For our dear brother Medgar Evers July 2, 1925 - July 12, 1963
1963
I’ve been trying to figure out all day why I remember November 22, 1963 so clearly and have no memory of July 12, 1963 at all.
I remember the Sunday before Easter that year. I was six and my mother had forgotten her lipstick on the way to Mass. She borrowed my little Avon sample and somehow managed to lose it by the time we got home. She also got stopped by a San Francisco cop on the way to church. My grandmother told me to tell the cop that Mom was going to have a baby and that he should leave her alone. This was news to me and as the best English speaker in the car, I think the news rendered me speechless. Between losing my lipstick and gaining a baby brother, that day stands out.
Later that year, my cousin Julie had a July birthday party in the garage of her family’s Marin County home. Julie is three years younger than I am so I remember a group of little girls in a rainbow of puffy-sleeved chiffon dresses and full petticoats, in black patent leather shoes and hair curled and pulled back into plastic barrettes. My aunt made that slightly creepy clown-head cake out of Betty Crocker and after everyone left, Julie and I hunted for frogs in the back yard barefoot.
That was about two weeks after Medgar Evers was killed in his own driveway in Jackson with his voter registration card in his back pocket but it might as well have been in another century or on another planet. It was about a month after the president gave his first Civil Rights address to the nation.
Of course, later that year, my brother was brought home from the hospital and two weeks later, our young president was killed.
I don’t remember my own mother or any of my aunts and uncles saying anything about the civil rights movement in the sixties until they themselves had safely changed their own status from “resident” to “citizen”. Not even in the privacy of our home in front of the television. They all grew up in a country where the government could come for your father in the middle of the night and had. So that isn’t very surprising.
And some of them took their families from San Francisco out to the new, white suburbs of Marin. My mother took us south to the equally white and red--lined suburbs of Silicon Valley. She didn’t know, she says, that she was moving us to a whiter neighborhood. I tend to believe her. She was moving away from a chorus of critical older brothers who reviewed her every life decision and to a place where the weather was better, where her kids would have a yard to run in. It never occurred to her that the South Bay suburbs had anything to do with the huge black migration to Oakland and San Francisco during the war. She had an accent so it’s likely the real estate agents didn’t sell our house to her exactly in that way.
I don’t know when I first learned about the murder of Medgar Evers just as I don’t know when I figured out that I was born into the second week of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. I remember odd details of the run up to the 1960 election even though I wasn’t five yet, like the primary debate when my grandmother said Kennedy didn’t look old enough to wear long pants and I leaned into the television to see if I could see his bare legs, but I don’t remember a word about the Freedom Riders in ‘61 or any about Medgar Evers in 1963, a year when too many things got too clear too early for me and for so many of us.
Not about his kids or how his young wife fought him to quit his work as the NAACP field organizer in the most dangerous spot in the country. None of that. I was in a development meant to house the president’s NASA Moon project engineers in Sunnyvale, California, and Jackson, Mississippi might as well have been the Moon. Sometimes, I think the Kennedy’s invented the Moon to take our minds off of things. Or at least, for those of us who had the choice not to worry about church bombings or our fathers being shot in our driveways. I know that in my burb kid’s memory of those years, the Kennedys are jumbled up with the Moon, with Montgomery, with Jackson and more quietly, later with Selma.
That was my first decade on this planet and if there are heroes in the world and not just hype, Medgar Evers is a hero of that decade. We remember him even if the corrupt media will not mark or honor the sacrifice of a veteran of our foreign war and a brave leader of our domestic struggle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_HBdrJkmDE
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