Are We Making Progress?

For the last 14 months I have researched and interviewed a variety of sources for the book Balls of Confusion: race, basketball and the chaos of 1972. 

Every black person I asked to interview, except for one, was more than cooperative. I found the opposite with whites. The issue of race will turn conservative white’s defensive, most immediately. 

On Facebook I was told by one white man that my insights proved I was “a liberal racist POS.” His friend piled on and said that I had made a racist and degrading post when I pictured a black friend and I sharing a fried chicken dinner (you can’t make this stuff up). Both said that the race card needed to be retired and I was the real racist as I saw my friends as black and white as they viewed their friends as friends. Looking at each’s face book friends list, each with over 1000 friends, I saw not one black face.

“Never,” was the 1950’s and early 1960’s battle cry of the white rednecks and  KKK members  in Missouri that fought integration. Over a ten-year slice of time framed by the years 1962 to 1972, a historical equivalent to the blink of an eye, it all changed. I watched it unfold right before my wide-open youthful eyes. Blacks and whites now went to school together, played on the same little league teams and high school football and basketball squads.

My mother said it  seemed like small steps of acceptance, but for one  of fair mind who had lived through the years of Jim Crow, she found it spiritually uplifting. “When I worked at the bank (in the 1950’s),” she told me several years before she passed away in 2018 at the age of 88, “we had a colored girl who worked with us. Once a year the Bank would buy tickets and we would all get on at the bus station and go to a Cardinal baseball game. She could not  sit with us at (the) game or on the bus, so she didn’t go. I never thought it was fair but I never spoke up against it, either. But things got better. It always does. Right just takes time.”

But, change will almost always be met with resistance. In my mother’s time, “Never,” the white demonstrators would chant, waiving their menacing ax handles. “We shall overcome,” sang the protesters in response. Today,  the new protest mantra  of the times is, “hands up, don’t shoot.” The mostly black voices of anger collide bitterly with the Make America Great Again movement. History may not always repeat itself, but in this case it sure does rhyme. But, Mom was right, history always belongs to the voices of those who sing the righteous songs of protest. It just takes time.

I will not quibble with the many African-Americans I spoke with while researching this book who feel we have a long way to go. Nor those who claim we are not moving fast enough. But we are learning, of that I am sure, even if we are learning late.