civil rights

when i was in elementary school, i asked my mom what she remembered from the civil rights movement. i know there was some sort of school assignment involved--i didn't just come up with this topic of conversation myself--but the details of exactly why this conversation happened are in the blurred area of the fish eye lens through which i tend to focus on memories. the focused part of my memories are usually dominated by my emotions toward the situation, with a few key details thrown in there.

the details i remember are of what my mom was telling me she remembered. she lived in the south in the 1950s. one day, she went to a water fountain to get a drink. i don't remember where she was or why she was there. there were two water fountains. one said white and the other said colored. she drank out of the colored water fountain because she thought that colored water was going to come out of it. needless to say, she was a bit disappointed when it was just regular water.

at the time she was telling me this, i was probably about as old as she was in her memory. i remember being dumbfounded by her innocence. (perhaps i wouldn't have used those words at the time, i might have described it best as "whoa.") my mom, who didn't seem to be ancient in years, had a point in her life where she didn't know what segregation was and didn't understand why there were two different water fountains. there was a time in her life when the word "colored" did not have the stigma associated with it today. there was a time in her life where she was expected to use a different water fountain that black people.

at the time, i also began to form small sense of awareness about my mother as a person. there was so much that i did not know about her life. of course i knew she had a life before having children, but at that moment i started to understand just what that meant. having a life means she was living, and living means that she had many moments and experiences that had nothing to do with me as a child.

in college, i developed an affinity for studying recent history. i took about 6 classes that covered america in 1900, many of which specialized in 1968 to the present. i wonder if my interest in the recent history might have stemmed from this conversation with my mom. the history of the '60s seems far more personal to me because of how it could shape one little girl's life.

for me, martin luther king, jr. day is not necessarily about the man. he was a great man, an inspiring man, and a man who died because of that. but i was not shaped by him. i was shaped by the people he affected--the people whose lives he changed. the holiday is not really to honor the man, but rather the movement that he represented. it's to honor a movement that completely changed the the social structure of my mom's life. it's about the fact that i have only ever known water fountains that anyone can use.