It was a hell of a time.  It was a complicated time.  It was the time of the civil rights movement.  It was the movement for black equality in which some white Americans were foot soldiers. 

    In this memoir, Dick J. Reavis tells us his story of being a white civil rights foot soldier during the summer of 1964. His mother and father objected.  His father said to him that yeah Dr. King wants you down there but don’t you see why; “…If white kids die, then this Dr. King will get more publicity.”  Still Dick Reavis left Texas to go South to Georgia and then Mississippi. Reavis become a worker for SCOPE (Summer Community Organizing and Political Education) a project sponsored by the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference).

    A Texas white boy, Dick J. Reavis had a lot to learn about the civil rights movement and about interacting with African Americans.  He learned that SCOPE represented a shift in the goals of the movement:

    “Always before… the Movement had in many ways pleaded… for whites to accept blacks.  The shift towards community organizing meant that the Movement would henceforth demand not a seat next to whites in a diner, but the seat at which the whites were sitting: it was [now] a struggle to take from whites the seats of power and patronage. …the Movement was not asking for acceptance, tolerance, or love; it was demanding power.”

    That made things complicated.  But even a young and motivated white boy could find a way to wrap his mind around that. More difficult were the lessons that were to come from interpersonal interaction mistakes. One of the things that made it a hell of time was the push to transition from a racial-caste system where being white made you right, and being black meant you had to get back, to a system where black and white people would have to interact with each other on equal terms.

   Problem was the caste system still existed. That meant that even an attempt to prevent a negative racial incident could go bad interpersonally for those on the same side. 

    A movement meeting was held in the backwoods outside Demopolis, Mississippi; although a SCOPE worker and a driver, Reavis was not allowed in because he was white.  Reavis and Jerry, a black movement spokesperson, left that meeting to head back into Demopolis.  Just as they made it to town, the car lost power. Reavis pulled over and just then two uniformed white men pulled up to see “…what are you boys doing here?” Thinking only of getting both himself and Jerry out of this unharmed, Reavis acted as if Jerry was a “…boy” who worked for his dad.  As part of that act Reavis handed Jerry some money and said to Jerry, “There, boy, go get us some oil.”  The ploy worked; the two white men left, but…

    “…Jerry didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day, and I don’t believe that he ever spoke to me again, though for a month or two, we lived in the same house… It took me years to understand why.”

    Young Dick Reavis was approaching all his interactions through the lens of strategies and getting the work of the movement done.  He had never felt the negative, heavy end of the racial caste system and so had not felt how everyday that system demeaned the humanity of African Americans.  So to save him and Jerry from going to jail he used what he knew of the caste system to play out the role of a white supremacist, using the appropriate language.  What he didn’t understand was that “…Jerry would have preferred risking jail to the insult… however well-intentioned…”

    One of the points I teach in my “Interpersonal Relationships and Race” course is that racial language has a history that still carries into the present use of words.  One cannot avoid that history by saying, “I didn’t mean it like that.”

    Writing with honesty and grace, in his memoir Dick J. Reavis tells us of encountering and failing at a number of these interracial interaction dilemmas.  Here again is a small story of what was going on in the everyday march of the civil rights movement.  Whites were involved and struggled to learn how to interact racially.  At the same time, blacks were struggling to learn how to interact interracially, and making mistakes, but mistakes that were not even seen as such. 

    All those mistakes influenced the successes and failures of parts of the movement, because the movement was complicated and “…a struggle against all kinds of odds.”  Looking back Reavis says, “While we accomplished some of what we set out to do, in the main, I believe we were defeated, and that our hopes now fairly or unfairly devolve onto the generations that will come after us.”

    That is all the more reason that it is time for stories like this one, from the foot soldiers, white and black, to be told.  Reavis makes this point too.  He writes: “My only hope is that in reading this work, members of a younger generation will see what I and my peers did not accomplish, and will do what they can for the cause…”

    We must never forget that it was a hell of a time.  Today, it is still a hell of a struggle. Now we see that this was not and is not just a black and white struggle, but a struggle to find respect for our common humanity; racial, ethnic, gender, religious humanity. All who care must be forever vigilant.

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