Last Easter I went back to the United States, this time in the company of my husband and our two sons. I felt it was time they visited the New World and that I showed them where I had lived four years of my life. Four years which left an everlasting imprint in me. Four years which molded my academic and professional future. Four years which influenced me for the rest of my life. It was an extremely rich experience that includes very relevant national and international events: the beginning of the Space Age and the excitement of the first orbit ever of the Earth by John Glenn, an American astronaut (1962); the Cuban Missile Crisis, a dramatic period which put the country on the brink of nuclear war while leaving the population literally holding its breath for a few days (Oct62); the Civil Rights Movement with its climactic March on Washington, DC (Aug63); and President Kennedy's assassination, a tragic moment for America and the World (Nov63). I was in the United States as many of America's major changes of this century were happening.

In Washington, DC, we visited several of the major sites, among them the FDR Memorial (beautiful and imposing!) and the Vietnam Memorial (I had tears in my eyes and felt goosebumps all over as I walked along that long, black marble wall!), both new to me; Arlington National Cemetery and Arlington House (or Lee Mansion) with its beautiful scenic view of the capital city (where I bought a couple of books on American slavery and the Civil War); and Lincoln Memorial, a monument which has always impressed me tremendously. It is magnificent. Its extreme dignity and impressiveness are a result of grandeur mixed with perfect simplicity. My teenage eyes used to see President Lincoln getting up from his armchair to greet his guests. My adult eyes see him sitting comfortably, though in a stately manner, listening to the conversation around him, but most probably thinking of the many and grave problems of the Nation awaiting a solution.

I bought Martin Luther King's book Why We Can't Wait in the souvenir shop not having realized that I had bought it in the exact same place where the climax of the Civil Rights Movement and the Negro Revolution had taken place almost thirty-five years before and where its author had delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

I read the book over the summer vacation. It brought back several memories, both good and bad. And it made me feel like writing about a period I had lived in loco. So when I finished the book, I promised myself that in a near future I would write about some of my recollections of America in the first half of the sixties, but mainly about the book. That's exactly what I started doing today. Why today? Because the English Department of my school decided to associate the celebration of Martin Luther King Day to the 50^th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which takes place on December 10^th.

In a week's time, a group of ninth-grade students of English will exhibit their research and writings dedicated to this famous American Negro. What better time than now to fulfill my promise and share with them some of my personal memories as well as impressions of one of his books? I dedicate this piece of writing to them. In it they may read about Martin Luther King's extremely important role in the future of his country and about his own account of some of the major happenings that led to the August 28, 1963 March on Washington, DC, the moment when ". . . a submerged social group, propelled by a burning need for justice. . . created an uprising so powerful that it shook a huge society from its comfortable base" (16).

I was living in the United States at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement. I had entered my teens in that *hot* summer of 1963. Because of my age and because I was a foreigner, I probably did not live or experience that moment as intensely as my American peers. However, I think that being Portuguese helped me have a different perspective of the black-white relationship in the United States, or rather of what I thought (and still think) it should be.

When I was born, the Portuguese had been in Africa for over four centuries. And in spite of the fact that we ruled in Portuguese Africa, our relationship with the black people had always been a friendly one. We did not exclude or want to exclude blacks from society. We did not treat them as slaves. We did not humiliate them. We did not segregate them. I grew up looking at blacks and whites in the same way, with the same eyes, distinctions never crossing my mind, never thinking one was inferior and the other superior.

When I arrived in the United States, I was immediately confronted with a totally opposite picture, with an extremely racist society. Although I was only eleven at the time, it shocked me deeply. Practically half of Washington, DC's population was black, the majority of which lived in a perfectly limited area - downtown - defined by many as a ghetto. There was housing segregation. I lived in Maryland, right on the border with DC and a mere half hour's drive from downtown. The area I lived in softened reality, kind of camouflaged it. However, reality existed and was there for all who wanted to witness it. From a moral standpoint, it was harsh. . . and very difficult to swallow. That half an hour's drive made a BIG difference!

DC and Maryland did not have the segregationist and discriminatory laws that still persisted in the South. Buses, schools, supermarkets, restaurants, etc, were not segregated. I went to school in Montgomery County (Maryland) and had Negro colleagues (a few) and a Negro Science teacher, Mr. Kelly, an extremely kind and nice man. However, blacks and whites did not mix, did not socialize. (The Portuguese and the natives in Africa did. Intermarriages were a normal practice, although practically unheard of in the US then.) Negroes stayed in their part of town because there was disgust for them. In many parts of DC, it wasn't safe to walk wherever blacks or whites wanted. There was real danger. There was a certain malaise (ill-feeling) in the air. And a kind of disguised hatred and animosity. I still picture the US at that time as a barrel of gunpowder which could explode at the slightest careless move.

Martin Luther King refers to racism on several occasions in his book through meaningful expressions: "For too long the depth of racism in American life has been underestimated" (119); "the scar of racial hatred", "massive base of racism", "this long--standing racist ideology has corrupted and diminished our democratic ideals" (120); and ". . . the ugly blemish of racism scarring the image of America" (129).

The sixties in America were a time of economic boom. You could feel economic well-being. You could feel economic stability. You could feel and smell money in the air. But not for all. America was an affluent society. . . with exceptions and striking contrasts. The difference between the well-off whites and the poor blacks was abysmal and uncomfortable. That same type of contrast turned reality again, years later, when I visited Rio de Janeiro in 1980. The sight of the 'favelas' standing side-by-side with the affluent neighborhoods of Leblon and Copacabana can leave any sensitive person speechless. Unfortunately, there are many such other examples throughout the World. Wherever they exist, they are a shame to society as a whole.

Why was 1963 the year of the Negro Revolution and the peak of the Civil Rights Movement? In the Spring of that year Alabama witnessed the greatest racial riots in American history. I clearly remember watching violent scenes on TV - policemen brutally beating and arresting black people, bombings, power hoses in action on demonstrators. Much of the violence that entered our homes through television is still a part of my teenage memory. A violence caused by a deeply-rooted hatred based on a difference in skin color, which for over three hundred years had given one race the right (?!!) to be superior to another. Racial violence!

They were extremely violent scenes - scenes of social, cultural and racial degradation. They were inadmissible and inexcusable scenes in a democratic society. They were a live example of the many contradictions which characterized and still characterize American society. As Martin Luther King put it: ". . . there is a certain bitter irony in the picture of [my] country championing freedom in foreign lands and failing to ensure that freedom to twenty million of its own" (21).

Those scenes are a stain in the fabric of society of the oldest democracy in the World! They were the straw that broke the camel's back, the turning point in the humiliating, discriminating and unjust situation black people had lived in America from the time the first slaves arrived. And they marked the beginning of peaceful action, of the Negro on his way to real emancipation, of the Negro Revolution.

The spring of 1963 represents the moment when the American Negro, ". . . so long ignored, so long written out of the pages of history books. . ." (18), realized that:

• he had suffered "three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation. . ." (16).;

• ". . . one hundred years had passed since emancipation, with no profound effect on his [the Negro's] plight" (22);

• "Emancipation was a Proclamation but not a fact" (Lyndon B. Johnson - 23);

• "the milestone of the centennial [of the Emancipation Proclamation] gave the Negro a reason to act. . ." (25).

However, it was a time when everybody thought ". . . the American Negro was too passive, unwilling to take strong measures to gain his freedom" (22).

Martin Luther King's realistic and moving explanation of why now? is the best account of the circumstances which led his people to their bloodless revolution. It is taken from a letter written in Birmingham jail (April 16, 1963) in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John", and your wife and your mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" - then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience (81-82).

But it wasn't just the unbearable domestic situation that inspired and gave strength to the Negro movement at that time. The international scene also played its part in their awakening, as we saw above, namely "the decolonization and liberation of nations in Africa and Asia since World War II" (21). ". . . The American Negro saw, in the land from which he had been snatched and thrown into slavery, a great pageant of political progress . . . . The Negro saw black statesmen voting on vital issues in the United Nations - and knew that in many cities of his land he was not permitted to take that significant walk to the ballot box. He saw black kings and potentates ruling from palaces - and knew he had been condemned to move from small ghettos to larger ones. . . ." (22).

In the summer of 1963 several factors converged to bring about the Negro Revolution - need, time, circumstance and mood. A revolution does not happen at the snap of a finger, as if by magic. A revolution needs preparation and that's exactly what had been going on in the eight-year time span which separates Montgomery and Birmingham. "A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution" (117). The Negro wanted to change people and institutions. That couldn't be done overnight. The preparatory work included workshops on nonviolence and direct-action techniques; sit-ins in libraries, lunch-counters and restaurants; kneel-ins at church; silent marches; and peaceful demonstrations.

The Negro Revolution was strengthened by deeply-rooted spiritual and christian beliefs, which explains why much of its preparatory work as well as action took place in churches and was accompanied by freedom songs - "the soul of the movement. . . as old as the history of the Negro in America. They are adaptations of the songs the slaves sang  . . . . We sing the freedom songs today for the same reason the slaves sang them, because we too are in bondage and the songs add hope to our determination that 'We shall overcome, Black and white together, We shall overcome some day' " (61). The songs and the singing gave the Negro inner strength, courage and resolve to face what lay ahead in order to pursue their noble fight. It was through the mass meetings in the churches that they recruited volunteers to serve in their nonviolent army, whose greatest weapon was "the conviction that we were right" (62).

This army wasn't an army in the true sense of the word. It was a very special army with sincerity as their supplies, determination as their uniform, faith as their arsenal, and conscience as their currency. It was an army of nonviolent soldiers whose weapons were their heart, their conscience, their courage and their sense of justice. "It was an army that would move but not maul. It was an army that would sing but not slay. . . . It was an army whose allegiance was to God and whose strategy and intelligence were the eloquently simple dictates of conscience" (62).

The church has always exerted a very strong influence in American society, ever since the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers. American society is characterized by profound christian beliefs. It believes strongly in God. The word God is used everywhere and is heard on many different occasions. In spite of the different religions, the church and God are a unifying force in American society. So it shouldn't have come as a complete surprise, except for the racial factor - a major one at the time -, "that the March 'brought the country's three major religious faiths closer than any other issue in the nations' peacetime history' " (123).

Three paragraphs above, I quoted "Black and white together, We shall overcome". In my opinion, this is an extremely meaningful example of the power of religion on its believers and followers. This is true christian spirit. It is a true and sincere expression of the spirit of brotherhood, in this case towards the white man who had for so long neglected, cast aside and humiliated the Negro. An element of proof of the Negro moral and spiritual superiority. Towards the end of the book, when Martin Luther King deals with ways of America *atoning* for the injustices perpetrated on his people, the white man is again remembered: "It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor" (138). I wonder how many white religious leaders would have said (or would have had the courage to say) the same of the Negroes back in 1963!

Who was this leader, this mentor of this nonviolent army? Martin Luther King, Jr., a reverend, a man determined to follow Gandhi's footsteps, a man who advocated Gandhi's philosophy - nonviolent direct action - as the best way to fight for the dignity of the Negro, for the rights of the Negro, for the equality of the Negro. A man who said that God had given him ". . .the power to transform the resentments, the suspicions, the fears and the misunderstanding. . .", a man who "spoke from the heart" (68).

Nonviolent direct action was Mahatma Gandhi's peaceful way of fighting unjust domination and consequently freeing his people from British rule. It was a strategy adopted by Martin Luther King and his followers to fight peacefully against the injustice of the American system, which had suppressed the Negroes for over three hundred years. A strategy that started to be experimented and tested in the winter of 1955-56 in Montgomery, Alabama. ". . . A powerful and just weapon . . . unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals" (26).

For President John Kennedy, the Negro problem in America was a moral issue. ". . . The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities. Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality" (32). A moral issue can be fought with moral force. Nonviolence meets "physical force with soul force" (30). It was the Negro way of forcing his oppressor to expose his brutality to the nation and to the World. Nonviolence implies spiritual, psychological and moral strength. Nonviolence gave the Negroes the possibility to "transmute hatred into constructive energy. . ." (38). Nonviolence also implies a strong belief in a just cause and great sacrifice. "The miracle of nonviolence lies in the degree to which people will sacrifice under its inspiration, when the call is based on judgment" (44).

Martin Luther King believed that the acceptance of nonviolent direct action by his people was proof that they wanted to break with the American tradition from the days of the frontier of "the eye-for-an-eye" and of the impulse to defend oneself when attacked. It seems that they also wanted to break with the hero image of fighting for justice by retaliating violently against injustice - violence justifying the means to reach the end - justice. ". . . nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek" (93).

The fact is that this peaceful means of reaching their end - justice, equality, dignity, pride, honor - stirred, confused and paralyzed the power structures. For the first time the Negroes dared face the white man and look him in the eye, while the World looked on. "The Negro was able to face his adversary . . . and to defeat him because the superior force of the oppressor had become powerless" (40).

"The thundering events of the [spring and] and summer required an appropriate climax" (122). On August 28, 1963, the Negro Revolution reached its peak when a multitude of nearly 250,000 blacks and whites of all ages, faiths, classes, professions and political parties marched peacefully on Washington, DC. ". . . It was an army with no guns, but not without strength. It was an army into which no one had to be drafted. . . . It was a fighting army, but no one could mistake that its most powerful weapon was love" (123). They assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the monument which honors the man and the president who abolished slavery when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.

That same year, only a few months later, another national event shook the country and the World - President Kennedy's brutal and tragic assassination. It was and still is my impression that on that 22^nd November, 1963 America lost part of its innocence. America came of age, grew up, all of a sudden started facing a different reality. The aura of youth that had been felt during the Kennedy administration was lost in that fleeting moment. These two major events left their marks - ". . . a profound change in the thinking of the American people; a massive rejection of extremism. . ." (Louis Harris - 145).

Dec.98

Teresa Almeida d'Eça