Neighbors
The post war civil rights movement was well on its way before it swam into my consciousness. I was eight when Brown V The Board of Education was given, nine during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and 10 when Eisenhower signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act. TV news shows of the time only took up fifteen minutes, and I never once heard the opinion of my parents on the matter, and if I did it certainly wasn’t in the negative. So, I was on my own with my missal and the gospels when the sit-in happened at the Woolworth Store in 1960 during my freshman year in high school at the seminary.
First of all, I didn’t really understand why blacks couldn’t eat at the Woolworth store in the first place. And secondly, the behavior of the people trying to stop them really seemed inappropriate. Why? Because of these three gospels: Love thy neighbor (Matt 22:34-40), The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), and the Woman at the well (John 4:5-30). The first, said fairly plainly to love your neighbor and there weren’t any exceptions carved out, and the second two were parables about people Jesus considered his neighbor and they were people his contemporaries considered to be lesser folk. The parables seemed to fit the current situation I was viewing.
Although, I’m not sure I was that academic about it at the time. I’ve always had a fair amount of that weird trait called empathy. I could feel sorry for people and understand where they were coming from, and my mother always said you could catch more flies with a spoonful of honey than you could with a barrel full of vinegar. So, it just seemed fair that we might want to listen to when those people at the counter were trying to tell us how they felt about their lives in the good old USA.
Part 12, Living in America, An Old Man’s Journey into His Past