hurtling toward Marblehead

"And, should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation." 
-- President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, in his voting-rights address to a joint session of Congress

Reading some in Robert Dallek's LBJ bio, I was thinking I wished I had drawn out more details from my dad, when he was living, about what it was like to travel to (Alabama?  Mississippi?...some place in the South) and help get people registered to vote.  He went, for a few days, one time -- on a bus, with other people.  (Were they all ministers?  Were some of them students?  I don't know that either.                                I don't know much....)

I think when he made that trip it was the year before I was in kindergarten, so it would have been before 1965, the year that President Johnson made that speech.  A memory that remained with me was when he returned to where we lived, in Ohio, my mother drove to pick him up and I rode along in the car.  On the way home he talked about the trip and at one point he said that the bus was "hurtling" down some winding road. 

From the back seat I asked, "What is hurtling?"

Can't recall the exact explanation, but I was given to understand that hurtling meant you were going -- mmh -- lickety-split, pretty-darn-fast....

(on-line dictionary:  hurtle.  1.  to rush violently; move with great speed:  The car hurtled down the highway.)

That image -- of a fast bus -- stayed with me.  I didn't think about it in any deeper kind of way, or put it together with anything.

------------------------------------  Some people might make an argument that people from other parts of the country who were going down to the South and helping people get registered to vote were "meddling in" other people's business.   And they wouldn't be completely wrong.  After all, people from Alabama and Mississippi weren't coming to Ohio and telling us what to do.  A person can't deny that. 

(Other hand -- my dad & the other folks on the fast bus technically weren't traveling to these "destination states" to "tell anyone what to do," they were simply helping U.S. citizens who had been denied by some of the local people, their right to vote -- just helping them get signed up, was all.  They didn't go there to dictate to the local governments what to do, but only to facilitate the voting-registration of American citizens who had been systematically and cynically bullied out of their right to vote -- for a hundred years...!!  I mean, it had been a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long -- time.

As President Johnson said in the speech,

"A century has passed, more than a hundred years....")

I think the reason people like my father, and many many more, were inspired to try to help out in that situation -- well, different reasons blended together:

1.  it had been a hundred years

2.  the processes used by some of the local white people to bar black people from voting were -- demeaning to everyone involved, even -- and maybe especially -- to the people perpetrating them (!) -- "Before you can vote, you have to pass a reading test."  "Sure, I'll take a reading test."  And they'd give him something written in Chinese.  "Whoops, you can't read, so we cannot allow you to vote."  Or -- some questions to answer on 'an intelligence test,' first question -- "How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?"

(I mean, seriously:  DOWN WITH MEANNESS!!)

3.  Before President Johnson, President John F. Kennedy had inspired people to idealism, to generosity, and to high hopes and powerful efforts:  "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."  It wasn't as if people just ran around, like maniacs, looking for wildly idealistic things to do to "help others" as some cynics referred to "the do-good-ers"

[yeah?  what are YOU doing?  bad stuff?  go report yourself to the police...],

but -- when a person in that era looked at the civil rights movement, and the fact that a large number of American citizens were consistently and constantly bullied and intimidated out of their right to vote, the person could say, "There's something to help out with, because that is bullshit."

4.  The assassination:  I think Pres. Kennedy inspired feelings of pride in America & wanting to contribute, if possible, to improvements, & righting wrongs -- and then after he was murdered -- some of the shock and grief and anger that people felt maybe got channeled into even stronger feelings of idealism, and tendencies toward activism.
And 5. 

It had been a hundred years.

---------------------------  In the Dallek book, the paragraph about the minister from Boston -- "...local whites the next day....beat up the Reverend James Reeb, a white minister from Boston, who died in a Birmingham hospital the following night" -- made me wonder about a couple of things....

I wondered if my mother might have wished that my father wouldn't "get involved" in such a venture, because of that type of danger, and I wondered why my dad wasn't -- more cautious.  (I mean, are ya doin' something foolish, here?  are ya crazy...?)
But then thought, he grew up during the Depression and survived that -- and served in the Army, overseas, in World War II -- and after experiences like that, I think he probably just did not feel, on a deep level, that any of his fellow Americans were going to -- beat him to death -- anytime soon.

I think when people go to war, they know the risks, and they see some bad stuff, and then develop to an emotional and psychological "place" where they are less afraid of things, in general.  They become more Tough.  (Some people think being "tough" means being "tough on" other people -- or being obnoxious toward them, but I think of a "tough" person as a person who is less afraid of stuff, & makes judicious decisions and has good priorities....)

And as I thought about the Boston minister who died, and then remembered the fast bus "hurtling"...down the road,
had new thought:

maybe
that's Why
the bus --

was Hurtling!...Hello?!

As people in Massachusetts like to say, "Light dawns on Marblehead"....

-30-