So after a very emotional and heartfelt conversation with my friend tonight - i felt that this piece written by my mother deserved revisiting. This is a message that still 4 years later brought tears to my eyes as we are what the future learns from. I as a parent am a teacher - a guide - a navigator and it is my job to teach, guide and navigate my child in apositive direction. As she brought to my attention tonight the simplest yet the most true of all philosophies - one I think that we tend to forget. "Be the change you wish to see in the world." - Ghandi.
She brought this to my attention as it hangs on our refrigerator as a magnet. I walk past it each and every day - I probably look at it without really seeing it. However that will no longer be. I am inspired to make change. So much so that I am going to be meeting with my advisor about changing my educational path - although not entirely but steering myself differently because I believe in opportunity, EQUAL opportunity for our children to be healthy happy people. For them to change the world. They come in to life unjaded and pure and they learn the hatred that breeds in this world only because we teach them...they do not come out of the womb, hating someone because of the color of their skin, because of their religious beliefs, because of their sexual preference. They learn these things because we teach them. They know not that they are different because their family makes less or more money than the baby in the nursery next to them. And why should they be denied opportunity for a fantastic life, for their dreams, for health care for any of these reasons. they shouldn't. I don't care what you might say in opposition, because there is nothing to say...children are the future and to deny any one a chance to achieve their dreams is foolish.
So please read this old note - from 2007...this message still rings as true today as it did then, as it did yesterday and as it will tomorrow and every day to come.
So be brave, be courageous and fight to make a difference in the future of humanity.
The first part of this was written by my mother this morning who attended a Celebration at my daughters school "Together We Can Make a Difference" it was so touching I wanted to share it and the Oregonian acticle referenced in it.....
So Please Friends Read it!!!
This morning I attended the Human Rights day celebration at Irvington Elementary where my granddaughter attends kindergarten. Irvington is a very racially and ethnically mixed school.
The theme of today's program was about working together. The children made posters to decorate the gymnasium, which also serves as the auditorium,and they sang and performed for a packed audience of parents, grandparents, friends and siblings. These children work and play together daily. When my granddaughter talks about her friends from school I have no idea about their ethnicity or race and most importantly neither does she. She has a crush on an African American boy, and there is a white girl who is mean to her and hurts her feelings. I know this because I have met these children, and sadly, I notice these things about them - she doesn't. For her this simply isn't part of the equation or her thinking. It quite simply does not matter. I am grateful for this; for at least in this tiny pocket, these small children are learning that if they work together they will create change, a better world. I am encouraged and ennobled by them; they are model of inclusivity, because for them as Martin Luther King Jr said so eloquently, whatever judgments they make about each other are not because of "the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
And for today, their parents and grandparents and friends came together in the same way. I don't know what was going through their heads or in their hearts, but I do know that they all clapped just as loudly for the African American boy who sang a solo as for the white girl. Today they came to simply honor these children, all of them equally, as sang for peace and liberty and joy and a cleaner planet. Let us hope that as these children grow into adulthood that they will continue to simply see each other as human beings. Perhaps they will be the generation that Steve Duin describes in the last sentence. I certainly hope so, but then that is up to us, isn't it?
The struggle to "get over" slavery
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Last week, a Virginia legislator named Frank Hargrove rose to denounce a bill that called for a state apology to the descendents of slaves. The 79-year-old Republican -- he turns 80 Friday -- insisted that since slavery ended more than 140 years ago, "our black citizens should get over it."
I emphasize Hargrove's age for a reason that has nothing to do with his candidacy for senility. Although he was not around for the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865, the "official" end of slavery in this country, he turned 3 in 1930, a year in which at least 20 "black citizens" were lynched or put to the torch.
Hargrove was a robust 31 and, presumably, better educated in 1958, when -- four years after the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education -- not a single school district in Virginia had yet been desegregated. Like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, the state of Virginia believed blacks should just "get over" the court's rejection of separate but equal.
Heck, Hargrove turned 62 in 1989, when the first National Football League owner finally conceded that an African American might be qualified to coach in a league that had been around since 1920.
Get over it? Sensitivity is a sensitive issue, and Hargrove is welcome to his own bundle of nerves. I rise to quarrel with his history and the absurd notion that the systematic oppression of blacks in this country disappeared with their chains.
The end of slavery -- and it was legal in Cuba and Brazil into the 1880s -- conveyed no advantages or equity on the former slaves. "They had no rights and protections under the law," said Darrell Millner, acting chair of the department of black studies at Portland State University. "They had no property because they had been property. They had no money because they hadn't been paid. They were still in the midst of the people who enslaved them."
And most of those Southern gentlemen met their attempts to crawl out of that hole with savage resistance. Beginning in 1890, the Southern states -- with the blessing of the Supreme Court -- began disenfranchising blacks at the voting booth with literacy tests, poll taxes and "white primaries."
The effort was so pervasive and so successful that by 1940 only 3 percent of blacks of voting age in the South were registered. Not until Freedom Summer (1963) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- when Frank Hargrove was 38 -- were blacks given reasonable access to the political process.
All the while, blacks were routinely denied job opportunities, transit and lunch-counter seats, fair trials and a decent education. By 1962 -- 97 years after the Civil War -- a mere 13,000 federal troops were needed to help enroll a black Air Force veteran, James Meredith, at the University of Mississippi.
Just who has had the tougher time getting over the end of slavery, blacks . . . or whites?
As Millner notes, Columbus requisitioned slaves for the trip back to Spain in 1492, and slaves were still crossing the Atlantic 400 years later: "It's unreasonable to expect an institution that is that pervasive and long lasting will disappear in a time period that's any shorter than the period it is operational."
Let's hope that's a particularly pessimistic view. Frank Hargrove's generation fought a lot harder to keep this country free from fascists abroad than free from court-sanctioned bigotry at home. His grandchildren's generation probably isn't all that surprised to see two black coaches in the Super Bowl.
May the next generation be just as blase about black law partners, black franchise owners and black faces on the Forbes 400.
Steve Duin: 503-221-8597; 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201
