Near the end of his life, David Halberstam returned to the first great story of his journalistic career and wrote about the young leaders of the Nashville civil rights movement in “The Children”. It’s an overly long, overly sentimentalized book (Halberstam was a 25 year old reporter for “The Tennessean” when he covered the campaign that led to the desegregation of public facilities in Nashville; the students—from Nashville’s HBCUs—were younger still), but it’s worth reading if only for the first third of the book, when Halberstam reports on the early years in the lives of eight student leaders.
Without exception, those student leaders—Diane Nash, John Lewis, Marion Barry, James Bevel, Curtis Murphy, Gloria Johnson, Bernard Lafayette, and Rodney Powell—had childhood memories of someone—a mother, a father, a grandmother, an uncle—who took the considerable risk of standing up to white people acting in racist ways.
So did Rosa Parks. Most of Chapter 1 is about her family—her father a carpenter who left when she was 2, her mother a teacher educated at Payne University in Selma, her uncle Robert a carpenter who studied at Tuskegee, her younger brother Sylvester about whom she “never did get out of that attitude of trying to be protective of him”. But she writes most about her maternal grandparents, in whose house she grew up.
Her grandmother’s father was a Scotch-Irish indentured servant who married an enslaved midwife, Mary Jane Nobles, “a person of African descent with no white ancestors”. Her grandmother was five years old when the Civil War ended, and shortly thereafter went to work in the Wright’s house taking care of their child. “I don’t know how or when they did it, but sometime after Emancipation my great-grandparents purchased twelve acres of land that had been part of the Hudson plantation.” When she wrote this memoir, Mrs. Parks still owned the table her great-grandfather built after Emancipation “so his family would have something to eat on”.
Where her grandmother was calm, her grandfather, Sylvester, was “very emotional and excitable”. He was very light-skinned, and could pass for white. His father was a white plantation owner, and his mother a slave housekeeper and seamstress, likely of mixed race herself.
After they died, an overseer took over the plantation and abused Sylvester and “treated him so badly that he had a very intense, passionate hatred for white people. My grandfather was the one who instilled in my mother and her sisters, and in their children, that you don’t put up with bad treatment from anybody. It was passed down almost in our genes.”
For most of us, the first and most enduring lessons of “how you’re supposed to act” come from our elders—parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. We learn from what they say, and especially from what they do. Eventually we reach a stage in life when we’re the adults. Very often, the strength we get to act “like you’re supposed to act” comes from the examples set by our elders.