Change

I was 17 when I moved from the mountains of W. Pa to Atlanta in l961 I had been taught in school that blacks were separate but equal.

Within the first month, I hired Maggie Thompson, a 67 year old, illiterate, (but I didn’t know it at the time), black woman to care for my disabled son so I could go back to school. Maggie, it turned out, would be my first teacher, and the catalyst for my becoming an activist in the civil rights movement.

One afternoon I was walking to my car when someone yelled out the window of an apartment behind me. “ Tell your nigger to stop washing her clothes in the shared apartment washing machines.” I stopped and turned around. I couldn’t see who it was, only a blurred face behind a dark screen, 

"Perhaps you haven’t heard of the civil war, but Maggie is a free human being. She works for me, and can wash her clothes wherever she wants. And, btw, you will never in your life have as much class as Maggie.” As I got into my car, she yelled, “Go home Yankee bitch.”

I told my government teacher about the incident. He filled me in on the realistic, dismal facts of how oppressed negros were in every area: education, jobs, medical care, housing… 

The following year when I started college, I volunteered with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I, along with another white woman and our new black friends, stuffed envelopes, made calls, and printed flyers encouraging people to vote. She and I stayed inside and invisible, because it seemed the police and Southern bigoted people hated whites who hung out with blacks more than they hated the blacks. We were traitors-referred to as nigger lovers.  

However, as the civil rights movement gained momentum across the south, I became overtly active. One afternoon, about 10 of us protested the Pickrick restaurant of Lester Maddox, a rabid segregationist who used ax handles to run off any blacks that came close to the restaurant. That day, I watched in horror as one of the protesters was bludgeoned and suffered serious injuries.  Eventually Maddox shut down the restaurant rather than serve black people. In l966 he became governor of GA.

My first march was in l964 or 65.  Thousands of protesters, all hues and religions, walked down Spring Street to the capitol. Full on riot police, just itching for someone to make a false move, lined our route. I held hands with my black friend, Hosea Sowell, a student at Morehouse College, singing We Shall Overcome, tears streaming down my face

But, because of public pressure from the sheer volume of people who vowed to vote, led by passionate leaders such as Dr. King, Andrew Young, and John Lewis, President Kennedy called for a civil rights act. When he was killed the following year, Lyndon Johnson signed it into law. Change happened because we the people made it happen.

Later in the 60s, remarried after a divorce, I was in Long Beach with my husband, a chemical engineer newly graduated from GA Tech, now an Ensign in the Navy. I had returned to college, and  joined Another Mother for Peace/ Mothers against the Viet Nam war in solidarity with mostly college students across the country. Before it ended, I would march several times, and land in jail briefly, but it worked. We the people prevailed again.

In the early 70s, I asked myself “Why weren’t women equal to men in every way?” I didn’t burn my bra, but I joined thousands of others to demand laws be changed to give women equality with men. Changes were made, but not enough.    

Suddenly, I’m marching again—for dreamers and women’s rights, and with students who are afraid to go to school because our congress has been bought off by the NRA. Like my ill-informed high school teacher, the politicians representing us are lying to us, but we can change them. I’ve seen it happen.