What Unites Us Read online

  The descent from patriotism to nationalism can be subtle and dangerous, and I am reminded of those weeks and months after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. We had been grievously harmed, and it was only natural that we reacted by rallying together as Americans. But instead of asking ourselves hard questions about how we should proceed and making sure we did not forsake our democratic traditions, we wavered amid a climate of panic and hubris. In the name of protecting ourselves, we limited our civil liberties (the Patriot Act), undermined our moral traditions (torture), and ultimately launched a bloody and costly foreign misadventure (Iraq). Dissent, the rule of law, and deliberations on acts of war are all hallmarks of the best ideals of American patriotism, but they were marginalized during a fervor of nationalism.

  A potent symbol of that era could be found in small pieces of metal that suddenly became ubiquitous. It is perhaps hard to remember, but whether or not a politician wore a flag pin became a big deal after 9/11, and for years thereafter. I see no reason not to wear a flag pin, if one is so inclined. But as President George W. Bush and his aides prominently displayed flag pins on their lapels, the subtext was clear. They were implying that their approach to the terror attacks was the patriotic one, an echo of the first rush of flag pin popularity during the Nixon administration, when the pins were sported by Republican politicians as a response to the antiwar and social protests.

  In 2007, the then presidential candidate Barack Obama created a stir when he declined to wear a flag pin. He explained, “Shortly after 9/11, [the flag pin] became a substitute for, I think, true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security.” In the end, however, the distraction became too great, and Obama returned to wearing a pin.

  Patriotism—active, constructive patriotism—takes work. It takes knowledge, engagement with those who are different from you, and fairness in law and opportunity. It takes coming together for good causes. This is one of the things I cherish most about the United States: We are a nation not only of dreamers, but also of fixers. We have looked at our land and people, and said, time and time again, “This is not good enough; we can be better.”

  I have traveled many, many miles since that first family vacation. I have been blessed with a long and eventful life, where I have been able to see and learn so much. I have gone far beyond what I could have dreamed as a young boy. I know that I am a reporter who got lucky. I know that none of what I have been able to accomplish would have been possible without the great fortune of being born in the United States. I was taught by passionate teachers and have borne witness to men and women of far greater courage than I. There are so many who have sacrificed greatly, often with little recognition, to make this country a better, more just, and safer place to live.

  Like so many, I love my country and its people. I do so with a sentimentality that may seem anachronistic in today’s more jaded world. I have been known to get emotional when I talk about “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” But to me these words mean something very deep, a feeling I struggle to put into words. They aren’t just the lyrics before the umpire yells, “Play ball!” From battlefields to segregated lunch counters, I have seen the cost of freedom and bravery. It is high.

  Our nation will not survive as we know it without an engaged and committed population. We cannot wait for others to fix what is broken, and I am inspired to see a new generation of grassroots activists rise up to insist that the cause of justice is expressed broadly across America. Our founding documents contain some of the most beautiful and noble words ever put on paper. I recite them often and love them with every fiber of my being. “We the people,” all of us, are living together in perhaps the greatest social and governmental experiment ever conceived. We are being tested. How can we prepare ourselves for this moment? Are we up to the challenge?

  FREEDOM

  The Vote

  It would be nice to say that I came out of the womb with a deep sense of fairness, that I lectured my friends in the segregated schools of my youth about the injustice of institutional racism, that my family dinner table was a hotbed of passionate discussion about the evils of Jim Crow. I would like to be able to say all of that, but it would not be true. The truth is, for most of my early life I had too little consciousness about race, and I didn’t have any deep personal empathy. It was just the way things were. It’s not an excuse by any means. It was just a fact. The banality of racism and segregation was one of its most disturbing qualities.

  There is one moment from my youth, however, that is seared in my mind (although I confess that my memory is likely not precise; it was a long time ago). The year was 1946, I was in my early teens, and my father decided it was time I attend a precinct meeting to learn about civic life. The way politics in most states worked back then was that candidates were selected at state and national party conventions, not primaries. A precinct meeting chose delegates for a county convention, which selected delegates for the state or national party gatherings. So if you wanted a say in who your party nominee should be, you showed up at your precinct meeting. And in Texas in the 1940s, being a Democratic candidate was tantamount to election, just as it had been since the Civil War. My father once joked that if I wanted to see a Republican, he would take me to the Hermann Park zoo. He said they had a stuffed one there, and while he had heard there were great hordes of Republicans in the North, we hadn’t seen a live one down in Texas for quite some time.

  Precinct meetings were often raucous affairs, sort of like the old party conventions you see in historical documentaries—a far cry from the scripted events of today. Our gathering place was a ramshackle building that has since been rebuilt. And the man in charge was Papa Cosby, a longtime precinct chairman known for keeping the action moving. But that night, the first such event I had ever attended, was different. Even I could sense a hum in the air. I just didn’t know the cause. It turned out that attendance at these meetings was normally an all-white and all-male affair of about maybe thirty-five to fifty people. But tonight there were four or five African American men also in attendance. By law they had every right to be there. It was their precinct too, as my neighborhood, the Heights, abutted a predominantly African American neighborhood. But law and custom can be very different things.

  I remember grumblings, stares, and tension. The African American men made it clear that they were both citizens and veterans of the recent war. I seem to recall that they brought their service records with them. For a young man like me, it was exciting and yet unnerving. Without knowing that the evening would take this turn, my father had wanted me to be there. And yet I don’t remember any slackening in his resolve to stay. Quite the contrary. Naively, I asked my father what was happening. He said that he would explain it all later, but he did nod toward the African American men and say, “When they get up, we get up.” You voted in these meetings by standing. The precinct chair would say, “All those who support the measure, rise.” So when a vote on a particular issue came up, and the African Americans rose, we rose as well. We stood up, the only white people to do so, and we were certainly noticed. I sensed the displeasure from others in the room. And I felt, as we walked out into the evening, some jostling in our path. Or maybe that was imagined.

  I share this story not to suggest my father was a hero. For his time and place, he was remarkably unprejudiced. But he was not a trailblazer. His rationale in this case was straightforward: These men had fought in the war and they were entitled to vote. It wasn’t a commitment to tear down all of Jim Crow. It was just a matter of fairness. I would like to say that this moment struck a deep moral chord within me that altered my trajectory on race from that moment forward. But it didn’t fully register. I noted it and apparently filed it away for a time when I was more prepared to understand its lessons.

  When I joined CBS News in 1962, I got myself assigned to the civil rights beat. It was emerging as an important national story, and again I would like to say I wanted to cover it because I
sensed the moral import of the moment. But it was more that I saw it as a great opportunity for a reporter eager to be a witness to history, and to make a name for himself. One of my first stops was meeting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Albany, Georgia. It was an early effort for his movement, and this one would ultimately end in failure. But being in the room with King, hearing him praise Mahatma Gandhi and nonviolent protest, sensing his deep spirituality based on both his Christian faith and his readings of philosophy—all of this started to focus me.

  I then reported on a Ku Klux Klan rally, and then another one in rather short succession. Suddenly the stakes of the movement were very apparent. Seeing hate course through a crowd of hooded men and even some women as they rallied around a burning cross sent the chill of death down my spine. I remember trying to imagine what an African American would think, but in truth I couldn’t really imagine. It is a level of hatred that is not easy to quench and that I fear still lives within too many. Today bigotry is often clothed in euphemism, and when I hear that kind of dog-whistle rhetoric, I remember those Klan rallies.

  Armed with an appreciation of King’s movement and the hatred that stood in his way, I headed to Jackson, Mississippi. As a reporter, I walked the streets, stepped into the cafés, and visited the churches to find out whom I should talk to, who mattered. I heard the obvious answers: The mayor. The local business leaders. And since it was the state capital, I sought out the legislators and others in government. But among the African Americans I met, particularly the pastors, one name kept coming up from the start: I needed to meet Mr. Evers. Medgar Evers.

  By this point, Evers was in his late thirties and was already a veteran of the civil rights struggle, even if most of the country had not been paying close attention. Whereas King sought a broad mandate of social change on a variety of issues—including, of course, the right to vote—Evers was different. He was focused like a laser beam on voting.

  I remember meeting Evers for the first time, and if you were a fair judge of character, you couldn’t help but be impressed. He would look you squarely in the eye when he spoke. But more than that, he was determined to bring your attention to the issue that occupied his entire being—the right to vote. Once again, I was slow to completely appreciate the importance of his particular cause, until I joined him one Election Day at a polling place on the outskirts of Jackson where African Americans were not allowed to vote. Evers and a group of black voters showed up with their papers. As they approached the white voting official at the door, some in the group seemed to tremble, understandably. Not Evers. I learned later that he had done this many times before.

  What proceeded was a simple morality play, but one that shaped me as much or more than almost any other event in my lifetime. The voting official said, “What you doing here, boy?” And Evers politely responded that he had come with these fine people to vote. “You aren’t voting today, you aren’t voting any day,” came the reply. The words on the page cannot do any justice to the terror and violence in the voice. Evers explained that they had all their papers and were registered, knowing full well the response. “Well, I’m telling you,” the official answered, “they ain’t gonna vote.”

  Suddenly everything snapped to attention in my mind. I remembered going to the polling places with my father as early as I could walk, and the great pride with which he filled out his ballot—my father, whom at this point in 1962 I had just buried weeks earlier after his death in an automobile accident. I remembered the faces of the African American men at the precinct meeting, and standing when they stood. I retroactively understood the deep sin of segregation and racism that had enveloped me my entire life.

  To write this now is to be shocked anew by my naïveté and blindness. I wish I had seen all of this earlier. But the brazenness of a white election official tossing aside the constitutional right of enfranchisement, a right that entered the Constitution only after the Civil War, our bloodiest conflict, made me seethe with anger. I was standing off to the side, watching this transpire. I don’t remember having a camera crew at the time. Those days we often traveled without one, as showing up with a camera was considered a provocative act by local officials. But I do remember sharing my experience later with my soundman, who was from Alabama.

  “What did you expect to happen?” he asked.

  “Not that,” I said.

  “Well, that’s how it is in a lot of places,” he said.

  There was a disconnect back then between what was happening in the South and what the rest of the nation knew. Many people had no idea these kinds of things were taking place. Even some of my bosses back at CBS News headquarters in New York wondered how widespread and entrenched these types of actions were. Did this happen all the time, or was it a rare occurrence? Was it being staged? I knew what I was seeing and I was determined to bring this story into living rooms across the nation. This was not America as I had envisioned it. And I wanted my countrymen and women to know this too. I felt a great certainty in the separation of right from wrong. My relationship with my country would never be the same. Patriotism would require standing up to what I had seen, not standing alongside it in silence.

  I witnessed in Medgar Evers that day the very definition of courage and love of country—his country, my country, our country. After that moment, Evers and I spent more time together. We got to be a bit more than acquaintances, and we often shared a cola and a conversation in the shank of the evening after I had finished filing for the late radio news. Remarkably, I found very little hatred in the man. He didn’t hate white people, although I felt he had every right to. He hated the system and the elected officials who manipulated it. But he saw most of his white neighbors as decent Christian people who were just horribly misguided on race. They had grown up in a system they never questioned and never really understood.

  However, I had a sense from that first reporting trip that Evers was living on borrowed time. To stand up for the right to vote was to challenge all the power of the Southern status quo.

  I was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in June of 1963 when we got the call, and it came from King’s headquarters. Evers had been shot and killed. My crew and I chartered a plane, getting to Jackson before daybreak and any other national reporters. Evers had been shot on his front porch, while his wife and children were at home, by a coward hiding in the grass across the street. It was a calculated and cold-blooded assassination. The murder scene was eerily quiet. There were some local law enforcement, and eventually other reporters showed up, but I don’t remember any large crowds.

  As I reported from the city, I found that African Americans’ feelings ranged from outrage to despondency. This was what happened when someone tried to stand up and lead. But there was also a deep resolve to persist. Among white people, there were certainly a fair number who felt that Evers had gotten what he deserved. The majority just wanted to go about their lives as if nothing had happened. There might have been white people in Jackson who would have told me this was terrible, that we needed to get to the bottom of it, that we needed to change our ways. But if those people were there, I didn’t find them.

  Myrlie Evers would tell me later how terrified she was. She wasn’t only in shock and mourning the sudden death of her husband; she was frightened about what might happen to her children. I wish all those who so glibly try to suppress the vote today could be forced to look into her eyes as I did that day in Jackson.

  So many of our problems today are directly linked to the way we vote or how we are subtly prohibited from voting. In some ways, we have worked hard to enhance the ease of casting a ballot; we have early voting and voting by mail in many states. On the other hand, there are states seeking to limit access to the ballot box, even if they make claims to the contrary. And often these voter suppression efforts target the most marginal members of society. We see long lines at some precincts and short lines at others. It is easier for a white-collar worker to alter his or her schedule to vote, but for a single mother punching a clock with a long bus
ride to her job, limiting voting options can amount to disenfranchisement.

  It is one of the great truisms of a democratic form of government that not only political power but the very definition of citizenship is predicated on the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did much to fulfill the widespread enfranchisement for African Americans promised in 1870 in the Fifteenth Amendment. But a recent Supreme Court ruling has removed key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, and many of the gains we’ve seen are being curtailed under specious claims of voter fraud. So we see states passing voter ID laws and other hurdles, even though the truth is that in-person voter fraud is so rare as to be statistically nonexistent. The real danger to the sanctity of the vote lies in suppression.

  It is inevitable that the battle lines of the recent voting wars have centered on race. Indeed, these narratives—race and voting—are inextricably intertwined. Full citizenship has been an elusive goal for many African Americans, long after the bondage of slavery was lifted. (And for African American women, as for all women, it would require an additional amendment to the Constitution to get the right to vote.) Those who seek to suppress voting today are either ignorant of the history or are, as I suspect is more often the case, malevolently choosing to ignore it. I am loath to judge the hearts of others on this matter, because I too was naive. Perhaps part of the problem is that schools don’t teach enough of what happened then and is still happening now.

  To suppress the vote is to make a mockery of democracy. And those who do so are essentially acknowledging that their policies are unpopular. If you can’t convince a majority of voters that your ideas are worthy, you try to limit the pool of voters. This reveals a certain irony: Many who are most vocal in championing a free, open, and dynamic economy are the same political factions that suppress these principles when it comes to the currency of ideas. I think the record is clear that our republic has benefited from the expansion of suffrage.