Dear Scott,

In our town, if a negro arrived during the day, his stay was temporary. At sundown our village cop would escort him to the city limits. There were no racial tensions in Corning, Arkansas, in the 1940’s and 50’s; there was only one race.

Though our family actually lived in Illinois, we spent many weekends, all our holidays, and I spent my summers with the extended family in Corning, so equally divided in my time between the north and south that I was a citizen of two cultures. We all loved Arkansas so much that if asked, ‘Where are you from?’ all our lives our family members answered promptly ‘Arkansas’. In Arkansas, The War was not long over less than a century later, I saluted the confederate flag, stood up when they played ‘Dixie’ and referred to Northerners as yankees. We were good-natured about it all and smiled when we yelled our battle cry ‘The South shall rise again!’

I didn’t think about race. There really wasn’t much to consider. In Illinois, my mother always had a colored maid (as we called them in the north), and mother treated her the way royalty treats servants, kindly, but formally. There were no issues. There were no negroes in Corning, and there were no colored people in Illinois.

In 1964, your dad and I, newly married, were transferred to Birmingham, Alabama. I slid seamlessly into my culture, not even noticing that I had developed a light drawl. I am a Southerner and I am home..

We learned that there were racial tensions in Alabama, though Sam and I couldn’t figure out why. We had heard the negroes wanted the right to vote. But all Southerners knew that wasn’t a good idea: the negroes were too large a percentage of the population, and if they got the vote, they would take over the government and treat us badly. We all understood that. Besides, they were ok. Sam would come home from his large land-bridge construction project he was working on and say, “I don’t know why they say the negroes are unhappy; I hear them singing under the bridge.”

The Birmingham News said there was a rabble-rouser named Martin Luther King who was causing all of the problems. He didn’t seem to have a purpose, according to the paper; he was just fomenting unrest. He had organized hundreds of negroes to march in Selma but the police had met them at the Pettus Bridge and beat them back. Later he did lead a march from Selma, across the Pettus Bridge and all the way to Montgomery but the newspaper dismissed it as a tawdry affair with negroes having sex along the highway. The Birmingham News was our main source of news, and obviously they understood the situation.

In the summer of 1965 we moved to Memphis, then to South Carolina, then to Texas, then in early 1968 to Pittsburg. These were busy years for us, with you three babies in just over three years, and I think I lost track of news of all sorts. But there was one piece of news that stuck with me. In April, 1968, this Martin Luther King was assassinated. I didn’t have any feeling about that, and I don’t suppose that would have stuck with me. But you know how once in a great while something of such importance happens to you that you remember where you were standing, remember the furniture placement in the room? I had such a moment in April, 1968, standing in my living room in McKeesport, PA. I was casually gazing at the TV news. They reported the death of Martin Luther King, and then played his “I Have a Dream” speech. As I watched this ‘rabble-rouser’s’ regal bearing and listened to his passionate speech on behalf of his people, I began to cry.

Who was this man? What was he trying to do? I was busy and I shelved the question into the recesses of my mind, but the tears were stored on my heart. I probably never mentioned it to your dad; the babies needed supper.

There was a film several years old, that I had never seen or heard of, a film called “A Raisin in the Sun”. It was showing somewhere, and Sam and I dropped in to see it. I’m a funny person in movie theaters, for as I do when I’m reading fiction books, I drop my identity and ‘become’ one of the characters in the movie. This particular movie had an all-black cast (by then we called them black) with all the day-to-day issues of all of us. I became part of the family as we worked our way through the problems of life in our dingy apartment. We were happy when Grandma decided to use her late husband’s insurance money to buy a house for all of us. She came home and said she had found a house at the right price and had bought it. Then she said, “It’s in a white neighborhood.”

I felt slapped. We want this house, deserve this house. But in the same instant I realized, I’m not black; I’m white! And everyone knows blacks can’t buy homes in white neighborhoods; it ruins the neighborhood. The playwright had me exactly where she wanted me — — being ‘black’ and simultaneously being white. Sitting there in the dark, it came crashing down on me: I am a racist.

I was convicted. By the end of the 60’s it was not ok to be a racist. Now that I suddenly knew what it was like to be black, I realized that my lifelong apathy didn’t really distinguish me from the Alabama police. We were both denying the personhood of humans.

God must believe in rehabilitation, for he rehabilitated me. In the early 1970’s I went to work in the prison at Mansfield (Ohio) with a thousand black convicts and one white woman, me. I was filled with humility as I learned that 90% of the prisoners at Mansfield were African-American while they represented only 10% of Ohio’s general population. We have only moved oppression on the plantation to oppression in the American judicial system. I expanded my work to all the prisons in Ohio.

There is a newspaper photo taken on March 7, 2015, that I have saved and that I treasure. It makes me weep with joy. It is a photograph of the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, 50 years later.

Love, Mom

-Mary Lynne Musgrove died last week.