November 22, 2012
By Mickey Friedman
I was fifteen but looked more like twelve. Frightened, but determined. My local Woolworth’s was on Fordham Road. My sign said something about equal rights.
Ronald Martin, Robert Patterson and Mark Martin sit-in at Greensboro, NC Woolworth Counter, 1960 – Photo: UPI
The Greensboro, NC sit-in of February 1960 was a moment of crystal clear clarity for me. The first born son of parents who experienced bias and bigotry first-hand, I had a Hungarian-Jewish father and Italian-American Catholic mother: two poor immigrant families who never came to appreciate one another. My mother’s family was so angry she married a Jew, they exiled her; my Hungarian grandmother could never hide the disappointment her favorite son had married a crazy Italian. Young people today probably don’t understand how divisive religion was in the United States, but believe me, it wasn’t easy being a mutt in the 1950s.
My parents were always fearless advocates for racial equality, and as trade unionists and union organizers embraced a vision of a multi-colored, multi-ethnic America.
As a boy – looking to escape the normal horrors of childhood, plus the additional burdens of having politically-outspoken parents in the midst of McCarthyism – I would read about King Philip, Harriet Tubman, Tousaint L’Ouverture, and John Brown. Incidentally, if you care to see John Brown in a new light, read the great biography written by our own extraordinary W.E.B DuBois.
CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and NAACP members picket Grants and its segregated lunch counter.
There were so very many heroes and heroines of the civil rights struggle; from those who from the very first resisted the horrors of slavery. To the slaves who fought back; the slaves who oh so patiently endured and learned and planned and plotted escape and crafted a long-term strategy of survival. To the abolitionists who supported their black brothers and sisters; to the thousands who built and maintained an underground railroad to freedom.
I was profoundly moved by the young men of Greensboro, NC who one morning sat not where they were expected to sit but where they wanted to sit. Who so bravely broke the color line.
They were the kind of men I wanted to be. So I marched back and forth in front of my local Woolworth’s to shame the company that allowed segregation in its Southern stores. It was hard to ignore the surprise of my fellow Bronxites that this faraway problem had somehow come home, when really all they wanted was to shop without controversy for the few knicknacks they knew they could get cheaper at their five and dime.
It’s fair to say a lot of people weren’t happy that day. But I had a vision in my head of a world of black and white and all kinds of in-between. It sounds corny but it sustained me. Later I made friends with some of the radical feminists who formed “It’s All Right To Be Woman Theater,” and came to treasure James Baldwin and Alan Ginsberg. A girlfriend had an apartment right by the Stonewall Inn. There was liberation everywhere about us, millions working, in Joni Mitchell’s words, to be “unfettered and alive.”
These memories came flooding back to me early Wednesday morning when I woke from a thick haze. For days I had been in and out of bed, weak and tired with what I self-diagnosed as a stomach virus or stomach flu or some rare brand new near-fatal disease involving some invisible and crafty parasitey kind of worm-thing.
Through it all I had maintained my determination not to watch any of the incessant presidential political screech. But I woke with a start at 6AM on Election Day worried that Scott Brown would win by one vote and my un-cast vote for Elizabeth Warren would ensure the future of an even more dreadful Supreme Court. Such is the power of illness-borne delusion. Somehow I made it to the new firehouse in The Best Small Town in America before 7AM and was one of the first to vote. And while I tried to pretend I was better and made it to Fuel, several hours later I was home and asleep again. Still sick enough to miss poker.
I remember waking at about nine on Election Night for just a flash to see that Obama was losing the electoral college. Well, I reminded myself, I had survived Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Bush. Maybe with medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide I could transition to a pain-free journey out of here.
Woman in audience listening to President Obama’s victory speech, 2012
I woke up next to Barack Obama’s acceptance speech before many thousands in Chicago. There was that picture I had imagined more than fifty years ago. Men, women, young, old, black, white, gay, straight, Asian, Latino. It’s the picture that explains his victory and Mr. Romney’s defeat. When it came down to it millions of black people, Asian people, Latino people, young women, men and women who embrace religious tolerance and racial harmony – ironically Mr. Romney’s dreaded 47% + 3% – who refused to let some fabulously wealthy white men & their bitter allies rule their lives. The real heroes.