Passing It On

Black, white, yellow or brown: Does it really matter?

How has race impacted your family history?

Although this sensitive issue is often overlooked as we delve into our roots, it often plays a larger role than you might imagine. My blogging friend Miriam Midkiff of AnceStories has an excellent post this week on the topic, with Martin Luther King Day less than a week away.

Even in these relatively enlightened times, the race issue is never far away. This morning’s paper carried a story about Louisiana’s new governor, Bobby Jindal, calling him “the nation’s first elected Indian-American chief executive and the state’s first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction.” Democratic presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been sparring over the issue for the past week.

I grew up in the overwhelmingly white community of Council Bluffs, Iowa. Council Bluffs was also a very blue collar railroad town in those days. I worked my way through college mostly by working a variety of railroad jobs. On those jobs I worked side-by-side mostly with white men of limited education who were outspoken about their deep-seated racist views. I also worked with American Indians, blacks and Latinos at a time when the civil rights movement was just gaining a solid foothold in American culture. It was a rich, yet often tense, environment.

My father-in-law was mostly Irish and faced prejudice in his formative years in Omaha. Italians and Czechs also had their own enclaves in the first half of the 20th century in Omaha, doing much of their business and most of their socializing with “their own kind.”

It’s hard for me to get a good read on how we all get along these days. In times of crisis, a true democracy built on the backs and minds of a diverse populace whose civil rights are genuinely equal should be able to pull together for the common good rather than splintering off into separate groups dedicated to preserving their own mutual self interests.

Regardless of how you see the state of the races today, it’s worth reflecting on where your family has been with regard to race relations, evaluating where it is today and, most importantly, projecting where you’d like for it to be in future generations.

Larry Lehmer, founder and president of When Words Matter, is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of benchilada.

The book of John: Fascinating, captivating and unwritten

By any measure, John Seigenthaler’s personal history is fascinating.

A self-described “son of the racist South,” Seigenthaler grew up in Nashville where, although a parent read to him every night, he considered the black women employed by his family to be his surrogate mothers. Still, if a black person passed him while heading to the rear of a city bus, he didn’t see them.

“If you were white, you were blind to their existence,” Seigenthaler said during his presentation at the 2007 Conference of the Association of Personal Historians in Nashville earlier this week.

That changed one day in the late 1940s as Seigenthaler worked in the control tower at McDill Field in Tampa, Florida. From his vantage point he could see his fellow airmen spill out from the barracks below, whites on one side, blacks on the other. Suddenly, it struck him. This is wrong.

“Where was my mind?” he said. “Where was my heart?”

When he left the service, Seigenthaler had the great fortune of having an uncle that served on the board of a newspaper group. Pick where you want to work, said the uncle. Seigenthaler picked Nashville’s Tennessean, a feisty, aggressive newspaper where he saw effecting change as a possibility.

Seigenthaler joined a newsroom staff that in the late 1950s was overflowing with young talent that would make its mark for decades to come. There was David Halberstam, the Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist and author; Tom Wicker, a one-time New York Times Washington bureau chief and author of several books about U.S. presidents; Fred Graham, now a Court TV anchor who then was wrapping up his law studies at Vanderbilt University and Wallace Westfeldt, who went on to produce the Huntley and Brinkley news shows for NBC-TV.

Student sit-ins had their birth in Nashville around that time, putting the young reporters at the forefront of a movement that would ignite change across the land. But, when new management shifted coverage of the emerging civil rights struggle to the Associated Press, the discouraged luminaries departed. That included Seigenthaler, who became an assistant to attorney general Bobby Kennedy in the early 1960s.

It was in this role that Seigenthaler was badly beaten and hospitalized during a Freedom Ride confrontation. Another change in management at The Tennessean resulted in Seigenthaler’s return. He would continue in the newspaper business for the rest of his career, except for a brief stint with Kennedy’s ill-fated presidential campaign in 1968.

Most recently, he has written a book about President James J. Polk but Seigenthaler admitted to the gathering of personal historians this week that he has yet to start on his own memoirs.

“It’s just in the last couple of years I’ve started to think ‘What am I going to do with all this stuff’?” the 80-year-old Seigenthaler said. “If I don’t get it down, I’ll feel disappointed. I guess I’ll feel kind of like a failure. We’ve all got these great stories to tell.”

Luckily for Seigenthaler, he’s left a voluminous public record of his life. The rest of us are rarely so fortunate. The time to collect those stories that are important to us is now.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. If you’d like to know more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo: John Seigenthaler in Nashville by lwlehmer.