High School 50Th Anniversary Reunion, May 26, 1989 My Dearly Beloved, Ladies and Gentlemen, What Ad Alight It Is to Meet Again
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High School 50th Anniversary Reunion, May 26, 1989 My dearly beloved, ladies and gentlemen, what ad alight it is to meet again, after so long a time, with the people and the place in which I grew up. I am an historian ••• I am a backyard gar• dener. But you honor me with an invitation to speak to you at this time. Not TOO much of an hon11r, for I am allotted 8 minutes. I choose to talk to you briefly about the generation and the time of which we are a part. The date was June 27, 1936, in the summer after our freshman year in high school. The scene was Franklin Field, a football stadium in Philadelphia. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just been nominated by the Derrncratic Party's national convention for a second term as president, and to accept the nomination the president went in person to that place. In his speech he said many memorable things, but I want to quote only three lines, as the motto and theme of our time. There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny. Sp spoke Pres. Roosevelt. And a rendezvous withd3stiny our generation has lived. In 1936 the country was deep in economic depression. The world, also suffering, saw in Germaey and in Italy and in Soviet Russiafiviolent and extreme experiments in totalitarianism as the solution to misery and despair.$Many people saw their choices as reduced to two:: liberty down one road, economic survival down the other. Our generation rejected that philosophy outright. Both human rights, and human welfare, was possible, we insisted, and it was our destiny to make it so. When the extremists threatened to dominate the world, in Atlantic and in Pacific, it was our generation that cried Halt, and then paid the price, in lives and wealth and years taken from our lives, to enforce a state of justice and limitation upon power. CiV!tlians all, with our productive capac~ty, and imagination, and will-power, it was our destiny to overcome the proud militarists. 011r destiny led also to the atomic age, to jet-aircrare-t, to instcnt ele~troni3 communication, to a thousand gadgets that were unknown in 1936 and are commonplace today. 0 r destiny also led to the creation of the world's most wealthy country in all of human history, and to cultural and artistic achievements that win for Americans the preponder• ance of international awards for excellence in the arts and sciences. For all this I am grateful, and I stcald in awe of which my country, in my generation, has done. But most of all I am thankful that the accident of birth made me a native Mississippian, 14 years before Franklin D. made that speech in Phi1ade1phia. It was the bes't of times, in the best of towns, among the best of people, with the best city library and school system and neighborhooV. We had the challenge of a rendezvous withd3stiny, but we had the advantage of this place from which to meet it. There is a west African proverb which says, No matter how far the stream flows, it never forgets its sources. So it is with us. We have gone to the ends of the earth in defense of liberty with order, we have done our bit to make our country great. In it all we have proven the quality of the roots from which we grew. Our generation of Americans had a rendezvous with destiny. I salute you for the courage and valor you have shown in seizing the challenge. Those among us who get a philosophy and a theology from the comic strips were especially pleased last month. The comis strip Calvin and Hobbes, about a small boy and his tiger--sometimes a small stuffed animal, at other times a full-grown animal--had lines that express my amazement at the swift passage of tiJq~. Let's say life i~ this square of the sidewalk, the little boy says to the tiger, pointing to as.trip of concrete marked with lines._ We're born at this crack, and we die at that crack. Now we find ourselves somewhere inside the square, and in the process of walking out of it. Suddenly we realize our time in here is fleeting. Is our quick experience here pointless? Does anything we say or do in here rellly matter? Have we done anything important? Have we been happy? Have we made the most of these precious few footsteps? The last panel in the strip shows the boy and the tiger, standing within the square of concrete, loo~ing apprehen• sive. B~hind them the sky is dark and the sliver of a moon shines in the night sky. They have stood in that square all the da,Y and into the night, wondering about the brevity of life, and what .if anything it means. We have all asked the same questions. The 15th century French poet troubador Fran~ois Villon said it--ou sont les neiges d1antan. William Wordsworth put it like this--there was a time when meadow, grofe, ands tream, the earth, and every common sight, to me did seem apparelled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream. • •• The pansy at my feet doth ~he same tale repeat: where is now the ~ visionary gl:eam? Where is it now, the glory and the d ream'i Centenary Meth Ch. May 17, 1989. My dearly beloved, ladies and :::entlemen, it is an honor for me to be invited to share this occas• ion with you. I am an historian, which IOOans that my calling is to remind people in the present of those events and persons and ideas in the past which have made the wrld we live in. Remem• bering is important to all of us, for we are debtors to the giants of the past who have enabled us to see farther and to live more happily than we might have done. As someone has said ,memory is the ability to gather roses in winter. The remembrance of things past makes it possible for us to live them twice, or a hundred times. Wm Faulkner said that the past is not dead; it isn't even past. Or perhaps the poet T. s. Eliot said it best, in the four-quarteD poem Burnt Norton; time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. Certain it is that present grows out of past, and future is being formed in the pres• ent. So historians look backward to understand this morning 1s newspaper, and riext month's revolu• tion in China, or central America, or right down the street from where we live. In every day there is a host of memories of what happened at this time a year ago, a century ago, a millennium ago. This day is no different. I invite you to come with me in your imagination to this day, May 17, thirty-five years ago, at 12:52 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, when Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United states Earl Warren began to read the unanimous decision of the Court in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. For 28 minutes reporters 'heard him, with mounting excitement; every few minutes they would scribble hastily-written messages and stuff them into the pneumatic tubes which took them to the teleg?'aph room on the floor below. When Earl Warren c-0mpleted his task, at 1:20 p.m., the United States was changed in nature and attitude and in liberty and in equality of opportunity, for all time to come. For the Brown de• cisi-0n, 35 yrs ago this afternoon, was without doubt the most controversial and far-readhing court action of the 20th Century. It is possible to argue that what happened on that day, in that imitation Greek temple which stands as guardian and shield of the rights and protections we need to be human, constituted the most significant half-hour ~the century since the end of chat• tel slavery in 1865. To ~o:lerstand its meaning, let us look briefly at what had goue before that momentous twenty-eight minutes;· and at the present day, more than a third of a century since; and conclude with a rema:bk or two about what is yet to be done in the future. ']I\. rjfif'yrs had gone by since the first \lflVPdiog Africans arrived in America in chains, and were ii. compelled to work without compensation other than subsistence--foodp shelter, and clothing~9~1~,.___ yrs had paased since Pres. Abraham Linco1n issued the Emancipation roclamation on Janu~r;y i; 1863. Ffeedom to enslaved black people was the battle-cry of the armies of the United utates that invaded the plantation regions to compel obedience to the laws and the Constitution, and also to eradicate from that Constitution and those laws every trace of human slavery upon this continent. But sadly, freedom to the enslaved was much too quickly proven/(to ~-a ooruel hoax. A decade after Appomattox all of the outward conditions of enslave?OOnt were{'f~~trit, and before ~he end of the century an elaborate code of laws compelled racial segregation in all public as• pects of life. Peonage replaced slavery; tenantry, and crop liens, and a severely restricted area of civil rights for blackskeffectively nullified ~he promises of~ citizenship contained in the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution.