Preach Hope, Do Good, & Go to Work: Lessons from Ruby Bridges, Dr. King, & Toni Morrison
Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial
“Are you prepared to never see the fruit of your labor?” A few years ago, I began asking myself this question. Regrettably, it’s one I’m regularly confronted with in the face of relentless retrenchment. As a scholar of race, one of the more difficult realizations I’ve come to grips with is just how long the evil of racism has gripped humanity; how many generations have passed while seemingly crushed by its weight. How many of our heroes have died with their work unfulfilled? W.E.B. Du Bois, who died an expatriate on the morning of the March on Washington with two “warring ideals” still raging within him. Martin Luther King Jr., who was killed before walking in the promised land, never to see his dreams manifested in this temporal life. It almost feels like the reward for a lifetime of fighting evil in America is a cruel, violent, or hopeless death at the hands of hatred, murder, or despair. Is such a death the destined end for the descendants of the disinherited? Is a slow demise– by way of the surgical hands of evil and the indifference of the blind eye– the fate of those who face the dark depths of despair? Are we cursed? Is this life our sinister gift? Are we trapped in a labyrinth of literal hell on earth where evil prevails?
Ten days ago I was walking through a limestone, ivy-covered campus bustling with cars and pedestrians. Like the vines on the walls of the century-old buildings, my mind was strangled with insurmountable questions to an impenetrable problem. What are we going to do? Will it be enough? In my peripheral vision, a mom and young daughter walked hand in hand towards a towering chapel bearing the name of a 20th-century oligarch. Like me, they had just left a corner cafe where they answered emails and worked on homework. Softly but persistently, the little girl had spent much of her time asking her mom for a sandwich. I could sense the uncertainty from her mother, as if she knew the extra order would go to waste. “I’ll just snack a lot until dinner,” the girl finally decided. We walked among a crowd of people headed to an event headlined by a one-time little girl who– 65 years ago this November– took a walk to school hand in hand with her own mom. Her name is Ruby Bridges.
When I reached the chapel entrance, a line had already developed and begun to curl around the block. A group of women– presumably students– had backpacks and swayed in the frigid temperatures to keep warm. A small woman in front of me kept looking behind us, anxiously trying to spot her companions whom she was on the phone with. She reminded me of my wife’s grandmother. We call her “tiny.” The doors of the church opened, and the line began to move forward. I lost sight of the wondering woman. Now inside the chapel, I found myself behind more students who were determined to stay together amidst the rush of the crowd down the center aisle. I found my seat, but was quickly back on my feet when a woman– who I learned (to my surprise) was 85– asked to sit in my row. I stepped out to make room, and noticed another group of women– decked out in pink and green– huddled together for a group picture. “I told you we should have sat on that side!” Hearing this remark I looked directly behind me to see an excited student playfully scolding her friends for not listening to her on where to sit. Apparently, an entire section, including the front row where she wanted to sit, had been de-reserved. Her braids floated down towards the ground the length of her torso, and her off-shoulder sweater reminded me of yearbook pictures in the mid-2000’s. The chapel was full by now. Fittingly, many brought their children. I had been there before to hear the likes of Eric Holder, Valerie Jarrett, and even Martin Luther King III. I had never seen it like this. There was a palpable sense that we were witnessing history with our own eyes. Someone who had lived to– no, survived to tell about it.
And she told about it. All of it. After just one simple introductory question, Ruby told her story. For thirty gripping, uninterrupted minutes. She spoke of her family and communities fear and worry, and the NAACP’s proactive strategy to integrate schools in New Orleans. She spoke of her innocence as a six year-old child– the parade she thought they were throwing for her on the first day of school, and how the empty school signaled to her that she simply must have been smarter than everyone else and deserving of her own school. She spoke of sandwiches– those she didn’t eat and stacked in a cupboard until they spoiled and her classroom wreaked. Unlike the young girl I witnessed at the cafe, she didn’t ask for sandwiches. She asked for friends, friends she thought were in the cafeteria while she was forced to eat alone in a classroom. So she protested by throwing out her lunch, until the one White teacher she had for an entire year– a teacher that had to be flown from Boston because the local White teachers refused to teach her– took her to the empty cafeteria. There were no friends. The cafeteria was empty. In fact, there were only a few White students whose parents even allowed them to attend the school with Ruby. And unbeknownst to Ruby, they had been hidden from her by the school principal. She was alone.
Ruby is a captivating storyteller. What captivated me most, however, was not the story of her brave walks to integrate New Orleans schools. Rather, I was captivated by her response to the interviewer’s final question: “What sustained you?”
Again, without needing much prompting at all, Ruby spoke. This time, however, she didn’t speak of history. She spoke of hope. And though she was sitting in a chair a few feet from the pulpit, Ruby’s hope still preached. For her, this one word encapsulated what has literally been a lifetime of sustenance. Faced with unemployment and uncertainty earlier in her life, Ruby was searching for an answer.
“I got on my knees in my prayer closet and asked ‘what do you want me to do?’… [I thought] if the voice I heard is who I think it is, then I’m going to listen. …When I surrendered… [I realized] my path was already decided… My story was already written. Ever since I got on my knees… lightning struck wherever I went.”
The answer to her questions was clear: Do good. Though a small child who was innocent of the “parades” cruel intent, she had looked evil in the face. Years later, she would find herself at the edge of life, looking down to the depths of despair when she saw– literally– the murderous capacity of humanity take her son away from her. And still, she said, “I believe there is more good in the world than evil.” Upon hearing this story of hope, the room filled with applause. “But,” Ruby said. She wasn’t finished. “Good people have to stand up and choose a side. …Evil is doing something. Good must do something, too.”
To close the evening, the dean of the chapel stepped to the pulpit. Considering the event was held in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and in celebration of King Day, he read one of Dr. King’s most quoted lines.
“On some positions; cowardice asks the questions, is it safe; expediency asks the question, is it politic; vanity asks the question, is it popular, but conscious asks the question, is it right. And on some positions, it is necessary for the moral individual to take a stand that is neither safe, nor politic nor popular; but he must do it because it is right.”
I had heard this quote before. In fact, a week before the event I discussed it in a lecture I gave commemorating King. In just a week’s time, however, this quote had reached a different place. Instead of my head, it reached my heart. And I have Ruby to thank for that. You see, up to this point my wrestling over the past week had been an intellectual exercise devoid of the matters of the heart. I had been faced with what felt like an insurmountable peak, and I was searching for intellectual strategy to ascend the mountain. But Ruby reminded me, just as James Weldon Johnson did 125 years ago, to sing a song full of hope:
“Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?”
“We have come. … We have come.” These often-repeated words are easy to overlook in what has become known as the “Black National Anthem.” But these words tell a story. They tell Ruby’s story. They tell Martin’s story. They tell Du Bois’s story. They tell our story. We. have. come. But to what? To face our death? To experience our demise? To live in hell on earth? No. We have come to do what they did: preach hope and do good. And we will do good as they did it, because “good must do something” in the face of evil. Not so we can taste the fruit of the promised land, but so our children can. We will– as Toni Morrison exhorts us– “go to work.”
Tryce Prince writes on race, religion, and culture. Reach him on Twitter @TrycePrince
