A few years ago, I spent some time in the city of my birth, helping my youngest brother to recover from a bout of illness. While in Pittsburgh, I found that a playwright I admired – and whose play, “Fences,” I had seen at the Indiana Repertory Theater — had a museum in his honor. The museum was around the corner from the art school I had attended, and I spent a long afternoon exploring it. One of the interesting things about the building in October 2016 was that the outside windows had pictures of people of varying pigmentation, with a corresponding Pantone Matching System (PMS) color. I never found my PMS color, but I imagined that, if the structure had been there in 1965, I would have skipped school to visit it. One of the exhibits was about the artists who illustrated the movements of the civil rights era. One of the featured artists had been an instructor when I had attended the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, but a series of graphic novels about Georgia Representative John Lewis especially interested me. When I got back to Indianapolis, I purchased the books from Kathleen Angelone’s bookstore, Bookmamas.
February is celebrated as Black History Month, and I had a conversation with my son-in-love, Bing Crosby, the father of two of my grandchildren. Not about the celebration of the month, but about the books that I had purchased for his two children. March, a graphic novel trilogy written by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell, tells the story of Lewis’ trials and triumphs from childhood through adulthood. My conversation with Bing was about my concern that the depictions of violence in the books may be too disturbing for my sensitive, passionate grandson. Bing told me that he felt that, on the cusp of his 15th birthday, Xavion was ready for the reality of the civil rights struggle. “Plus, he has me, his mother and you and grandma to help him understand the things he needs to know.” I told Bing that I had purchased the boxed set of March, as well as the individual books, so that I could read along with my grandson, if necessary.
John Lewis led sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters in the South, participated in the Freedom Rides to desegregate public transportation and had his skull fractured on Bloody Sunday, the 1965 assault on peaceful marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Despite being characterized by a politician as being “all talk, talk, talk (commas are mine),” John Lewis has earned a place in American history with his activism on behalf of African-American civil rights. His story is richly illustrated and easy to follow, and despite the accurate depictions of firehoses being turned on children, dogs being set loose on demonstrators, and Emmet Till being abducted and murdered, a necessary history to be studied. I want my grandchildren to have the facts of their history, no matter how brutal. Of course, we adults need to be there for the context, and the difficult explanations.
Black history is America’s history, broken out by cultural (racial) designation because it had been systematically ignored for so long. We’ve come a long way as a country in our correction of the “permanent record;” the grades on our report card are rising. But as Paul Simon sang, “this is the story of how we begin to remember.” In our early conversations with the young, we should begin with what we know, read or saw, and then work together to understand the “why” after we acknowledge the “how.”