businesses or public institutions.
Even more impressive, for those of us who lived through those days, the new law was accepted immediately and with no significant resistance. Which was remarkable in the days when Arkansas--and other Southern states--had politicians like Orval E. Faubus and J. William Fulbright, the kind of opportunists who'd made something of a career of massive resistance to simple justice. Simple justice long delayed.
I remember driving up to Columbia, Mo., when I was going to the University of Missouri's school of journalism, and stopping at a filling station up around the Arkansas border. A black family--in those days we'd say a colored family--pulled in behind me to get some gas for their car and use the bathroom. No, said the attendant, we'll sell you the gas but you can't use the restrooms. Those are reserved for white customers.
The sight enraged me. I yanked the hose away from the car and told the man I didn't want a drop more of his damned gasoline. When you're young, you still have the keen sense of justice most of us do as children, before we've learned to avert our eyes and accept its opposite. I'd like to think the kids at Governor's School still have that innate sense of what's right and what's wrong. And won't let the world and the years grind them down.
Nowadays, I'm keenly aware of what's politely called "the indignities of old age," which is part of a natural process to which all mortals are subject. But the indignity I witnessed that day so long ago was purely artificial, man-made, completely unnecessary--and completely infuriating. Those little kids, cooped up in the family car for a long trip, just needed a restroom--but old Jim Crow wouldn't let them use one, and I'm glad this generation of Americans doesn't have to put up with that kind of . . . thing any more.
There were still some giants in the earth back then, and in Washington. There was Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic president and before that masterful leader of the U.S. Senate, who pushed that Civil Rights Act into law. And there was another master of the Senate, old Everett Dirksen, the grandiloquent orator from the Great State of Illinois and Land of Lincoln.
In his time, Senator Dirksen was known as the Wizard of Ooze for his love of wordplay and his basso profundo delivery. He always sounded as if he had a very sore throat. The senator took one look at the laundry list of reforms included in this one civil rights act and declared it an attempt "to unscrew the inscrutable."
And yet the bill passed.
You have to wonder if the country could unite now as it did then in bipartisan unity, and support a cause that had nothing going for it except that it was the right thing to do. And the only course that could preserve a decent peace.
Could we today tackle the long-ignored need for a complete reform of our broken immigration system? Or the need to keep this country actively engaged in the world instead of yielding to our old isolationist impulses? And indulging in the happy delusion that the world's troubles will never affect us here in our safe continental sanctuary. Despite what we should have learned again and again--from December 7, 1941, to September 11, 2001.
I'd like to think these bright young kids at Governor's School--and their generation--know better. And will do better than their elders. Which is another reason to wish each and every one of them Godspeed.
Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at:
pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com
Editorial on 07/13/2014