Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights

One Patricia Stephens Due "The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future." --Arthur A. Schomburg There are so many misconceptions today about the civil rights movement. People think blacks were a unified front in the "old days," with everyone marching and holding hands. Well, that's not true. If only it had been that easy! Just like today, in cities and towns across the South, there were always a select few who lit the fires and went to the meetings--and, eventually, others followed. Dr. Martin Luther King wasn't the only one lighting the fires. He had a lot of influence, but he was only one man. It concerns me when I hear people say If only we had Martin Luther King today, as if we are helpless without him. I wish we had Dr. King today, too. But Dr. King did not create the Movement. There were hundreds and thousands of ordinary people who did extraordinary things. Daily heroism went unrewarded and unrecorded. Some heroes were children, and some were retired. They were maids, ministers, students, teachers, housewives. And they suffered! Their families suffered. Their jobs suffered. I know people who never recovered from the Movement. I know people who today cannot bring themselves to talk about what happened to them during that era. I know people who had to spend time in mental institutions. I knew people who committed suicide. I knew people who died. And they were all ordinary people. I remember sitting on a textbook committee for schoolchildren in Miami-Dade County a few years ago, and when I asked why the social studies books under consideration mentioned nothing about Tallahassee's civil rights struggle, school officials tried to tell me that nothing of note had happened in Florida. "I was there!" I protested, but they looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. A living witness didn't matter to them. Without written documentation, I was told, the forty-nine days my sister and I spent in jail, the tear gas that burned my eyes, and the people I knew could not be included. As if we had never existed. There's a saying I believe in: History belongs to those who write it. I have to write ours. Two Tananarive Due "I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother or when it was her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world." --Jamaica Kincaid By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I was already taller than my mother, but my height was irrelevant to the way I saw our proportions. She might be short physically, but she seemed like a giant. All children believe their parents are larger than life, but that feeling was much more pronounced for me and my two sisters because of the things our mother and father had done. They were civil rights activists. To us, that meant our lives were filled with opportunities no previous generation of blacks who lived in the South had ever known. Ever. In our home--where only my father could claim a reliable singing voice, a silky, soothing baritone--freedom songs were every bit as much of the family sing-along repertoire as nursery songs. In fact, we knew the choruses and refrains of 1960s standards like "This Little Light of Freedom," "We Shall Overcome," and "Oh, Freedom" better than we knew most Christmas carols. Freedom songs were always the background music of long car trips and annual family celebrations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. I can still hear our voices blending together, with my mother's deep, rolling timbre underneath: And before I'll be a slave . . . I'll be buried in my grave . . . and go home to my Lord . . . and be free. And, of course, we knew the stories. Like the children of refugees, the children of immigrants, the children of veterans--the children of any sur