Love Was My Parents’ Answer to Jim Crow |
In my house in Providence, there’s an old photograph of my parents hanging on the living room wall that I look at every day. They had been married for 11 years when it was taken. In the picture, they're sitting next to each other in the backyard on a late summer’s afternoon. They are smiling and holding hands. To all the world, they look like they have arrived—like they have everything they’ve ever wanted.
But it’s 1957, and in America, Black people still have to worry about the possibility of getting lynched. Jim Crow in the south and racism everywhere else was rampant. Let me remind you that 1957 was only two years after the Montgomery bus boycott and the murder of Emmitt Till.
The year this photo was taken, a recently passed civil rights bill was proving difficult to enforce. That year, Richard and Mildred Loving would begin a nearly 10-year odyssey of banishment from their home state of Virginia, that was finally ended by a Supreme Court ruling that legalized interracial marriage. 1957 is the year president Eisenhower reluctantly federalized the National Guard in Little Rock, Ark. to escort nine Black children through a hostile white mob to attend Central High School.
I look at that photo and think of those times. My parents had every reason to worry about their own safety and their children’s, too. It must’ve been something like living under a state of siege. But that was their life.
And yet there they are, holding hands and smiling. Their contentment and their connection is undeniable. Given what I knew about their circumstances, I looked at that picture and for the longest time was at a total loss to explain how they could have been so happy. Bear with me.
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My parents, Mamie Lee Gohagon and George Washington Green, were childhood friends born and raised in Selma, Ala., in the mid-1920s. In coming to terms with the hellish maelstrom of World War II and the ongoing plague of American racism, these two friends would go their separate ways.
Mom left home for what she hoped were greener pastures in Louisville, Ky. Dad left Selma twice: The first time was to the Atlantic because of his enlistment in the Navy. The second time was in order to save his own life from a........