Today, when I see how far we have progressed in terms of school integration, in some instances I am pleased. In other areas I am very angry. Why have we not devised a workable plan for solving a problem that has so long plagued this nation? We put a man on the moon because we committed the resources to do so. Today, thirty-six years after the Central High crisis, school integration is still not a reality, and we use children as tender warriors on the battlefield to achieve racial equality.
IT would take years of sorting out my Central High experience before the pieces of my life puzzle would come together and I could make sense of what happened to me.
In 1962, when I had attended the mostly white San Francisco State University for two years, I found myself living among an enclave of students where I was the only person of color. I was doing it again, integrating a previously all-white residence house, even though I had other options. I had been taken there as a guest, and someone said the only blacks allowed there were the cooks. So, of course, I made application and donned my warrior garb because it reminded me of the forbidden fences of segregation in Little Rock.
One night, a brown-haired soldier wearing olive-drab fatigues stepped across the threshold of my suite. His name was John, and he was a blind date for Mary, my roommate. Of course, for just an instant, he reminded me of my 101st guard—same stature, same uniform. When he tried to talk to me that evening, I ignored him. But the next morning, Saturday, he rang our doorbell. When I told him that Mary had already left, John said never mind, he’d really come back to see me.
He brought me strawberries in dead of winter and flowers every weekend. Six months later I had married this bright, kind, green-eyed martial arts expert, who said he would protect me forever. Later I would come to understand that he represented Danny, my 101st guard; Link, my protector; the power of those who held sway over me at Central High; and the safety that my black uncles and father could not provide in the South.
“If you can’t beat them, you’re going to join them,” my mother said when I nervously announced my wedding from a phone booth in Reno. “I hope you’ve thought this over, young lady. It’s not the racial difference, it’s the philosophical difference that is most important.”
Seven years later John and I split up because he had been a farm boy who wanted a wife to putter about the house and have babies. I wanted to be a news reporter. But he had by then shared with me the most wonderful event in my life, the birth of our daughter, Kellie. As I held the cinnamon-colored bundle with auburn hair and doelike eyes in my arms, I swore she would never have to endure the racial prejudices I endured. I was wrong. But then that’s a story for another book.
Until my marriage, I had been hearing from my old friend Link, living in faraway places as he piled up awards and degrees from this country’s most prestigious educational institutions. He was livid about my marriage, saying I’d all along told him we couldn’t date because he was white, and now look what I’d gone and done. I never heard from him again. Still, I think of him as a hero, yet another one of those special gifts from God sent to ferry me over a rough spot in my life’s path.
INDEED, I followed my dream, inspired by those journalists I met during the integration. I attended Columbia University’s School of Journalism and became a news reporter. I always remembered it was the truth told by those reporters who came to Little Rock that kept me alive. Later as an NBC television reporter, covering stories of riot and protest, I would take special care to look into those unexposed corners where otherwise invisible people are forced to hide as their truth is ignored.
I look back on my Little Rock integration experience as ultimately a positive force that shaped the course of my life. As Grandma India promised, it taught me to have courage and patience.
Some observers have said that its negative impact may have been that it forced me to live my life as a marginal woman, in two worlds—white and black—by virtue of my early experience with the McCabes and my marriage. But I see that as a distinct advantage, for it has allowed me to know for certain that we are all one.
If my Central High School experience taught me one lesson, it is that we are not separate. The effort to separate ourselves whether by race, creed, color, religion, or status is as costly to the separator as to those who would be separated.
When the milk in Oregon is tainted by the radiation eruption of a Soviet nuclear reactor, we are forced to see our interdependence. When forgotten people feel compelled to riot in Los Angeles, we share their pain through our TV screens, and their ravages impact our emotional and economic health.
The task that remains is to cope with our interdependence—to see ourselves reflected in every other human being and to respect and honor our differences.
* * *
Namasté
(the God in me sees and honors the God in you)
Warriors Don't Cry Page 34
