“Clarence, what can we do to make things better?”
I’ve heard that question countless times in the last few weeks, as the senseless murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd flooded the headlines, filling us all with horror and grief. Many decent Americans want to do something to demonstrate solidarity with the black community and work to end racial injustice. But what?
I have been in the civil rights fight for a very long time. When I was 8 or 9 years old, I was riding my bicycle down a sidewalk, when I saw a white man walking toward me. I moved all the way over to get out of his way, and he turned, walked right to where I was, and knocked me off my bicycle.
Growing up, I knew that the world was full of white people who thought they could treat me any way they wanted and get away with it.
For me, the civil rights movement was always rooted in morality. Since my involvement in the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-it in 1960, my goal was to ensure that blacks were treated with the respect and dignity that all Americans deserve under the law.
That dignity doesn’t come from the law; it comes from God. Good law recognizes what God has already said: that we all bear His image and deserve to be respected.
Every black person I grew up with knew we had to be better — nearly perfect, in fact — to hope to get the treatment and benefit of the doubt that seemed to be automatically afforded to whites. This is, and has always been, fundamentally wrong and unfair.
We should never deceive ourselves to think we can ever sufficiently “earn” the respect of the worst racists: that man who knocked me off my bike wouldn’t have cared if I was a straight A student or an usher in my church. But at the same time, we cannot let that unfairness lure us into self-destructive behavior, just to prove a point.
Clarence Henderson is the young man seated on the very end at the far right of this photo.
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