Today I spent the day downtown with Jessica playing tourist in our hometown. We started last week finding out the free days at the local museums and planning days to take advantage of each one in turn. Today was the National Civil Rights Museum.

For those of you that don’t know, it is a museum that was made out of the Lorraine Motel (the motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April of 1968) and it traces the civil rights struggle from the days of the emancipation proclamation to the present. I don’t know if I ever knew what racism looked like through the eyes of a child until today.

“Mommy, WHY is that man hanging from that tree??” “Mommy, WHY should that lady have to get up from her seat because a white person wanted it? She was there first!” “Mommy, WHY are those police men hurting those boys and girls? Police men are supposed to HELP people!” “Mommy, WHY?” Over and over and over again. And the only answer I could give her was “Because those people aren’t white.” She found that simply unfathomable, “But that’s STUPID! What does being black have to do with anything?”

I wouldn’t call the experience “fun” but it was definitely worth having. I kept thinking of Troy’s book “Bound for the Promise Land” and how well he did his research. If you haven’t read it and you can get your hands on it…it’s a ROUGH read, but so worth reading. Kind of like the Civil Rights Museum. The history is ugly…but worth facing…and learning from.

Memphis is a tough city to love. Race still divides us far too deeply and it is easy to become disillusioned and lose hope that it will EVER be different. Then you see it through the eyes of a child. You see them on the playgrounds at 3 or 4…not seeing color…just seeing friends. And you realize that THERE is the hope for this city. THERE is the future. THERE is Dr. King’s Dream. IF we don’t kill it for them that is.

My FAVORITE musical (other than CATS) is South Pacific. It was extremely controversial when it came out because it dealt with racism. Watching it now it’s hard to comprehend that Asians were once as discriminated against as African Americans and that interracial marriage between Asians and Caucasians was taboo. But they were. There is a song in that musical when the young lieutenant who is in love with a Polynesian girl from Bali Hi, is lamenting the reason that he cannot marry her. It talks about how racism is propagated from one generation to the next. Part of it goes, “They have to be taught, before its too late, before they are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people their relatives hate…they have to be carefully taught.” Today I realized again the truth of that statement. I take racism for granted…it’s a fact of my life…maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t have to be a fact of my daughter’s. Maybe, just maybe, our children will be the ones who understand the song we all learned as kids in Sunday School. “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world! Red, Brown, Yellow, Black and White they are PRECIOUS in His sight! Jesus loves the little children of the world!”

Blessings,
T-Bear