Greetings all! For two years I've been waging a struggle against the big "C' - Fifty years ago this fall, I became part of another struggle: the struggle for full Civil Rights for African Americans in the states that continued to enforce legal segregation: the separation of people by skin color in public places.
The year was 1962. It was a balmy fall day in Durham, North Carolina, when I agreed to go with a friend of mine at Duke University in Durham North Carolina to a meeting across town to hear about some demonstrations planned for that town. With my friend Ginny Erickson, I took the bus to North Carollina College - a local state school for African Americans. The meeting was planned by CORE, the Congress for Racial Equality.
I had never met an African American college student. I only had limited knowledge of the Civil Rights movement, being the protected middle class white girl I was, but I was eager to understand. The year before I had begun asking why our Presbyterian Church didn't allow black members. My parents were New England born and bred, but their lives had been as segregated from African Americans as any Southerner. They had moved South when I was years old, and easily embraced the Southern way of life, including legal segregation. They said things like: the South used to allow black slaves- it takes a long time for people to change. They never allowed perjorative language against anyone in our house. But it's not what you say, it's what you do. I continued to be involved in social change activism, and it took many years to convince my parents that my activism actually grew from the values they introduced through both religion and family.
Returning to my initial experience, I had been in a political science class with Ginny Erickson, a young woman already passionate about being active with Civil Rights efforts. She asked me to come to the meetings, and my life was never the same. Through the years, I have continued in my own small way as an adult educator and community organizer to uphold the goals of the Civil Rights movement - to join in social action efforts concerning rights for all, anti poverty efforts, and access to education.
I will add, in this long post, that I am currently also getting involved in activism for cancer care: access for all, including those without insurance, and protests of the control held by the profit motivated pharmaceutical companies who control experimental trials for new treatments. The 1% has all the access to care they want: the rest of us struggle with the iron fist of insurance.
Currently our so called "democratic" system is being threatened by the control of process by those with extreme money and power. To the 1%, the most needy are expendable, and should be silenced by the "crumbs" offered through our broken social welfare system. Those of us in the "middle" are being squeezed, pushed down by those who want to maintain access to obscene profits, even at the expense of most of us.
So this is a book length post - but MLK day certainly got me thinking. As I have pondered the possible limitations on my future by the big "C", I have realized how fortunate I am to have been able to do my own small part in efforts to gain full humanity for all. xx
