I went home for Thanksgiving this year, home being
Birmingham, Alabama, Alabama being the state known for its history of
hardheaded, mean hearted, and soulless racial politics.
After a century and a half of lynching and bombings, and
institutionalized hatred of African Americans, things seemed to have been
changing over the past fifty years. There are all sorts of signs of that. After
the extraordinary Civil Rights’ Museum, my favorite sign of this change is the
airport itself—named, now, for Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a leader in the civil
rights’ movement whose home had been dynamited in 1956 by fellow Birmingham
citizens, and who had died just a month ago.
Recently, and alarmingly, Alabama’s racism has
reinstitutionalized itself again, this time taking concrete form in a series of anti-immigrant laws that
are impressive in their evil. In their essence, the laws make anyone
even looking Latino a suspicious person.
There remain signs of hope, even in the midst of this
enormous setback in the struggle to create a more human world order. The faith communities in Alabama
immediately protested the laws (it took them quite a bit longer to get their
act together during the first civil rights’ movement) and even the farmers
chimed in at the stupidity of their state representatives.
The laws were that bad—the pure-hearted found themselves
allied with the purely selfish.
I discovered my own favorite sign of hope as we were heading
back to Texas. As I walked into Fred Shuttlesworth Airport, I found an eight
year old girl parked right in front of the entrance. She was sitting on some
luggage, and had on a white and green and red soccer shirt with the word
“Mexico” blazing across the back.
I liked the innocence of that effrontery; I liked it all the
more when her apparent father or grandfather or uncle came up and took her hand
and they walked together down the aisle.
He was a tall African American man who was wearing a black jacket that had its
own statement screaming across the back.
It said, in large, red letters: BLACK.
The two of them made their way through the holiday crowd
slowly and confidently, and, I would say, as defiantly as the new future that
is coming our way, whether the white Alabama legislators like it or not.
As that black man and that brown girl walked down the way,
the air above them seemed to shimmer, just for a moment. It was as if Fred Shuttlesworth himself had spotted
them and that they had given him cause for a heavenly shout of joy.
“Órale,” I thought to myself, in Mexican, or “Yeehaw,” as we
say in Alabama.
