COMMENTARY
Dark Curtain of Racism Sometimes Opens to the Light
- By Cynthia Tucker
- Atlanta Journal-Constitution
- November 7, 2005
When Condoleezza Rice took the field on Oct. 22 at Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, the crowd greeted her as if she were the school's most recent Heisman Trophy winner -- conquering hero and pride of Alabama. She was not the first black person to step onto the University of Alabama's football field to so enthusiastic a greeting, but she is the first who has never worn a helmet and shoulder pads.
Had I not witnessed the moment myself -- in all its magic and wonder -- I could not have imagined it. An Alabama native, I am old enough to remember that even star black athletes were not always treated kindly on the South's storied playing fields.
Indeed, the secretary of state's appearance at the Alabama-Tennessee game was just one in a series of recent events that have thrown me slightly off stride, as if the Earth has tilted ever so slightly and my social compass has begun to spin. Just over a week after Rice's triumphant stride onto the field for the ceremonial coin toss, civil rights heroine Rosa Parks lay in a place of honor in the rotunda of the nation's Capitol.
The news media played it as if it were a routine turn of history -- a natural outgrowth of a civil rights movement that overturned the cultural status quo -- but there is nothing "natural" about Parks' elevation to civic sainthood. Nor is there anything routine about Rice's ascension to secretary of state a mere 42 years after four little girls were blown up at church, in Rice's hometown of Birmingham, for the sin of skin color.
This is a staggering development, akin to a dimensional shift -- like stepping into one of those parallel universes so popular in science fiction. Perhaps you have to step back in time a bit to catch up to the marvel of the present.
My musings over the miracles of our time started with the death last month of another civil rights heroine, Vivian Malone Jones. It was Jones (then Malone) and fellow black student James Hood who prompted George Wallace's infamous stand in the schoolhouse door, where he denounced "the unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted and force-induced intrusion upon the campus of the University of Alabama." The year was 1963, and I was attending a segregated elementary school in Alabama. So was Rice.
She was a closer witness to history than I, since a playmate of hers was among the victims of the Birmingham bombing. But our childhoods are characterized by this similarity: Her schoolteacher parents, like mine, did everything possible to raise her sights above the limits of segregation and to shield her from its everyday degradations.
Even so, our parents could not protect us from all the humiliations of Jim Crow. I remember whites-only waiting rooms, water fountains and toilets. I remember when my parents, both of whom had graduate degrees, earned less than their white counterparts. And I remember when black passengers were routinely ordered to the back of the bus. Taking a commercial bus line through Hayneville, Ala., notorious for its bigotry back then, my mother and her 4-year-old (me) were ordered to move to the rear to make room for white passengers. I refused -- not because of the injustice of the demand, to which I was oblivious, but because I liked the seat. My mother, all the more terrified because of her obstinate, protesting preschooler, dragged me to the back.
When Mrs. Parks refused to yield her seat that December day in 1955, she was regarded by local authorities as an outlaw. She was arrested. And there was no national outpouring of sympathy. President Eisenhower refused to make a strong public stand against segregation, and J. Edgar Hoover had already begun a campaign to smear civil rights activists as godless communists.
Yet, last week, countless Washington notables came to bid Parks farewell. It was hard not to notice the layers of irony: Among those dignitaries was Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, hailed by hard-core conservatives as a jurist contemptuous of the sort of judicial "activism" that gave Parks full citizenship. Without federal judges who were courageous and farsighted, after all, Rice and I might still be sitting in the back of the bus.
I am not naive enough to believe that racism is dead, the nation is colorblind, or that Rice could be elected president, as some have claimed. Just the other day, I received a reader e-mail stunning in its crude bigotry. It ended with the male correspondent's assertion of a black woman's proper place: "I have floors that need to be mopped," he said, before descending into obscenity.
Still, there are those moments when, if you stand at just the right place and the light falls at just the right angle, you can see the faintest outlines of the beloved community of which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke. This is such a moment.
Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She can be reached by e-mail: cynthia@ajc.com.
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