My poem, Blessing XXVII, was inspired by the story told to me by one of the student leaders in 1963, one who helped to bring about the University of Alabama’s peaceful integration despite Governor Wallace's intention to “stand in the schoolhouse door.” That was the year of the Easter demonstrations when Bull Connor attacked the peaceful protesters with dogs and fire hoses, the year that the Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Denise McNair were killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in September, and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November. 

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The student leaders at the University of Alabama

organized peer brigades to rid the grounds

of rocks, bottles, soda cans, anything

that could be used as a weapon.

The campus was locked down,

guards posted at every entrance

to keep outsiders away.

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No one dared admit to wanting integration.

The effective appeal was to pride.

“What will the country think of us?

We don’t want to be another Mississippi.”

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In preliminary talks with student leaders,

James Hood had to be smuggled onto campus

huddled on the floor of the backseat of a car.

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On June 11, 1963, personally escorted

by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach,

James Hood and Vivian Malone approached

Foster Auditorium to register for classes.

The governor stood in front and blocked their way.

“Some people enter your life and leave it empty,”

said Hood. “Other people you never forget.”

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“Segregation now, segregation forever!”

declaimed Wallace for show.

National Guard General Henry Graham urged him

to step aside, and the two students entered, unhurt

and unhindered. Said Vivian, “I went beyond

that day in my mind to envision the future.

There will come a time in your life

when you must act for others. Everything

you have done until then is preparation.”

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I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up there in a segregated, all-white suburb. I was an elementary school student living “over the mountain.” Even though I did not participate in the demonstrations, I consider myself a child of the civil rights era, for it has indelibly marked my life. The narrative of my childhood is bound up in this greater narrative. I am fascinated by the history of the movement, and, as I have grown older, I have sought to discover as much as I can about the period and the many, many people who played their part in bringing about such revolutionary social change. As Muriel Rukeyser famously said, "The world is not made of atoms. The world is made of stories."

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It is perhaps hard for people born since the civil rights era to grasp how terribly difficult it was to change people's hearts and minds, and how very much courage it required. When I was teaching in public schools and colleges in Harlem, the South Bronx, and other minority neighborhoods in New York City in the 1980s, I realized that my students could not readily conceive of what it was like to be an African-American living under segregation even one generation before them, any more than I, a Jewish American, could imagine what it was like to be a Jew living in Nazi Germany. That’s a good thing, and yet it’s also important to be aware of what others sacrificed for our freedoms. As John Lewis said, “Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that [Pettus] bridge in Selma.”

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I remember other children talking about using derogatory terms for African Americans in such tones that my blood ran cold. And in fourth grade, when our teacher came to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot, I remember students actually cheering as they ran across the schoolyard to the waiting school buses. I knew they had learned their behaviors at home. This was the backdrop of hate and the climate of fear I grew up in. I used to wonder, in those days, were I black, how much courage would I have?

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The poem, of course, is a Blessing. It has a happy ending despite the governor’s efforts, and because it shows blacks and whites working together towards a common goal. It’s also a blessing in that it shows how two people, James Hood and Vivian Malone, rose to the challenges they asked of themselves and displayed heroism.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine blog

Anne Whitehouse, Guest Blogger

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Anne Whitehouse’s chapbook, BEAR IN MIND, has just been published by Finishing Line Press. She is also the author of the poetry collections, BLESSINGS AND CURSES and THE SURVEYOR’S HAND. Her poem, “The Decisive Moment” has just appeared in The View from Here, and her poem “Water Cure” will be published in September in Istanbul Literary Review. Her story “A Visit to the Stock Exchange” will be published in Art from Art anthology forthcoming from Modernist Press in 2010. Please visit her website at www.annewhitehouse.com  - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor