To Obama
Page 16
Sincerely,
Joelle Graves
* * *
—
“There are those kinds of letters, I think, that shape your attitudes,” Obama told me that day. “The individuality and the specificity carries a power that is different than any rational argument that is made or policy presentation that is made. It carries with it a force that’s different.”
I asked him what he thought letters like Joelle’s said about the relationship he’d formed, over the past eight years, with the people he was elected to serve.
“It says the American people are full of goodness and wisdom, and you just have to be paying attention,” he said. “And sometimes that’s hard to do when you’re inside this bubble, but this was a little portal through which I could remind myself of that every day.
“The letters are beautiful, aren’t they?”
CHAPTER 10
Marjorie McKinney,
August 21, 2013
BOONE, NORTH CAROLINA
Marg was in Albany when the incident happened. It might seem like a tiny thing. A run-of-the-mill, everyday thing. But Marg couldn’t shake the memory of it, carrying it the way another person carries grief, a feeling of heaviness inside, unmovable and flat.
How do you describe it? Okay. Imagine it’s getting dark outside. Cold. Gray. The dreariest dusk, everybody aching to get home for some mashed potatoes and TV. Marg was at the New York State Museum there, doing some work for her husband, Ken, a geologist at the university back home in Boone, North Carolina. Marg helped Ken his whole career; it had been a willing partnership ever since the 1950s when they met in paleontology class. They decided he would get the PhD; she would stay home with the kids. She loved it. They traveled the world together hunting fossils, debating plate tectonics and all the exhilarating implications.
Then Ken had developed muscular dystrophy, and then came the wheelchair, so now Marg, who was in her early seventies, did most of the traveling alone. She’s a short woman, compact, with a paper-thin complexion, wire-rimmed glasses, and shaggy white hair she lets fly around naturally. That day she had traveled to Albany to pick up some images of fossils that Ken had requested, and she was headed to her car. (This was 2011, when Ken was still alive. He has since passed.) The plaza outside the museum was huge, a broad quadrangle, acres of concrete reaching toward the horizon, nothing to cut the wind, and the weird thing was not a single person was out there except Marg and one shadowy figure in the distance. Weird because it was a weekday, rush hour, and people should’ve been storming out of those buildings headed home to their mashed potatoes, shouldn’t they?
The person in the distance was a guy, definitely a guy; he was way across the plaza on that parallel sidewalk there. Suddenly he started walking toward Marg. He quickened his pace, came closer. She felt uncomfortable with the way he seemed to be zeroing in on her like that. He looked young. He was black. He was wearing a hoodie. In one swift move, he flipped the hood up and over his head, concealing his face.
I should run, Marg thought. It was more instinct than thought. Her short legs wouldn’t take her very far very fast. He kept getting closer. At what point do I run? There were no nearby buildings to duck into. She started walking faster, toward the stairwell that led to the parking lot. He did too. She felt hot. She felt a pulse in her toes and on the tips of her ears, a pounding all over saying, “Run like hell.”
They both reached the stairwell at the same time. He looked up at her. “Bad wind, isn’t it?” he said. Then he told her there was a pedestrian walkway underneath that linked the museum to the parking lot, in case she didn’t know. Next time if it’s cold out, she might want to take that, he said.
And that was it. He was gone.
It might seem like a tiny thing. A run-of-the-mill, everyday thing. But for Marg it marked a break in who she believed herself to be.
“Why was I afraid of this very pleasant young man? It was just all because I saw he was a black man. I had no reason to be afraid of him. And that just knocked me flat. It wasn’t anything I ever expected to feel. It was a turning point in my life, because I realized then, you know, that I was racist. And I had to find a way to get rid of that.”
Now, a big part of the problem for Marg was she thought she had gotten rid of it. She had made the decision long ago to get rid of it. For people who grew up in the Deep South, in Birmingham, Alabama, it was a steep climb to work on something like that. It was a decision you had to make, yes or no, if you wanted to learn how to free yourself of racist thinking that had been more or less ingrained in you.
Marg was six when she discovered the white robe and the pointed hood hanging in the neighbor’s den on the back of the door. She was playing hide-and-seek with her sister. “What are you doing in here?” the mom said. “You are forbidden to enter this room.” She knew what it was. She always wondered who was under those things. He was the town barber. He was so jolly. He and her dad were pals. There were things you didn’t talk about.
The black neighborhood was across the street from her school. It was like a separate village you didn’t go into. And they didn’t come into yours. The buses would come and take the black kids miles away to another school. The public buses had a wooden placard behind the white section. If you were white and got on the bus and there was no place to sit, you pushed the placard back, and those people had to move. And if their section got full, one of them had to get off the bus.
It was normal. It was just the way the world was divided: two types of people. That’s why you needed two types of everything: seats, stores, schools, theaters, ball teams. Nobody said anything about it being wrong. She heard about Martin Luther King, Jr., when she was in high school—some of the stuff about the Montgomery bus boycott; she did hear about some of that. At home, when she brought it up, she was told to leave the dinner table and never mention it again. Nothing they should be involved in. It was up to somebody else to get involved.
The first time she ever talked to a black person was when she was in grad school, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the early 1960s. “Well, hello,” she said. She had no idea what to expect. “My name is Marg.” It was just a normal conversation like she would have with anybody, and that was the thing that jolted her. He was acting like a regular person.
She had a friend, an exchange student from Germany who was considerably older, and at lunch one day, she told him she didn’t understand some of the sit-ins and other civil rights demonstrations that students were starting to organize at segregated restaurants and businesses in town. “Black people are satisfied with their lives,” she said. “Why stir up a fuss?”
“Where are you hearing this?” her friend said.
“That’s how it is back home in Birmingham,” she said.
Except of course that’s not how it really was back home in Birmingham. That was a polite white girl’s dinner table version, where you were told to leave if you brought anything up. In fact, in the 1950s and 1960s, racial segregation was legally required in Birmingham, where just 10 percent of the city’s black population was registered to vote, and the unemployment rate for blacks was two and a half times higher than it was for whites; there were no black police officers, firefighters, store clerks, or bus drivers. “Probably the most segregated city in the United States,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said about Birmingham.
So there was Marg in grad school, her friend from Germany trying to wake her up from her stupor, explaining racism and bigotry and hate, telling her about his country and his life and about the Hitler Youth. First it had just been a group of little kids. Then other youth groups had to join, church groups, sports leagues. Hitler consolidated them; he outlawed all other youth groups except for the Hitler Youth. It grew to eight million kids. You had to read Nazi books and sing Nazi songs. You could be refused a diploma and a job if you didn’t join. Your parents would be hunted down. Two kinds o
f people, pure or impure, an army enforcing the divide.
Marg would stay friends with the guy from Germany. She would continue to thank him for everything he had explained to her in the lunchroom that day and for setting her life on a new course. “You needed it,” he’d say.
In 1963, police dogs were unleashed on black protesters in Birmingham, and then police turned on the fire hoses. King was thrown in jail, and from his cell he wrote an open letter to America. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he said.
Marg got involved in the civil rights movement. Throughout her life she tried to see beyond race. Even when she and Ken planned their family. Four kids, they said. One by birth, the rest adopted. So many kids needing love. Two of them were biracial.
So imagine. With all that behind her, all that evolving, a whole life with Ken and the kids. And then she’s in Albany, and it’s cold and dark, and she finds this pit of ugliness sitting inside her like some dormant worm wriggling to life.
What are you supposed to do with that?
In the background, on the news, the Trayvon Martin tragedy was unfolding. This was now 2012. Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old kid coming back from a run to the store on a February night in Sanford, Florida. He was wearing a black hoodie. George Zimmerman, part of a watch group for the gated community, thought Trayvon Martin looked suspicious, so Zimmerman went after him and after an altercation shot him dead.
Marg heard about it on the radio, at home in Boone, in the house she and Ken had built together, on seventeen acres overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains. The kids were grown, and Ken was gone, and so it was just her, two goats, a donkey named Rosie who liked Cheetos. Marg was following the Trayvon Martin saga on the radio, thinking about a divided America. She felt complicit. She wondered about Zimmerman. Did he have the same piece in him that she had discovered in herself? Was that what made him do it? Was he surprised to find it, as she was?
Zimmerman walked free for six weeks before he was charged with second-degree murder, provoking protests in Florida and across the country. The trial lasted a month, and when the not-guilty verdict was announced, people took to the streets and social media. “Black lives matter!” became the cry of a new movement.
On July 19, 2013, six days after the Zimmerman verdict, President Obama gave an impromptu speech in the White House press room. “Trayvon Martin could have been me, thirty-five years ago,” he said. “I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.”
Marg thought it was a gracious speech. She thought Obama was trying to explain the insidious nature of racism by making it personal.
“What I identified with was the complexity of it. I felt that Obama was trying to say, ‘You can’t just say that this man cold-bloodedly decided to kill Trayvon Martin. There were things going on with him, and with his thinking.’ ”
That was the way Marg heard it. Things going on in him, like the things she discovered going on in her.
Other people heard it differently. On the radio, conservative commentators and callers were sharply critical of Obama’s words. The Zimmerman shooting wasn’t about race, they said. It was a scuffle that had ended in tragedy. Nothing more. Obama shouldn’t be making it about race, they said. He shouldn’t use this tragedy as a way to appease critics decrying him for not doing more during his presidency to address race relations in America.
What is the matter with you people? Marg thought. Of course this was about race. And why wasn’t anyone talking about all the other things Obama had to say in that speech that day?
“I think it’s going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching,” he had said. “There has been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven’t seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have. On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there’s the possibility that people are a little bit more honest, and at least you ask yourself your own questions about, Am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can? Am I judging people as much as I can based on not the color of their skin, but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.”
Marg went to her computer and began typing. She wanted President Obama to know someone was listening. She had never thought of writing to a president before. But this guy needed it. Soon enough she found herself confessing about what had happened in Albany. “I wanted him to know that I had a reason to feel the way I did. I wanted to claim it for myself too. Because I wasn’t doing this intellectually; I was doing it from my experience. It was something that was real to me.”
“Dear President Obama,” she wrote. “As years went by, I thought I had done a pretty good job of shedding the racism in me….Then, came a cold evening in Albany, NY.” She told him about the cold and the darkness. “As I pulled a scarf around my neck to cut the wind, I saw the man pull his hoodie up.” She told him about the fear that overcame her and how she didn’t understand it. “Into my mind popped the notion that he was a black man, had hidden his face (I had, too)….I was embarrassed to think that, but it was there.”
She thanked the president for his speech about Trayvon Martin, and she said she owed that young man in Albany an apology. “I hope that others who heard your words will be more aware of the fear that lurks within many of us,” she said. “It’s unreasoned, but there.”
Marjorie McKinney
Boone, NC
President Barak Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama,
Thank you for your recent statements after the Zimmerman trial about your own memories of being a young black male. I am a “white” American, born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama where I lived until I moved to North Carolina as a grad student. When I left Alabama, I had the opportunity to know many different people and was impelled to examine the racism in me. I didn’t know it existed. I didn’t even think about it before.
As years went by, I thought I had done a pretty good job of shedding the racism in me. I had African-American friends, two of my children are bi-racial, I was involved in civil rights issues. Then, came a cold evening in Albany, NY.
I was in Albany for a short visit and was walking in the area between the museum and government buildings. It’s a huge plaza with an underground pedestrian area that links the buildings. I had used that to walk to the museum but decided to walk back outside. It was getting dark. The only other person on the plaza was a young black man who was walking parallel to me on the other side. As I pulled a scarf around my neck to cut the wind, I saw the man pull his hoodie up as he changed direction and began walking quickly toward me. Much to my horror, I became afraid and tried to figure why. Into my mind popped the notion that he was a black man, had hidden his face (I had, too), and had suddenly changed direction when he seemed to have looked up and seen me. I was embarrassed to think that, but it was there. I decided to wait and see what happened, fearful all the time. I changed my direction a bit and he seemed to as well. He continued to come directly toward me. As he came near, he looked up and said “Bad wind, isn’t it?” and showed me the nearest entry into the pedestrian underground. He was cold as I was and his change of direction was to go into the building close to where I walked. I wish I could have apologized to that fellow. That experience stays with me.
I hope that others who heard your words will be more aware of the fear that lurks within many of us. It’s unreasoned, but there. I hope to never forget my walk in Albany and the young man I encountered that cold day. Your candid comments last week meant a lot to me. Thank you.
Sin
cerely,
Marjorie McKinney
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
Marjorie—
Thanks for your thoughtful letter. Your story is an example of what makes me optimistic about this country!
Barack Obama
* * *
—
It was a surprise and a pleasure hearing back from the president. Marg had never expected anything like that. She put the letter in a frame and hung it beside her favorite chair, the blue one with the wooden arms, so she could sit by it. And so that’s what she did. She sat by it and did some soul-searching, just as the president had recommended in his speech.
She decided she needed to get out more. Soul-searching, she discovered, goes only so far.
“Convene a conversation on race…families and churches and workplaces.” Marg thought about some of the other things the president had recommended in his speech. She drove over to Raleigh, attended one of the Moral Mondays civil disobedience protests that were gaining attention there. They were organized by religious leaders like the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, head of the North Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). For Marg it was uplifting to be among all those people marching, saying that black lives matter, saying that we have to protect voting rights for all.