Sometimes, when I wake up in the morning and put my feet on the floor, I feel something invisible tugging or pulling me back to sit next to Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin in the back of the bus; pulling me back to drink water out of the “colored/white” water fountain; pulling me back to the theater where the black folks sat in the balcony while the white kids sat down below; pulling me back to that inferior elementary school. Fortunately that invisible force is only a remnant of an errant dream.
To live out our elders’ prophecy about race, we tried as best we could to use love as our weapon. For we know that there is only one race — the human race. We knew that the only way one race could claim superiority was to keep another race down and mired in inferiority.
When discussions about race are not put on the table for us to debate and opine about, we are asking for trouble. We, as American people, don’t need things to divide, anger or inflame us. The same name-calling or hurling of racial epithets by pundits, columnists or talking heads are the same divisive words used by our schoolchildren with increasing frequency.
Most of us spend our entire lives with friends of all colors. We’ve worked together, played together, sometimes worshipped together, coached together, shopped together and lived together. Our children have played together since Pee Wee football or Knothole baseball.
Yet we sometimes listen to demons of division whose job it is to pit us against one another by raising the ugly spectre of race. We’re spending too much time reacting to racial “nabobs of negativity.” It’s easy to stir stuff up, but hell to quell it when it flares up.
I’m reminded of an incident which occurred many years ago in Detroit. The Ku Klux Klan had gotten a permit from the city to hold a rally on the courthouse steps.
The Klan leader spoke to a large congregation of black and white protesters and to a small line of police officers. After Klan members had finished their hate speech, it was time for them to leave the stage.
Suddenly, the angry crowd broke through the police protection and headed for the Klansmen on the run. Somehow, an isolated Klansman tripped and fell. Some black guys surrounded the Klansman and began to kick and strike him.
As quickly as the pummeling began, a black woman came out of nowhere and threw her body across a badly beaten Klansman. She literally saved his life. She so loved her Higher Power that she risked her own life. (Word has it that the Klansman renounced his membership and accepted minorities as equals.)
Now is the time for us to come together and love one another, regardless of race, color, creed, religious affiliation, gender preference or handicapping condition. Love makes us better, rather than bitter.
Now that I have become one of the elders, I hope that my granddaughters will live in a world where racial strife will not exist.
Elmon W. Prier is a veteran educator and minister. His e-mail address is eprier@cinci.rr.com.