NOW AND THEN

I wanted to write this piece in order to show the differences, and similarities, between how social movements were handled in my grandfather’s day in comparison (or contrast) to how we handle them today, how social media has influenced us for better or worse, and to ask an all-important, though admittedly impossible, question: Is a world of equality and fair treatment even possible?

As someone who is an activist of words, I often don’t know whether or not I am doing enough, if my methods of getting messages across are effective enough, if words on a page will be enough to make someone question themselves and/or this world we live in. Is there a right or wrong way?

Sitting down and speaking with my grandfather to try and find these answers and to discuss his days as a protestor and local activist in the city of Louisville was a welcome treat, mostly due to the fact that while Charles is an American hero, he is also extremely humble and quiet. He isn’t the kind of old man who will randomly start ranting about “the Good Ol’ Days,” spouting his excellence to anyone willing to open their ears. Quite the contrary. Instead he’ll sit quietly, occasionally humming a song or yelling a crass remark when a point guard misses the shot. 

“I was born here in Louisville, Kentucky,” he begins. “I grew up in the California neighborhood, in my early years, attended Centennial Baptist Church, and eventually moved to the Russell neighborhood when I was nine years old… and went to Madison Junior High School and onto Central High School, which were basically all-Black schools.” It was during this time in his youth that Charles began noticing the uneven scale in which people of color were being weighed in comparison to white peers. He was pushed to become active in demonstrations and boycotts while at a camp that would take a day out of the week to go to the movie theater or a drive-in movie, where he said he “ran smack” into the harsh reality of segregation. He describes, “That particular year I chose to see a movie at the drive-in, and I was told that I could not go to the drive-in, but they didn’t really give me a reason why. So there was a young counselor there who came to explain to me that only whites could go to the drive-in, Blacks could not go to the drive-in and I’d have to go to the movies rather than the drive-in and sit in the balcony where Black folks sat. And I refused to go. So that’s what really got me into hating segregation.” Even more motivation to demonstrate came out of local problems such as voting rights (sound familiar?) and problems in regard to housing. As for if he ever felt hesitant or afraid when expressing this hatred through civil action, he responded, “There were places that I did not like to demonstrate in, would rather not have been because they tended to be more boisterous and physical against you, but no I never hesitated to go.” Yes, my grandfather is a gangster. 

In all seriousness, hearing the word “hating” out of his mouth was a gut punch I did not expect. For my entire life I have hardly seen him angry, let alone show any hatred. He is someone who dedicated his life to acts of love. He took care of both his parents and my grandmother’s parents in their old age, he raised two children, he has been a major player in the raising of all of his grandchildren and has even played a part in making sure his great-grandchildren are taken care of. That’s four generations of love, not to mention the love put into his now 58-year marriage to his wife, my grandmother. So for him to hate something means that it was something that was nearly impossible to deal with, impossible to feel like a human being in the face of. I often forget the abundance of privilege we are naturally given being from a later generation, and while things are not anywhere near perfect, there have been great strides but also great stalls. “I think it’s changed where you can basically eat and drink where you want to, go into restaurants, clubs, buy a house where you want to for the most part, but as for employment, promotions, things like that, I don’t think it’s changed a lot at all. If you’ve got fifty whites over a company, you may have one spot for one Black person and it tends to stay that way. If a Black happens to be promoted to a president’s job or CEO and he has diversity within his VPs, when he retires, they tend to disappear. I think industry or large companies, financial industries, are still well-segregated places.” 

I often forget the abundance of privilege we are naturally given being from a later generation…

Clearly while the year and even the millennium has changed, a lot of the problems remain the same. One thing that has grown rapidly in use and popularity that certainly did not exist in the 1950s and 1960s is social media. Now more than ever people have the power to be activists at their fingertips. Anyone can share an opinion; anyone can make a statement without even moving one foot off their bed. We have seen social media campaigns and call-outs lead to great progress and the creation of groups, organizations and causes; it has promoted stories of individuals like Breonna Taylor to a global level, whereas it might not have spread far out of the city fifty years ago. Still, there are negative sides to everything and social media doesn’t get excused from that fact. The internet is full of people who would rather see destruction than construction, who would rather build twenty more statues than take one down. There are those who go to protests simply for photo-ops and clout, and those who post black boxes without ever giving much of a thought to what it means.

Just as social media’s ability to give anyone’s voice a platform to be used for good, it can equally be used for destruction and the rallying of hate, not peace. “Where we always met at a church and marched from the church to the downtown area… on social media they can meet at several different places, they don’t have to all meet together. You know, they basically come and they’re ready to march in the streets,” Charles explains. “I think it helps in that sense but it could hurt people if there’s someone on there that’s doing something wrong that hurts the protest or what it’s about.” Often it is law enforcement that agitates, disrupts or infiltrates otherwise peaceful demonstrations, causing the portrait of the protestors to be painted as one of violence and disarray, though there’s a good chance that is not the case. 

In many ways we have built this invisible line between generations, one that has no reason to exist, because that line is blurred, barely present. He continuously referred to it as ‘The Movement,’ something that is reliant on progress, on motion. In my grandfather’s youth, there was the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which took the lives of four young Black girls. I had the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which took the lives of nine Black individuals. He had Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. say “I Have a Dream” and Malcolm X say “By Any Means Necessary,” same as we had President Barack Obama say “Yes We Can” and his wife Michelle say “When They Go Low, We Go High.” It is why my grandfather spent hours in jail for his activism, same as present-day protestors who find the need for bail funds because sometimes fighting for “No Justice, No Peace,” can land you behind bars. It is why he can remember the Rodney King beating that was caught on video in 1992 as well as we can mentally flash to the murder of George Floyd in 2020, similarly captured on video. The record continues to spin. 

As the conversation with my grandfather went on, I began to realize that we are all feasting off the fruit of the labor conducted by those who came before us. Those who knew well before any of us did how tragedy-prone this country can be, how dangerous it can be to be a certain shade, to be seen on a certain side of town, to want to do something as basic as watching a movie at the drive-in with the rest of your peers. It began to weigh on me the true differences between generations, and how me – a twenty-two-year-old – has never and probably will never endure some of the sights and experiences that my grandfather did. He stood on the frontline before it was popular, before it was posted on social media, before it received likes and direct messages. He took risks without the promise of reward. He watched as his heroes and leaders were assassinated. He managed to excel in the face of great adversity. And still, despite his silent demeanor and often-straight, unreadable face, he has hope that the actions taken today are continuations in the same fight and that there is a chance of winning, of achieving what was started even before him, with his parents, and even before them in Southern towns and pain-filled plantations where revolts were a means of either freedom or death. My grandfather has always and will forever be an American hero, if not to the world, to me alone. He is one of the people I aim to make most proud. When my biological father made the choice not to be in my life, my grandfather stepped up and filled that space, showing me what it meant to be a strong Black man, as well as a smart one, a driven one, one with integrity and heart, a selfless one. I stand in the shadow of that great man and can only hope that one day I am half the person he is. I will forever keep the recording of this brief conversation, of this knowledge and short memoir he has given, this voice of his that will forever be immortalized not only through that recording but also here, on this page. He will forever live.

And now, if we have any more fight left in us, which I know we do, because we must, I hope that we continue to raise our voices and raise our fists, so high that the clouds feel the power of our melanin, the strength of our colorful calls. And hopefully one day we too can sit down with our grandchildren and tell them the stories of our days in the streets, when we were the ones changing the world and using our voices to spin the record in the right direction.