I grew up in the City of Tonawanda, a suburb of Buffalo, NY that hugged the shore of the Niagara River. In those days, Tonawanda was similar to its gritty big sister city in many ways: it had an industrial base in Spaulding Fiber, it was populated with mostly working class people , and had pockets of immigrant families, especially German and Polish. What it did not share with Buffalo was racial diversity. The nearest we came to having people of color in our elementary classroom was a Native American boy in third grade. As a young child, it was all that I knew.
By my teen years, the world as I knew it had expanded, if not in the neighborhoods of Tonawanda, at least in the corridors of my mind. A voracious reader, I’d begun to pay attention to the Civil Rights movement as reported on the pages of the newspaper, and my thirteen-year-old self was broken-hearted when Dr. King was assassinated. Yet while I knew there was a world outside my white, blue collar suburban bubble, I had not yet been in relationship with a neighbor, co-worker, fellow worshipper, or classmate of African-American heritage. I may have known more, but I still had no interracial experience.
In the nearly fifty years since my graduation, life has changed in many ways, both in the world around me and in my own story. Our family has lived in multi-racial neighborhoods, we’ve served both African-American and multi-racial congregations, and were I to analyze the racial composition of my Facebook friends list, it would likely resemble the demographics of our country. Yeah for me, right?
I wish it was that easy. I’m struggling to write this column because race remains a difficult topic to address. I write from my own privileged position, influenced by my own bias. There’s also a nagging worry that my comments may trigger a letter to the editor, labeling me a radical woman or worse. My reputation!
Yet I also write from my own story, which runs through Hough. Cleveland’s Hough neighborhood was a fashionable residential area, predominantly white with a 5% non-white population in 1950. By 1960, its population was 74% non-white. In 1966, racial unrest boiled over and Hough burned. Hough’s story was complicated, repeated in many urban neighborhoods across the across the country.
We arrived in Hough in 1990, and halfway through our second year of ministry there, rioting erupted in Los Angeles. Four police officers, who had beaten Rodney King, a Black man stopped after a car chase, were tried and acquitted, and L.A. exploded. As we watched and waited, wondering what might become of our neighborhood, the beaten man pleaded for peace. “People, I just want to say, can’t we all get along?”
Rodney King’s words echoed as time marched on, through Ferguson, MO, in the aftermath of the death of Tamir Rice in a westside Cleveland neighborhood, to the Black Lives Matters protests of the summer and fall of 2020. Can’t we all get along? But what my older and hopefully wiser self understands is that “getting along” isn’t as simple as it sounds. “Getting along” can be accomplished by walking on eggshells day after day, or pretending that all is well. Yet there is another way, one that embraces the hard work of reckoning with history, recognizing our own deficits, and reaching out to build relationships with those we see as “other.”
I’m encouraged by a small group of Ashlanders who realize that it isn’t enough to wishfully hope that, Abracadabra!, all racial tension will evaporate and we’ll all live happily ever after. Instead, they’ve joined together in “Colorful Ashland,” with a mission to understand and share the way race impacts life in Ashland County, in education, religion, criminal justice, health, mental health, housing, employment and business. In doing so, they advocate for “liberty and justice for all,” not just as words recited in the Pledge of Allegiance, but as deeply held values.
Artist Paul Gauguin recognized a simple truth: “Color! What a deep and mysterious language.” Indeed, the fulness of color speaks into us deeply, as who we knew to be is transformed to who we can become.
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