Meet the Son of Jim Crow: MLK Day Below the Mason-Dixon Line

It's Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday and, for the first time since 1977, I am remembering the man and his life in a town below the Mason-Dixon line. At the library where I work Blacks were denied entrance. Denied the right to read a book or study or even get a drink of water. John Brown or not, humans of the darker hue were forbidden the things that Brown and King and many others fought and died for, each in their own way. As I listen to a collection of recorded speeches by Dr. King on a local radio station sponsored in part by the NAACP, I still have to fight back tears. It is here in the South--where Africans and their American descendants were enslaved and brutalized, murdered and raped by their owners, the Ku Klux Klan, the police and racist citizens--it is here where the legacy of Dr. King and the movement against legalized apartheid in the United States means the most.

The radio station is now playing a rendition of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" sung by a marching band of African-American troops representing the African-American Civil War battalions raised by John Brown's friend and fervent supporter, George Stearns. The song itself was written by another abolitionist Julia Ward Howe and was based on the song "John Brown's Body," which was sung by many a Union soldier as they marched into battle. Even if the original reasons for the Civil War were economic, there were many soldiers on the Union side who were fighting to free the slaves. According to many historians, this sentiment was eventually predominant even in the Lincoln White House.

I remember as a young child when my family first moved to Maryland. It was the first time that I saw separate water fountains at the drug store counter. They didn't last long in the part of the state where my family moved, but the racism and the system it supported remained for quite a while longer. Indeed, it remains to this day, but it is more insidious now. Back then, it was blatant and it was everywhere. It was in the conversations of kids at school and in church. It was in the way African-Americans were referred to in the conversations of many white adults. It was there in the fact that most of the Black people in our town lived in one section of town. It was called "N*ggertown" by most white folks, even though its historical designation was "The Grove." This section was historically the area where slaves and freed men and women lived.

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