The stories on this site are written by individuals who have stood up to racial injustice in some way. They are an invitation to reflection and, ultimately, action. But such stories can, by the very nature of their subject, include unsettling language and images. Racism is a horror and talking about it means speaking of horrors. Our intention is not to shock, but to encourage responsible action. As the least represented group in social justice movements, whites in the United States have a lot of work to do. If we are ever going to have a chance of stemming the tide of hate in our communities, we need to speak truthfully about the horrors and injustices in our society. In this spirit, we hope you can engage and reflect on what you find in following story. — editors, The Threshold Project/Stepping Across the Threshold: Learning to Say Black Lives Matter

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Bonnie

Age 75

I was born and raised in Birmingham and though beloved, the city is also the source of my darker angels. By being a “preemie” I kept my dad out of WWII, after he had sold his feed store in preparation for going to war. He joined the Birmingham Police Department shortly after my birth, and with a photographic memory, memorized the criminal and civil laws in the law books he acquired.

Most black people in our community knew my dad by name and he knew them. I remember the black people that were part of my world. One was Irene, the baby nurse. In those days, new mamas went to bed for two weeks and a woman came in and took care of the baby. Whenever Irene saw me, she would run up and envelop me in her ample bosom and cry, “my baby.” I would sit at her table and eat cake. She was usually canning vegetables out of her garden. Her kitchen was very much like my mama’s with the canning, only my mama didn’t make cake.

There was Old Snow, who lived at the top of 85th Street hill and owned the property that South East Lake School and Banks High School would later be built upon. He was retired after working at my granddaddy’s store and with no wife or children, we took him Christmas dinner until he died.

There were all the black people who called our house either hysterical or in a panic, and we called them my dad’s “clients.” Later, I realized they really were, and he acted as their lawyer, at no charge, because he considered them “good” black people. In those days, a few drunk and disorderly charges could send a black man to prison for several years. I didn’t know that, and in the white community, if it was known it was not acknowledged. The black community knew, and they were terrified of any legal problem, with good reason. Over 30 years later, a friend of mine researched the Alabama prison archives from its beginning, and what she found made me sick to my stomach. Prior to 1929, blacks were sold to the nabobs and “big mules” in Alabama to work in the coal mines. The abuse of blacks in the prison system did not stop but became subtle.

My family would have punished me for using the N word or being disrespectful to a black person and my interaction with blacks was warm and without fear or lack of acceptance. Little did I know that world would change.

When I was 15, I opened the Sunday paper and the KKK had taken a black man, nailed his penis to a tree and left him there to die a slow, painful death. I went numb and felt sick. I had never used the word penis and certainly never talked about a black man’s penis. I waited and waited for some adult in my world to talk about it and no one ever did. All I knew of the KKK was that I needed to stay away from them and most folks were scared of them but THIS — I didn’t know people did those kinds of things.  All my innocence was gone about the safety of my world.

For a week, I careened between numbness and emotional pain. For the next 20 years, I lived only in my head because of the lingering effects of a trauma that was not only inhumane but totally foreign to my understanding of how human beings lived and how they treated one another.

The bombings, the marches, the dogs, the water hoses began to be a part of my world. The adults were angry and scared and I saw so much pain. The adults that were part of my world would never have hurt a black person but the thought of integration was totally foreign to them and scary. The year of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, I had a baby, my dad died, and I knew my marriage was a mistake. I divorced my husband and got a shock to realize that as a single woman, I had no access to credit. I was totally at the mercy of pompous white males. I began a journey into feminism and became aware that the only people in my world growing up who had full civil rights were white males. I was angry for a very long time. It was only after the civil rights movement got a bill thru congress prohibiting discrimination in lending, in 1973, that white women gained credit access. I felt a debt of gratitude to the civil rights movement and a connection to a part of their struggle.

My son’s drug addiction sent me into a struggle of self-discovery and re-discovery of the world around me. Drugs had been a problem in the black community since the ‘30s but no one cared as long as it was over THERE and happened to THEM. I also came into contact with the criminal justice system and saw that money and power were the difference between guilt and innocence. Black people and poor white people were the ones who went to prison. White people with money or influence had a disease called addiction but black people and poor whites were sorry no good criminals. I sat in so many courtrooms and watched as the mentally ill were thrown in jail and prison. I took part in a Prison Fellowship seminar at Donaldson Prison in West Jefferson County and there I encountered a man so mentally ill that he was psychotic and had no clue where he was. Two kind inmates shepherded him around and it was clear to me that without their guidance, without help, in a maximum security prison, he would have been prey. The addicted and mentally ill populate our prisons and jails and yet there is treatment for both.

Gay people became a part of my world, the ones that had been rejected by their families and the ones who lived a lie. I overheard a conversation between a black woman and a white lesbian about which one had suffered the most prejudice. I will never forget the response of the white lesbian when she said, “you were not rejected by your mother for being black.”

I began to realize that racism and discrimination of all kinds were the root of the problems we face as a society. It was during this period that the trauma I had suffered at 15 came to light. That memory finally gave me a gateway to my emotions that I had suppressed so long. White people may think that racism does not affect them but I came to know that none of us are truly free until we all are free.

Meeting the man who was to become my second husband educated me further. He respected everyone, and together we chose to live in a diverse neighborhood and go to a diverse church and my struggles continued to know and understand.

When Obama was elected, I felt our nation had turned a corner but then I began to hear echoes of the ‘60s. That rhetoric has a way of never changing. When Black Lives Matter began to demonstrate, I didn’t say All Lives Matter. Those that did only wanted to deny how at risk black males are in our society. I am feeling the turmoil, anger and fear of the ‘60s. The divisiveness is being fueled by the fears of this nation becoming browner and the fears of mostly older white males who can remember what it was like when only they had full civil rights. I want it all to end and be over. Unfortunately, race is complicated, messy and divisive. I must believe I will get there, the country will get there, this state will get there.

I have been asked what my belief system has cost me. In my twenties I made several decisions that I knew in my heart were right for me, none of which were supported by family or friends. Those decisions were the best things I have ever done for myself. It was then that I began to realize that I could survive whatever life threw at me, even if I had to do it alone. I also had a father who went his own way and was criticized and laughed at for being himself. That is quite a legacy and one that few people can call upon when struggling.

When I have not acted upon what I believe, I think of Joe, one of the most courageous men I have met along the way. Joe was a 6 foot, 10 inch black man, a drug addict, with a 15-year prison sentence for theft of property. He saw a young man beaten to death at the back gate of Draper Prison in the early ‘80s. He agreed to go to court and testify, knowing what it would cost him. He could have served five years but ended up serving every day of that 15-year sentence because of his testimony. He knew that up front, and I think my and others’ admiration was because of the grace with which he accepted that 15 years as the price for justice and truth. He was respected by prison guards and inmates alike. Many people would look upon Joe as a low life, but I have asked myself many times if I would give up ten years of life for another person, a cause, a belief. I have never been able to say I would or could.