Never really thought about it like this, but the black people in particular that we are losing to this pandemic, are Civil Rights Movement survivors. A lot of wisdom of how to overcome the struggle is being lost this year...
We Are Losing a Generation of Civil-Rights Memories
America’s response to the pandemic harkens back to ugly times in our country’s history. But to recognize that, we need to know our elders’ stories.
LETA SELETZKY
I knew it was only a matter of time before coronavirus deaths hit my social-media feeds—before people I knew would grieve, or even become ill and die themselves—but I wasn’t prepared for the speed or relentlessness with which it happened. Or that most of the victims I’d see would be black. I knew that to a large extent this reflected the people and topics I followed, but it was something bigger too, a hint of the grim reality that was only just emerging.
My eyes began to search for COVID-19 in every death announcement. It wasn’t always there, as with the Reverend Joseph Lowery, known as the “Dean of the Civil-Rights Movement,” who died on March 27 at the age of 98, of causes unrelated to the coronavirus. But it often was, and as I scrolled past smiling photos of people of all ages—daughters, sons, cousins, matriarchs, and patriarchs—I wondered how American society would bear a loss of this magnitude, what it would do to our country to lose them and all they remembered.
Bree Newsome: The Civil-Rights Movement’s generation gap
I’ve been thinking about ancestral memories for a long time. In the mid-’80s, when I was 11, I interviewed my grandparents. For all the time I’d spent with them over the years—every day after school, plus all summer while my mom worked—I realized I knew little about their early lives and the stories of their families. Once in a while, they’d let slip little anecdotes—some amusing, others revealing of the discrimination they had endured during the brutal Jim Crow era. But much of their lives lay behind a heavy curtain that rarely opened. They didn’t like talking about the past, and if their conversation touched on it, they didn’t linger there.
As I slouched cross-legged on the variegated shag carpet in their Memphis bungalow, Grandma—a tall, lean, reddish-brown woman in her 70s—sat languid and elegant on a tufted gold velvet armchair, its plastic upholstery cover crinkling beneath her when she shifted. A few feet away, Granddaddy, a round man in his 80s with horn-rimmed glasses resting on his dark bronze face, perched on a red velvet damask armchair, also covered in plastic. They gazed at nothing in particular—nothing visible to me, anyway—while I formed my questions: What were the names of the Mississippi Delta towns where they were born? What were the names of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents? What were the oldest tales they could recall?
From top to bottom: Seletzky’s grandmother; Seletzky as a baby with her parents; Seletzky’s grandfather (Courtesy of Leta Seletzky)
They answered in turn, hesitantly at first, noting dates and surnames, mentioning towns, states, and even another country, Cuba, through which Granddaddy’s ancestors passed before landing in the American South. I scribbled notes in pencil on a scrap of newspaper, the only paper I had handy.
This would be our only interview, extracting mostly biographical particulars. I took home the scrap of paper bearing my notes and put it in a desk drawer, where it lay for years among a jumble of trinkets and ephemera before disappearing in the whirlwind of packing for college. Over the course of my burgeoning adulthood, I gradually became aware of its loss, my heart dropping when something triggered a memory that took me back to its precious details. Never again, I swore, would I fail as the custodian of a fragment of history.
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@ where was W, n*gga he was at home hoping your goofy ass was going to get removed like the majority of everyone else.
what do you mean, you want states to have less power? i think they should have more power
i think montana should be free to create separate guidelines from new york
