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“Your mind is a garden; your thoughts are the seeds. The harvest will bring either flowers or weeds.” ~ Robert Thomas Jacobs
Maybe the most formative moment in my young life was the day I
~ WOKE UP ~
I woke up to the world beyond Queen Anne Hill and the small circle around which my life spun.
It occurred on one chilly morning in September 1957 while I was listening to the radio and eating my oatmeal. It was reported that the Governor of Arkansas had issued an order denying admission for nine Black students to the all-White Central High School.
President Eisenhower sent the National Guard in to protect the students from the angry mobs who threatened them.
As this struggle played out my mother told her five children the only reason they were denied admission was because they were Black.
Her outrage was palpable.
She lectured us, saying any form of prejudice is wrong, reminding us that in an earlier time the Irish were treated in a similar fashion.
- Mother was a woke woman.
- Mother raised woke children.
Wokeness was a way of life for our family.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion became a rallying cry.
So it was for Marsha.
She was the oldest daughter of Charles and Doris Hahn.
They were a woke family.
Her father was a Methodist clergyman who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma.
In 1964 Charles requested a special appointment from the church to work with the Ecumenical Institute, a nonprofit located in a depressed neighborhood on the west side of Chicago.
At the time the Institute was developing a methodology for doing community development.
The 5th City Project
In 1963, the Ecumenical Institute moved….to the inner city of Chicago…to one of the most distressed parts of the city…It had high crime and unemployment, abandoned housing units, inadequate public services…deteriorating schools and virtually no locally owned businesses. There was little access to healthy foods and an absence of opportunities for any kind of meaningful civic involvement. The staff and community set out to develop a comprehensive plan to address these things. ~ From the archives of the Institute of Cultural Affairs
Marsha and her younger sister Shelley would spend the next four years of their young lives immersed in wokeness,
- living
- learning
- playing
in a predominantly Black community.
Marsha tells a delightful story of being the only white child in her 2nd grade class, getting ready for class picture day.
Her teacher suggested the students wear light-colored clothing for the class picture.
When her mother suggested she wear a dark outfit, Marsha protested, “Mommy, we were told to wear white.”
“Yes, I know, but you are different. Your classmates are of a dark complexion and you are of a light one. For you to be seen you need to wear something darker.”
Marsha’s first lesson in the glory of diversity.
She writes of another memory:
When I was in fifth grade I got hepatitis. Because of my illness I had to miss the last several weeks of the school year and spent long stretches of time in our little apartment on the 3rd floor of 341 South Trumbull Avenue on Chicago’s West Side.
It was the spring of 1968 and we had experienced the riots after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. I had fresh awareness of the injustices endured by Black Americans for centuries.
As I was gazing out our back window one day I saw an old woman walking down the alley rummaging through garbage cans. I didn’t know what she was hoping to find, but it was clear she didn’t have what she needed in life.
I wanted so much to help her. I fantasized that if I could put some money in one of those garbage cans, she could find it and buy what she needed. Forty dollars seemed like the right amount to my ten-year-old mind.
I didn’t have anything close to forty dollars, and I probably knew that putting any amount of money into a garbage can would likely mean it would just get thrown away, so my fantasy ended there.
But I mark that as my first encounter with a pull to do something “good” in my life.
Over the next few years my mind was flooded with insights and big thoughts about the outside world and my own inside world. I didn’t know what it all meant, but I knew I wanted to feed this hunger for meaning, to have my life be meaning-full.
And how she did.
Oh! What a blessing it is to be
…WOKE
Just a thought…
Pat and Marsha