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January 19, 1997
Black and white together now-
Oh deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome someday.
We sang last night as members of a community. Black and white together. In memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. This was Providence's second annual community sing for Martin Luther King Day sponsored by Temple Emanu-El and the Olney Street Baptist Church and the Rhode Island Committee for Non-Violence Initiatives.
Someone from Olney Street Baptist read aloud from Dr. King's last book, Where Do We Go from Here, Chaos or Community?. His words still have the power to move the heart.
Four young people from the RI Committee for Non-Violence Initiatives' training program spoke about there experiences. I was particularly moved by a young man named Jason who began the program while incarcerated at the Rhode Island State Training School. He spoke of how he had learned that violence is a choice, not something we have to do. He spoke of returning to his old neighborhood and how he almost got in a fight but he remembered how to handle it without violence. All four kids are from tough neighborhoods where violence is a way of life. One young man talked about how his group was breaking up because some of them were still fighting. One young woman talked about how she used to be a violent person until she learned it was a choice. That was a theme they all mentioned. Choice. They live in neighborhoods in a culture where the prevailing belief is you have to be violent to survive the violence... They've all changed their minds. These are not special privileged kids, they are ordinary kids from the street who learned violence as a way of life and now have learned non-violence as a way of life. The guy from the training school is now working with City Year to train the City Year volunteers in non-violence. One of the young women talked about how she was bringing the principles of non-violence into the schools...
The singing was a powerful experience. All those different voices raised in song. Familiar songs. Songs of Struggle; Songs of Hope. Singing was so much a part of the times I grew up in. I was moved to tears several times.
I want so much to write about what the songs brought up for me. This is hard to write. In some ways I have drifted away from values that were once central for me. The culture has drifted far from those values too. But scratch the surface or sing me the songs and I remember.
Most of the songs we sang last night I learned in Freedom School, where I also learned African-American history, and non-violence. "But", the reader may say, "you're white". Yup, so were half the kids in the Freedom School. Together. Community. Social Justice. Words we don't hear much in the cold of the end of the 20th century.
The Roxbury-Newton Freedom School grew out of the Boston School Stay out, a protest against de facto segregation in the Boston schools. We were kept out of school by our parents and sent to Freedom Schools set up in church basements. It was quite a phenomenon. When the protest was over, some of the churches in Roxbury (a predominantly black neighborhood in Boston) and Newton (a suburb bordering Boston) decided it was important for us to maintain the connections we'd made and to learn the things that weren't being taught in the regular schools. We met after school, alternating between the Roxbury Multi Service Center and the Eliot Church in Newton. This went on for years. My brothers were still going to Freedom School when I went off to college. I'm not sure when it ended.
There's lots more I need to write about that experience but it needs to be a well-researched carefully written essay - not a journal entry.
The cove was frozen today making amazing patterns in the ice on either side of a patch of open water near the bridge. Canada geese streamed back and forth along the edge of the ice in procession. Gulls rested on the ice. Swans and mallards dabbled in the open water. Hooded mergansers did their diving under the bridge. No sign of Igor but it's hard to spot him when there are hundreds of his kind - he doesn't stick to the swans as closely when geese are around. The one legged mallard was huddled in a small puddle under the bridge not moving much. Nancy was worried he was sick. It's hard to tell. He may just have been conserving energy in the bitter cold. We're talking single digits and negative digits the last couple of days. The whole place looked like a fairyland stage set in the brilliant blue of the clear day with the low sun glinting off the crystalline icescape. Breathtaking.
We saw the new Woody Allen musical at the Avon. The boiler broke. We were freezing. The movie was great. Goldie Hawn and Alan Alda were wonderful. The songs were wonderful. The dancing Grouchos number was wonderful. We laughed so hard it didn't matter there was no heat. See this movie.