“It’s amazing why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back.”
Doc Rivers said that in August 2020, after Jacob Blake was killed by Kenosha police. His interview was on the news, here and gone, hard to find two days later. It was during the peak of the BLM protests last summer. Those words have haunted me since. I didn’t know a thing about Doc Rivers. Google told me he’s from Chicago, a professional basketball coach, and is probably a millionaire. I don’t understand professional sports or all the money generated by them. I’m not a fan. But those words kept echoing in my head.
Sidewalk message
Last weekend we watched “All The Way,” a 2016 film adaptation of a play in which Bryan Cranston reprises the role of LBJ he performed on stage. Civil Rights Act, 1964. Voting Rights Act, 1965. The story is about the hardball politics LBJ employed to get those milestone acts passed after the Kennedy assassination. In the process, the solidly Democratic South (Dixiecrats, then) felt betrayed and started leaving the party to join Republicans.
The South wanted to keep its Jim Crow laws. Southern senators bemoaned a loss of civil discourse and bipartisanship, claimed all that would be destroyed by passage of those bills. They were clear about keeping “negroes” in their place, which meant, among other things, not letting them vote. I was appalled, hearing that congressional debate. We have made progress in the last fifty years, that’s a fact. But it has been slow, foot-dragging progress.
MLK (played by Anthony Mackie) like LBJ, knew the time was right for such racist practices to end. The world is changing, they said. The old order cannot continue to stand. Droves of young white idealists joined blacks in voter registration drives. Three young men, two white, one black, were killed by the KKK in Mississippi in 1964. They were killed for trying to register blacks to vote. The film of fire hoses and dogs being turned on peaceful demonstrators in those days has become iconic. The ethnically diverse young people on our 2020 streets say the same things: the world is changing; the old order cannot stand.
Intersection where a young black man was killed in 2012
I was in college in 1964, learning how to drink while maintaining a 4.0 average, discovering literature I hadn’t known existed, seeing my first Fellini film, losing my virginity. I was busy. I paid no attention to politics. There were no black students at the University of Florida. Wait—there was one. A Jewish guy I dated for about five days knew the black student. I met him, a reserved young man, wary of us. I didn’t know why he was like that. I knew nothing.
In 2013 the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act LBJ and MLK and others worked so hard to pass. Activists gave their lives to get those measures accomplished. Since 2013 Republicans have been enabled by that Supreme Court rollback to ramp up the voter repression they were already doing.
Some Americans seem unable to surrender an illusory past, in which white people had all the privileges and others were contented to remain in medievally mandated lower ranks. Some Americans seem unable to accept that the U.S. never was, and certainly is not now, that country. It’s been 55 years since Jim Crow was outlawed and some still refuse to join today’s diverse world, regardless of the enormous contributions non-whites have made to the America that actually exists.
He’d just won a playoff game and ought to have been jubilant, when Coach Doc Rivers granted an interview. He talked about how he’d like to just be a coach but was so often reminded of the color of his skin. Trump keeps talking about fear, he said, but “we’re the ones getting shot.” His eyes glazed with tears, he said, “It’s amazing why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back.”
I saw this interview. “haunted” is the word I was searching for; thank you.
And just what era did Trump hope to return us to when America was Great? And who exactly thought it great enough to want to do it again?
Such a powerful piece, Pat. Thank you. If you haven’t yet watched the new documentary on Stacey Abrams, All In: The Fight for Democracy, it is another exccellent film documenting the struggle for voting rights.
That Doc Rivers interview made me cry. ( It’s viewable on You Tube. He has since been fired after a disappointing playoff series by the way.). I will never forget his heartbreak and his words.
I will never forget growing up in Vero Beach when you were there either. Thank God for phones now. I can only imagine what went on between the police and the black community of Gifford when no one was looking.
I was living your university experiences at Florida State up the road. We got our first black student my senior year, and where I did my student teaching at Rickard’s High School the first black student had his tray flipped in the cafeteria his first day. I was there.
The amazing thing is how the laws changed things so quickly. In the late 60’s I taught at an inner city school in Miami and those students seemed almost oblivious to the struggles that had gone before them. But laws can only change so much unfortunately. There always seem to be people that need enemies. that need to blame, that need their prejudices, that didn’t get enough positivity in their lives to make them kind and empathetic. It’s tragic really. I’d feel sorry for them if they didn’t make life so miserable for the rest of us.
I’m cheering for this blog post! Putting it up on my damn Facebook page.
Thanks, Pat. So powerful, heart-wrenching. In an attempt, I think, to remain hopeful somehow, I wrote the following short poem a couple weeks ago.
Sooner or Later
Rusty hinges crack open
Like oysters to the knife
Or rock struck from cliff.
All hearts open somehow.
Some as windows to night
And tired eyes to starlight,
A sigh without thought,
Parched earth to rain,
Broken honeycomb weeping,
Hurt to balm, fist to palm.
So many ways, all good.
All hearts open somehow.
Beautiful, Bob. And beautifully hopeful. Thanks so much for posting this poem.