Passionate for Justice. Catherine Meeks
Unlike Wells, I did not lose both of my parents, though I lost my father when I was sixteen. My mother was present and was gainfully employed, but still I assumed a great amount of responsibility in our household and felt that I had to help my mother as much as possible. This sense of responsibility led me to seek employment as a youngster, but the jobs never paid more than $3.00 per day. My jobs were cleaning houses for white women, babysitting, and working in a hotel as a short order cook in the hotel kitchen.
Though I was not compelled as Wells had been at sixteen to lie about my age so I could get a job in order to take care of younger siblings, the small amounts of money that I made did help my mother to make ends meet as she worked to take care of the four of us on a meager Arkansas teacher’s salary. My mother’s resourcefulness helped me to learn the meaning of “making a way out of no way.”
Clearly, just like Wells, I learned a great deal from my parents, although it would be years before I would come to see that fact and to appreciate it. Just as Wells had learned to be independent from her father and to have a deep and abiding faith from her devout mother, I learned from mine. My mother taught me that education was one of the most valuable possessions I could ever gain. Daddy taught me to love the land. Though he was a sharecropper, he loved the land and would rise even before me and go out to walk all around the field to see what had happened to the crops during the night. His love for the land was instructive to me, helping me to understand the need to be grounded as I traveled through the landmine of segregation and other forces of oppression that were not poised in my favor.
I share with Wells an inner motivation that propels me forward to this day. Wells recalled that she does not know when she began to read; the process must have begun very early in her life. She left school at sixteen to go to work, yet she maintained her curious mind and the courage to follow it throughout her life as she fought against lynching, racism, women’s oppression, and poverty. The archetypal spirit of resistor grew in both of us as we walked along the paths presented to us. Of course, the walk was different because she was traveling in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and I in the twentieth and twenty-first, but the beauty of the human journey is that we can share so much even though separated by a set of major differences.
When Wells was thrown from the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad ladies car because she was not white, though she had the proper ticket for that car, she had the courage to sue the railroad. She won the lawsuit initially but lost on appeal. This reminds me of my mother and several other teachers in her small school in Wheatley, Arkansas, who were fired after the school integrated, because the white people did not want to have the black teachers in the school. My mother and that courageous group of middle-age African American colleagues, having finally found their voices, sued the district. They won the lawsuit. They were surprised. Their example of resistance resonated with me as did Wells’s as I encountered opportunities to resist.
My earliest act of resistance came when I was a teenager and would be taken to the local doctor who had a separate waiting room for us in a dimly lit hallway while his white customers had a well-lit comfortable waiting room. I would refuse to sit in the space assigned to us. There was something in my soul that made me choose standing to sitting. It was a quiet protest, but I knew what I was doing, and it was intentional. My mother would have worried if she had known that I was resisting injustice. She simply thought I did not want to sit down. We did not talk about race and we certainly did not talk about resisting racism.
While race was a major factor in our daily lives, we did not talk about it beyond the survival instructions that were given to us about how to behave around white people. We were clear that there was a place assigned for us and that we had to be careful to stay in it. As I think back on it now, I understood that white people were dangerous. We lived on the property of a white man and we worked in his fields; we bought food from his store and I understood that he had a certain type of power in our lives. I did not really understand what it was except it was clear to me that we were not able to do whatever we wished. My parents did not talk about this limitation, but it was clearly present. White people were not a part of my life in a positive manner; it would not have crossed my mind to imagine being a friend to a white person.
The boundaries were clearly drawn, and we always knew to stay within them. In addition to the limits that I sensed, there was a clear sense of the white people holding the keys to our wellbeing. They owned everything that we needed to have: food, clothing, shoes, and any other necessity. Our challenge was to determine how to attain those goods when there was little or no money—often it was not easy to obtain basics. There were many times when we did not have shoes for the beginning of the school year because there was no money to pay for them and they were not sold in the store belonging to our landowner. The landowner happily sold us food and whatever else he had available on credit and those things were to be paid for when the crops were harvested.
It was this practice that made sharecropping nothing more than glorified slavery. By the time a sharecropper shopped from one harvest season to the next, there was always a huge bill to be paid. In my dad’s case, the bill usually took just about all the proceeds earned from the year’s cotton crop and he had to begin the next year with credit again. This cycle allows the landowner to keep the sharecropper in his debt with little chance to move to any type of economic stability. I watched my father go through this cycle year after year until he finally died of a stroke, which I believe was caused by years of oppression and the weight of the grief from losing my brother.
It was not until I went to college that I encountered four white people who took me into their hearts in a way that made it possible for me to see them as people that I could care about. They helped me to realize that loving a white person was possible. They loved me and related to me as a human being who deserved to be cared about. They stood up for me and other students of African descent when there was a crisis created on our campus by a grave act of injustice.
The act was the killing of a fifteen-year-old boy from our neighborhood by the campus security guard. It was murder and the person who did it was not held accountable. Our campus was filled with great turmoil around the injustice of the matter and the way in which the college worked to return to a sense of normalcy as quickly as possible. It was amid this turmoil that I caught a glimpse of their authentic and deep desire to do what was right for us as students of African descent, which I had never seen expressed by a white person at any time before. It was their honesty and willingness to risk their place in the white world for what they believed to be right for us that opened my eyes to the possibility of a relationship with a white person.
The door of my heart opened and allowed them to enter. It was the first time that I took the chance on letting a white person into the sacred space of my heart and it had been made possible because of their open hearts. Those relationships have lasted for over fifty years and helped me to be able to move along the path that my life needed to take me in my work of resistance to oppression and the pursuit of liberation.
Although I did not discover Wells until much later in my life, I think that my soul was always searching for her kindred spirit as a sister of resistance. When I left Brinkley, Arkansas, I was eighteen years old and had only been to Memphis, Tennessee, to visit the zoo and to Louisiana because one of my older sisters lived there. My older brothers lived in California and I began daydreaming about going to college there in my teenage years. At eighteen, I boarded a Greyhound bus and headed to Compton, California. I made the declaration that I was leaving the South with no plans to ever return in this lifetime.
Unlike Wells, I had the opportunity to leave the South because I chose to do so; she left because of threats to her life. Through her writing she made whites so angry that they burned down her newspaper office in Memphis and placed a bounty on her head. Yet despite this, she would come back to the South because she was more concerned about being true to herself than choosing the safe path. The realization of a similar spirit in myself was quite surprising.
This spirit had accompanied me along my path for longer than I knew, but the circumstances of my life allowed it to be mostly dormant. It was not until I went to college that I was given the opportunity to take a stand for justice in situations that would be challenging on many levels. My learned habit of keeping silent was challenged by the struggles for liberation that I had to navigate as a young African American woman