I Can’t Believe I Didn’t Know That
When I was a child, and well into my adulthood, I thought that old people must have learned all the lessons life has to offer as they aged. Even if I never said it in public, that’s what I thought.
Now I’m old. I crossed the threshold of 70, the prophet’s life expectancy of “three score and ten,” some time ago, and I’m still being shocked at what I did not know.
This week’s example: In 1941 a wall had been constructed to keep Black Detroiters segregated from White folks and White privilege. We’re talking a concrete wall built through people’s backyards. I was raised a stone’s throw from the wall, and never knew it existed. But it did, and still does, assure that privilege and resources, including Federal funds, went only to Whites and never to Blacks.
Until now, even the existence of the “Birwood Wall” was hidden. NBCNews and Bridge Detroit told the wall’s secrets this past week.
A grandson of the wall’s creator first told reporters that his grandfather wasn’t “racist.” When shown the evidence, he had the decency to confess: “As you can imagine, I’m shocked and this is difficult for me to hear.” “This is an important story that needs to be told.” History is instructive, he said, and “you learn from the good things and the not so good things, and you don’t hide either of them.”
Growing up in a Detroit suburb, I knew about the racially inspired riots scarring the city in the 60s. I was told I shouldn’t get involved; I should look away. It was decades later before I learned about the Detroit riots of 1943 — two years after the Birwood Wall was built — in which 34 people died, 25 Black, most killed by a solidly White police force.
The simple, historical, indisputable facts of racist policies protecting White Detroit’s supremacy are real. What may have shocked me most about the Birwood Wall story is that Detroit, far above the Southern world of the Mason-Dixon line, championed Jim Crow as certainly as any city in the South. I grew up in it. I produced television morning shows in it. And, I swear, I never knew it.
Until now. Now I know.
Some people want to slap the label “Critical Race Theory” on stories such as the Birwood Wall fearing that teaching children the truth is dangerous. It’ll change their views of America from a heroic tale to a shameful legacy. That’s the kind of thinking — wrong — that kept me from knowing the story of Tulsa’s Greenwood community for most of my adulthood. The truth was buried next to the burned homes, forgotten businesses and charred bodies just now being exhumed.
It reminds me of the early 90s when parents wanted their children not to contract AIDS but also refused to offer truthful sex education. What I said then is no less true today. My message to America was simple: “We cannot love our children and fear to teach them.”
May I just say that I’ve had life-changing personal experiences based on other people’s desires to hide the truth. I’ve had trusted people take my money, and maybe a few took my heart. I’ve had a trusted man hide a deadly intimate secret. I know about hiding the truth when we don’t like it. But I agree with the grandson of the Birwood Wall’s planner: We “learn from the good things and the not so good things.” We learn, we don’t hide.
And the folly of “deniers” isn’t new. In his book, The Path Between the Seas, the brilliant David McCullough notes that a half-decade after the Wright Brothers flew a heavier-than-air machine, Americans by a whopping margin said it wasn’t true.
Or how about this story told by McCullough? The scourge of deadly Yellow Fever was killing thousands of American workers building the Panama Canal in 1900. Scientists knew mosquitoes carried the killer. The Nobel Prize had been awarded based on the discovery. And America’s leading architects, planners and bureaucrats sponsoring the Canal called it a silly “mosquito theory” and “a waste of precious time.” In fact, it was their denial that caused a waste of precious human lives, by the thousands. A century later refusal to accept scientific truth is still with us. Only the disease has changed.
I’m convinced that permanent change, hopeful change, is carried on the wings of truth. The truth isn’t always pretty. Neither is it always believed. But it’s still the truth. And if, in my 8th decade of life, I am regularly shocked at truth I did not know, I am also enormously grateful still to be learning.
