Until she went to college, Patti Miller had never so much as spoken to a black person. There were few opportunities in her hometown of Jefferson, Iowa. And when she might occasionally see someone of African ancestry in Des Moines, her mother would admonish her not to stare, telling her, "They're no different than we are."
Miller was born in 1943 to a high-school principal father and stay-at-home mother, and raised in what she calls an insular Ozzie and Harriet childhood. She revered Abraham Lincoln and assumed the problems of slave descendants ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. So Miller coasted happily on the image of smiling children holding hands around the globe.
But history lessons delivered in the abstract can have crater-size gaps. Segregation and the racism, violence and economic conditions that enforced it were a far cry from the idyllic images she had harbored for 21 years. On a trip south in 1963 with fellow Drake University students, the music major found herself looking in on a filthy, crammed train station waiting room marked "Colored," next to a pristine "Whites Only" one. "Something just snapped in me," she said.
A year later, she would join hundreds of other college students responding to an appeal from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to spend the summer living with black host families in Mississippi and volunteering for desegregation. That was the fateful Freedom Summer, chronicled in Stanley Nelson's documentary of the same name, airing on PBS stations this week in observance of the 50th anniversary. Patti Miller is in it.
That summer was filled with violence, church burnings and home bombings.
Back at Drake, Miller helped change housing policies that allowed off-campus landlords to discriminate against black students. But her eagerness to share what she had witnessed, especially with her hometown Methodist minister and mentor, did not get the supportive response she had expected. "He let me know that he didn't think what I was doing was right," Miller remembers.
Much has changed since that summer. The work of civil rights activists led to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But in many college dining halls, black and white students still sit separately. Miller thinks the political conditions for African-Americans are not much better, because racism has been institutionalized.
"This country was built by slaves," Miller muses. "And it has lasted so long that it's in the DNA of the country, even though we've got a black president."
Maybe that's why a white Roosevelt High School teacher in Des Moines feels comfortable telling a black student to address him as "Master, Sir." Maybe it's why African-Americans still live disproportionately in poverty and in prisons.
But in the absence of mass violence and separate waiting rooms, students today don't seem to see the imperative -- or maybe the hope -- of renewing the campaign against racism. Many looking to make a difference are instead heading abroad.
That's why every American household should watch "Freedom Summer" -- not just to be reminded of how young people's passion for justice changed the country, but of the work that is yet to be done.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Rekha Basu is a columnist for the Des Moines Register. Readers may send her email at email@example.com.
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