Looking at photos from 60 years ago, it's so easy to tell the good people from the bad people.
The bad people are the ones screaming at children, the ones who are trying to hold back the inevitable. The bad people are the ones afraid of what is coming, who see their way of life--whatever that means--threatened by the idea of black boys and girls sitting shoulder to shoulder with white boys and girls in public school classrooms.
We are so much better than those bad people. None of us would have been with them had we been there in those days long ago. All of us would have stood up for the children, who only wanted to go to school and learn and be accorded the dignity to which all human beings are entitled. We shake our heads and wonder how those people in those Will Counts photographs could have been so hateful and so wrong.
Maybe you know some of those people, who have been judged by history. Some of them are still alive, some of them are parents and grandparents. No doubt their children and grandchildren love them, and even make allowances for the way they were. No doubt they would take exception to the idea that Meemaw and Pawpaw are bad people, they might make a nuanced case that they were just people of their time, and that while their fears were unfounded they were very real. And there were committees and political figures telling them they were being threatened.
They were just ordinary people. They were ignorant and misused by people in authority who should have known better. They weren't bad. They loved and were loved; they were much more than the grainy bigots they present as in those old photographs. They evolved. Some of them regretted. Some of them atoned.
History doesn't care about that. History is through with them, history has moved on. They can rehabilitate themselves on their own time if it matters to them. But the book is closed on them.
I get it. None of us would like to be judged by whatever standards will exist 60 years hence. But like the people of 60 years ago, we live in interesting times. We are living in a time when it seems incumbent to declare ourselves; to make certain decisions.
I don't presume to tell you what to do. But I think most of us know right from wrong and that it is weak to allow fear to drive our choices. Most of us know that the right thing is very seldom the easy thing and almost never the most convenient thing. We don't need a court decision or a commissioned study to guide us. We know in our bones.
In some circles it is fashionable to disbelieve in any Darwinism but the economic kind; to hold the poor and powerless accountable for their own sorry condition. It is fashionable to say that there are absolutes in the world and that relativism is for the weak of will and spirit; that things are more black and white than gray.
And, yes, some things are absolute. There are things that we will not and cannot argue about. There is moral truth, and there is evil in the world.
One of the things that is true and inarguable and absolute is that the repression of black folk is this country's great crime, the original sin that stained this nation's soul. Our transgressions are compounded because we--our ancestors--knew the extent of this evil. Make whatever excuses you will about the vagaries of the old ways, but Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee and the ancient Greeks knew that it was wrong to treat human beings as chattel, just as the Theodore Bilbos and the Bull Connors and the George Wallaces and the Orval Faubuses knew that their various acts of obstruction were evil.
Just as the mean hearts and the petty sneaks, the cheats and the advantage takers comprehend the full measure of their transgressions, the slave masters and the lynch mobbers and the White Citizens Council members knew exactly what they were doing. They knew that it was worse than wrong, but the person who will let qualms of conscience interfere with physical comfort is rare. We humans are the only lucky creatures who can apprehend the rightness or wrongness of the things we do. To be human is to know sin, to taste it--and sometimes to relish it.
All Americans are haunted by race, and we shall not be released from this curse until the worst nightmares of those White Citizens Councils come to fruition. It is possible that someday not too far hence the old shame might be dissolved by miscegenation, that the mongrelization of these disparate "races" might produce a new kind of American, unhyphenated yet alert to history; an alloy of two or three or six cultures, unimpeded by ancient wounds and unafraid of people who look or talk differently. Maybe. I know that is optimistic.
History does not inevitably bend toward the better; history has no agency of its own. It is entirely possible that bad people will win the right to write the histories of the future.
Sixty years after Central High, things are better now than they were then. But there is no assurance that things will be better 60 years from now. That depends on what we do, not what we know in our hearts. America has always been more an ideal than a nation; unless we endeavor to enact our noble principles--to actually extend liberty and hope to those who look to us and our example--we betray it. We are not so good as we pretend.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 09/10/2017