Tigerbelle

by Wyomia Tyus

  I look around and I am not sure where that movement is going to come from, but maybe it will grow out of another movement, like women’s liberation in the seventies followed civil rights in the sixties—maybe the next movement for women’s equality will come out of #BlackLivesMatter. There was never a time when they didn’t matter, in my mind, but right now people are looking at the situation and saying enough is enough. We’re not back in slavery when people could get away with acting like Black people’s lives meant nothing

  Even if it feels sometimes like things are moving backward, you can’t give up and you can’t lose faith. You have to start the fire again, gather up all the little sparks and hope that, this time, the sparks come together—not just because Black people or women speak on it, but because everyone is speaking on it, everyone is at that point, everyone can see that the situation is totally wrong.

  Chapter 14.

  Blacks Lives Have Always Mattered

  The fight for racial justice is like the fight for women’s equality: there has been change, but that change has not been enough. And sometimes that change isn’t for the better; it’s just change. For example, when I was growing up in Griffin, you could still see people—Black and white—working on chain gangs. They would be out there at five o’clock in the morning, and my dad and mom and grandmother would draw our attention to them. “That is what happens,” they would say, “when you get in trouble. Stay out of trouble, or you’ll get on that chain gang. You’ll get on that chain gang, and you’ll have nothing to say. You’ll be chained to someone you know nothing about. You’ll be out there working from sunup to sundown. They’ll tell you when you can have a drink of water, when you can go to the bathroom, when you can stand, and when you can sit. Only thing you’ll be able to do is what they tell you to do.”

  They used to preach that to us, and we could sit on our porch and look and see it was true. Because they were right out there on the roads—they paved the roads, they cleaned the roads, they dug the ditches, they did everything. They would work hard—when it was so hot we couldn’t even play. We would play ball or tag and games like that in the morning, but by twelve o’clock the sun was too hot, and we would sit on the porch with our board games—Monopoly, checkers, and Sorry! And if my parents were around they would look out at the people on the chain gang and say, “That’s such-and-such’s child. He did this or that. How could that boy do that?”

  We kids would look at them and think, God, I don’t ever want that to be me.

  “You better not do anything bad!” my parents would say.

  “We are never going to do anything bad!” we would tell them. “Never!” Because that was quite a visual: This is what happens to you when you do not obey the law. Of course, when I got older I also knew: You can obey the law and this can happen to you anyway. But the adults never said that part.

  That’s one of the areas where there’s been change, but not enough change—change, but not necessarily change for the better. Because now they have a lot of people locked up in prison for decades doing work in tiny cells; they’re not out on the roads anymore—at least, not where I live. That’s different. But is it better? And if you’re Black—or Latino, or from any other group of oppressed people—you can still obey the law and end up treated like a criminal, end up hurt, end up dead. So that’s some change that still needs to happen.

  There are lots of things like that. When I think back about growing up, I can also remember how my parents always wanted us to be very aware of what was going on in the world and to be very protective of ourselves and conscious of the things we said and where we were. I remember them making sure we knew that we should try not to get ourselves into situations where we were going to be harmed by anyone. I think about my brothers and how my parents always wanted to keep them secure because of all the things that would happen to Black men, especially young men, in those days. Today you might think of Tamir Rice, but back then you would think of Emmett Till, who was murdered three days after I turned ten. When people talk about the fact that Black lives matter, that’s the first thing I think about: Black lives have always mattered. That’s been from day one. Now, it has been said out loud, in the streets, so to speak, but it’s always been in my life, all my life, because my parents taught me so hard how to take care of myself—and how to stand up for myself. That is something that hasn’t changed.

  But what also hasn’t changed is that Black parents still have to teach their children that lesson. Even my son, who was born long after the Civil Rights Movement ended, had to learn that lesson. He is six feet five inches tall, and he was never a small child, so when he was seven, eight, nine, I started telling him: “You have to be aware of who you are, but you also have to be aware of what people see when they look at you.” And when he started driving, I told him: “If the police pull you over, you need to keep your hands on the wheel, you need to say ‘Yes sir’ and ‘No sir,’ and you need to say everything you’re going to do before you do it. You need to say: ‘Can I roll my window down?’ You need to say, ‘I am reaching for my wallet now.’ And you need to tell them which hand you are going to use to do it.”

  “I just can’t believe I have to do this,” my son would respond. “Why do I have to do this?”

  “To stay alive,” I’d tell him. “And it’s not just you. We all have to. All people of color have to do that.”

  One thing that I found to be true, growing up in Georgia, was that I knew when I was not welcome, where I should not go. It was quite obvious. And I could deal with that. But then I moved to California and it got to be unclear—until I realized that I still was not really welcome. At first I was taken aback by that. Before I came out west, I thought it would be different—lots of people in the South thought that. To this day, people in Griffin will say to me, “California? Oh, you could have it so free there!” And before I moved, I agreed. California’s so open, I thought. But no. It’s not. Things are just more subtle than they are in the South. Because a lot of the people in California came from the South. And moving to California didn’t necessarily change their ideas. It just meant that they were surrounded by change and maybe they had to bend a little bit.

  So whether you’re in the South or in the West, you still have to figure out who you’re going to socialize with, and you still have to have “the talk”—not that it was ever one talk; it was something we always talked about. That was a part of growing up in my family—both the family that I came from and the family I made. I talked about it with my son, and I talked about it with my daughter too. Because even though it may seem like most of the bad things happen to young Black men, plenty of bad things happen to Black women as well, and more Black women than ever are in prison these days—though they are almost never talked about—and she needed to understand that.

  As a Black person, you are aware of this danger, and I don’t feel like you can ever really let your guard down. I don’t care who you are, how much money you have, or who you hang out with, you’re still going to be viewed the way the larger society sees you, and the first thing they see is your skin color—whether people say it out loud or not. This is nothing new. I turned seventy-two in 2017, and I have lived it for all these years and lived it continuously. What’s going on now is that more people see that it’s wrong, so it’s getting a lot more press and a lot more recognition. Which is as it should be, when you think about what is happening to so many young Black people. One of the impacts of that recognition is that people feel a little better now to speak on the subject than they did years ago. Years ago, if you sat in Black people’s living rooms, you would hear pretty much what people are saying out in the streets right now. But back then, most people did not feel comfortable enough to speak out about it—I don’t know if comfortable is even the right word—safe is better. They didn’t feel safe enough to speak out about it. That’s a problem. And if only a couple of people are speaking out, they can shut them up right away, which is one reason why numbers are important—why it’s im
portant now to try to include as many people as possible in making change, just like it was in the sixties.

  It’s hard for me to talk about all the murders that have happened, but I know every day that all of that is still going on, and so are all the subtler things. When I was a naturalist at the Clear Creek Outdoor Education Center, I worked above La Cañada, a pretty much all-white community—and a very exclusive community at that. On my way to work, I would be driving on an isolated mountain road. You don’t see too many Black people up there, driving on that lonesome road, and I was always extremely aware of the fact that I was a Black woman, and that most white people who saw me would want to know why I was up there.

  And it wasn’t just on the road that people thought they needed to pay special attention to me. I remember going into a market early in the morning in that neighborhood—I would shop there before work so that when I got off work and drove out of the hills, I could just go home and cook—and it was that whole thing of people following you around the store. That kind of thing has never ended; it never stops. To me, though, one of the things that #BlackLivesMatter has accomplished or started to accomplish is working away at the people who never thought that kind of thing was true. Because there are still plenty of people who don’t believe, even now, that when I walk into a store in La Cañada—a seventy-some-year-old woman, a retired naturalist, and an Olympian—people start to follow me around.

  I have a friend, Alex, who’s white—she was one of my coworkers at Clear Creek—and one day I told her about it. “Why would they be following you around?” she asked. Not in a disbelieving way because she knows about racism and a lot of her friends are people of color. “You’re a grown woman! Let’s put it to the test.”

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s go.”

  So we go to the market, and I’m pushing my basket one way, and she’s pushing her basket another, and it takes maybe five minutes before someone comes up to me and says, “Can I help you find something?”

  My rule is always to say, “Sure! Here’s my list.” And I make sure to have three of four lists so that when the next person comes up to “help” me, I can say it again: “Sure! Here’s my list.”

  On this particular occasion, Alex and I had set a time to meet at the checkout, and when that time came, I said to her, “Did you get everything accomplished?”

  And Alex said, “Yeah, mostly. Did you?”

  “Yes!” I told her. “These three lovely people helped me out.” Because of course they were still standing there. “I didn’t have to do anything but sit around.”

  After that, Alex could say she had seen it in action. But, you know, for a lot of people, if it doesn’t happen to them, then it doesn’t happen. It’s not there. It can’t be true. Even well-intentioned people can go in that direction. They think, How could people do that? How could they still act that way? I just can’t believe it. And that can be difficult for the people who know, the people who easily see it. They can get impatient. But for me the question is: How do you bring those other people along? The ones who can’t see or don’t want to see—how do you bring them in? Because being inclusive means reaching out to all kinds of people, even people who have very different experiences. I always feel that the whole “They don’t know our pain!” argument is not a strong argument. If you’ve felt pain, then you know pain. And everyone knows pain.

  It’s not going to be the same pain—absolutely not. If you lose a kid, and I’m a person who has never lost a kid, and I hear your story, I feel, but I will probably never feel the same pain or the same sorrow that the person who has lost a kid will feel. And I wouldn’t want to take that from them. But we who are now speaking out for Black people will never know the pain of our forefathers or foremothers. Their pain was a different pain. I think back to my father and all the suffering and the labor that he had to do to get to where he was, which wasn’t far. I see that, I understand that, and I say to my children just like he said to me: “I don’t ever want you to have to work as hard as I’ve worked.” But would I stand up for my father? Can I say that what happened to the people of his generation should never have happened? And would I want my children to stand up for me? Yes I can, and yes I would.

  Not that I don’t get impatient sometimes. It shouldn’t take lives lost to bring those other people in, to have people who have never had to deal with it see that just because you’re a policeman, it doesn’t mean that you’re not a racist. And just because you’re in a position of authority, it doesn’t mean you won’t act on your racism. Racism exists. That’s just a reality in our society. I think that people—all people, people who have had the experience and people who haven’t—just have to be able to look down into themselves, deep down inside, and say, “Yes. I can see. That is racist.” It is racist to beat or tase or shoot a young Black man who is lying on the ground or has his hands up or is walking or driving or just standing there breathing. It is racist to follow a Black woman around when she is doing her grocery shopping. But if you’ve been brought up all the time to think, What I do is right; what you do is wrong, it might take longer for you to see that. How do you correct that problem? I don’t have all the answers. But people shouldn’t have to be killed to correct it.

  Sometimes I feel like we’re just going back to long before I was born, when these things were happening but weren’t getting any press. Now the tasing and shootings are getting lots of press, and some people are trying to act like it’s a big surprise. But it’s only a surprise for people who are looking for the first time. In any case, this is what’s happening, and it is something that we need to look at, that the world needs to see, not just America. It bothers me that here we are in the twenty-first century and one of the only things that’s changed is that there is more publicity.[36] Lives are still gone. People’s lives are still being taken from them. And that has to change.

  * * *

  One aspect of the movement that reminds me of the old days, of my time in the Olympic Project for Human Rights, is the football players like Colin Kaepernick who are protesting during the national anthem. It takes all different kinds to make people aware of what is going on in the world today, and anybody who has a platform should use it. Of course, a lot of people are going to say, “How could they do that? How could they sit down or kneel or whatever? That’s disrespecting the flag. It’s an insult to veterans.”

  To them I say: “Think about this: all the Black people who fought in wars and then came back home and had nothing and could do nothing—like the Tuskegee Airmen.”

  And if they come back with: “Well, those people still stood up for the flag,” I say: “Yes, they did. But did the flag stand up for them? Does this country stand up for them?”

  It didn’t, and it doesn’t. We all protest in our own way, and if the NFL players sitting through the anthem or taking a knee is going to bring awareness about what is going on in America, then I say let that be. Because of it, more people are talking about what’s happening. Of course, some people are talking about it in a way that seems straight-up crazy to me, but even that can be good: it shows us all where they stand. We get moved from California where things are fuzzy to the South where everything is clear. There are some people out there who are such lovers of the flag that they can’t bear to have anyone not worship it. But I say that no one is saying anything about not loving the flag. They’re just not loving what is happening in America, and this is a platform for the world to see, or at least for more people to see and more people to start thinking. Think about why you dislike that kind of protest. Is it really because this country is so great? Come on. And I think, too, that if it was about another cause, if it was about farm subsidies, for example, I don’t know if people would be so down on Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, or the multiple Women’s National Basketball Assioncation (WNBA) teams—including the Minnesota Lynx, the New York Liberty, the Indiana Fever, and the Phoenix Mercury—that have been in the protest from the beginning.

  * * *

  When pe
ople ask me if I think I will get to see the changes I want to see, I have to admit that I don’t. Not in my lifetime. But I have grandchildren, and I have hope for them. I feel like a whole lot is possible, a lot of change can happen. Is it ever going to be equal, with everybody sharing the same? I don’t see that. But I also like to think positive. I like to think that it could change, and I am thinking that things will change, but they will change so slowly that I won’t be around to really appreciate it. Still, you never know what will happen once someone lights a spark—like when Tommie Smith and John Carlos did their medal stand protest.

  Sometimes it takes one person, sometimes it takes a group of people to be the spark. You don’t know what will spark people, but whatever does—whatever brings people to more clear and conscious thinking and saying, “Hey, yes, this is happening, it’s not right, how can we change it, what can we do?”—then that’s a good thing. The people who are already in the know have to be tolerant and wait for and help those people who are still figuring things out—have to help those people to cross the finish line too. If every time they make two steps I make fifteen, it’s not that they’ve failed; it’s just that it’s a slow process. And who knows? Maybe the next month, maybe the next day, a spark may hit them, and suddenly they’ll be with you, they’ll be where you are, on the front line, so to speak.