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You know, I think a lot about the black people who were willing to put their dignity, and often their lives, on the line to bring about equality for their people, and then I think about this in the context of the choice movement now that values the individual over the whole.
Abon and Lucille Bridges had been sharecroppers when they moved to New Orleans for a better life. They sent their 6-year-old child through a white mob everyday in order to challenge segregation in the South for all black children.
When white politicians shut down the entire school system in Prince Edward's County to avoid letting black kids sit in classrooms with white kids, to break the resistance they offered black parents vouchers to pay for private school. Those parents refused.
They refused because they understood taking the benefit for their own children would mean condemning the rest of America's black children to apartheid schools. So their kids went without schools for FIVE years because they understood their obligation to their community.
In North Carolina and Alabama, I interviewed black families who are blackballed, fired from jobs, evicted from homes, threatened and abused, for refusing to remove their names from lawsuits challenging segregation in schools.
In Detroit, Vera Bradley gave up her privacy, the privacy of her children, to challenge apartheid in the North, and her family suffered life-long effects of this decision.
Now we have black parents challenging school deseg lawsuits that work to provide integration for thousands of students because their own child did not get into their first choice school. You have black advocates pushing individual "choice" over fighting for a collective good.
Too many black folks are adopting the tactics of those who created the very systems our ancestors fought against. Too many have bought into the idea of the individual or the collective. But black people have never had that luxury.
Had Oliver Brown and Vera Bradley and the Bridges and the Shuttlesworths and the Evers thought this way, we would not even be able to exercise the "choices" we think we have. Just something that's been on my mind a lot.
