I once wrote about two young white guys in a bookstore whom I overheard griping about Black History Month (which, of course, starts today). They thought the whole thing was a
Here’s a quick story from my S.C. hometown to quell that ignorance:
In 1957, the year of violence-plagued school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, a group of S.C. pastors published a small book of essays, one of which was written by Claudia Sanders, a respected doctor’s wife, chair of the county library board, and member of a venerable Charleston family. Not long after the book was published, a Ku Klux Klan bomb blew up one side of the Sanders’ house, located in the “nicest” part of town. Police arrested three Klansmen within a couple of days, but no one was ever convicted of bombing the Sanders’ home. The prosecutor implied that Mrs. Sanders had brought her troubles on herself.
Four decades later, in a used bookstore in the mountains, I ran across an old copy of the essay collection that had so enraged the Klan. I flipped to Mrs. Sanders’ essay, thinking she must have been pretty inflammatory to rile someone enough to make them want to kill her. What I found was a very mild essay proposing gradual, voluntary integration of schools, without federal interference, argued from a Christian viewpoint that “all men are my brothers.”
The Black History Month lesson for today: That is what the pre-civil rights movement South was like — so stifling and repressive that even a respected, prosperous, Christian white woman, a pillar of the community, risked being killed for publicly suggesting that segregation should be gradually phased out. Feel free to print this blog entry and cut it out to keep for White History Month.
This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 5, 2008.
