The Education of a WASP

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen In September 1964, the white men accused of killing Lemuel Penn in Georgia were acquitted by an all-white Georgia jury. In October, the Reverend Martin Luther King, then thirty-five years old, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The following month, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover publicly called Dr. King "a notorious liar" for saying that FBI agents in Georgia failed to act on civil rights cases because they were Southerners. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X, the honestly angry man who had impressed me so profoundly on television , was shot and killed as he spoke to a group of followers in New York. Three Black Muslims were accused of his slaying . I overheard a Negro woman mentioning the murder casually as I prepared food in a church kitchen. Spike's Cub Scout troop was having its annual Blue and Gold dinner that night. Spike had chosen this troop. He wanted to be with his friend, Michael. Spike was one of the few (perhaps three) white children in the troop, and I was the only white person in the kitchen when I heard of the assassination. - 209 - "Good," said a light-skinned Negro woman standing next to me. A doctor's wife, also light-skinned, whose mink coat was hung carefully in a corner under her eye but away from the coleslaw, ham, and ice cream, said, "He asked for it." I had already learned that a sense of social justice does not necessarily come with brown pigmentation, and I knew most of the Negro parents in this group were well-to-do and materially content. But couldn't anyone express bereavement? No one did. Since the evening in Omaha, when Paul Benson told me something of the tall, slim man who said black men would have to figh t in the streets to become men, I had followed the career of Malcolm X. I had never forgotten this man, the ex-pimp, ex-convict, ex-dope addict, who had raised himself to brilliance in a few short years. I had come to believe that if he had grown so prodigiously and had now begun to admit that white and black might work together, then his potential for good was great. Now he was dead at thirty-nine. At first it felt strange to me that not one black person in that church basement shared my feeling of loss. Then I realized that my mourning was not for his loss to Negro people, but to America. I had an awful premonition we would miss him more than we knew. The assassination of Malcolm X made Ben's eight months of unemployment seem relatively minor, but by February 1965 our financial problems were becoming acute. Although we had lived frugally ever since leaving Omaha, our savings were nearly gone. I was writing radio-television commercials at home and it was painful to think of leaving my children, but I knew that March 31 was the deadline for my taking a full-time job. In the middle of March my brother telephoned. His nextdoor neighbor in ·Washington, D.C., was organizing a new department in the federal Office of Education and wanted - 210 - men "with a personal belief in integration." My brother had suggested Ben. When Ben went to Washington for the interview , I was not optimistic. Although he had talked of trying to find something "outside the business world," I thought it impossible for a forty-year-old man to change fields; Ben had no experience in anything but advertising and merchandising . '''hen Ben returned from his interview I was writing a television commercial at the kitchen table. He sat across from me and smiled jubilantly. I knew he had gotten the job. "I start next week," he said-four beautiful words after all those months of unemployment. Ben's job had come one day before my own deadline for job hunting. "I'll be working on school desegregation," Ben continued, grinning. "And this Mac Puccelli-the head of the department -acts as if he really means to enforce it. I'll be working out desegregation plans with the school superintendents in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia." As Ben began to describe the details of his new job, his enthusiasm was phenomenal. Never before had my quiet, reserved husband shown this much excitement. When working for the corporation he had displayed satisfaction over advertising campaigns or sales...