Eleanor Roosevelt, "FDR's eyes and legs," visited coal miners in Appalachia, sharecroppers in cotton fields and soldiers in tough times. On this day in 1938, she attended a conference in Birmingham where segregation laws required blacks and whites to sit separately. Eleanor walked in and took her seat on the black side. It wasn't long before a police tapped her and asked her to move to the white side. She took her little folding chair and moved it into the middle of the aisle, between both sections and she sat proudly.
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She carried this folding chair from meeting to meeting throughout the rest of the conference, always sitting in the middle, always reminding folks of the need for all Americans to come together.
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I wonder what she'd think of "Human Welfare" today? We no longer have to carry a folding chair and be a public obstacle when and where we sit. Oh... wait. Maybe we do.
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When we moved to South Carolina from New Jersey, we were shocked at the segregation. There are so many different ethnic peoples up north that we'd come to accept diversity as the norm. Then we moved here. One Sunday, we pulled up into a church parking lot and noticed a lot of stares. Tom begged me to get out and go in, but I just couldn't. I'm no Eleanor Roosevelt. This was a "black" church. They didn't want no whites there. Just 'cause we were new in town and from the north, we couldn't just march in and expect things to be different.
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We scuttled back to our little white church and took our place among "our "folks where we have been ever since. Every now and then I think of rattling things up a bit and attending the "black" church. Why, in this day and age, do we have a "black" church and a "white" church? Is it just different styles of worship? Different levels of passion? The white folks must get out by noon and the black folks keep going til 2? Is that OK? Is it OK to be different? To congregate with like minded folks? To worship with similar worshipers? It's OK to have "methodist" or "catholic" or "pentecostal holiness" divisions, why not racial divisions? It doesn't seem right, it doesn't feel right, but maybe it's OK.....
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This, among many other things, boggles my mind about America in the 21st century. What say you?
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