Very seldom do I notice my age. But as I have read the outpouring of grief and rage (which I share) over the Michael Brown grand jury verdict, I am deeply aware of the decades I lived before most of these friends, and other writers who are otherwise strangers, were born. Things they learned about, but I lived through.
With deep sadness and disgust, I watched Robert McCullough in his starched white shirt and dark suit with his half-glasses perched on his nose like a college professor and knew what he would say. His endless prologue foretold what was coming with an ego and naked self-interest that was dreadful to see. But it wasn’t a surprise. I expected nothing else.
I remember the murders of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner,, (see Awesomely Luvvie) of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Dr. King, Viola Liuzzo. Brutality, incarceration, death. I remember George Wallace in the school-house door,
and Willie Horton
and the ads that NC Sen. Jesse Helms, in a re-election bid, ran against African-American candidate Harvey Gantt .
I remember scores more for every one of these.
It’s really terrible to witness, and share, the heartbreak described by so many I love. Read this post by Kelly Wickham that expands on that, or this by Rita Arens. Or go back and hit the #ferguson and #blacklivesmatter hashtags one more time if you can bear it. A Greek chorus of agony.
I am by no means connecting this weariness of mine with reasons to stop taking action and writing and reaching out and making noise. No. I’m just thinking about how different it feels when you’ve sat in front of black and white TVs and listened on transistor radios the first times you learned of each desperately painful incident of even the past half century. We know we will keep working, trying. Even so, how hard it is to feel shock or surprise or anything other than a bone-chilling validation of the presence of those ugly creatures of hate and injustice that still hide between the stars and stripes that represent our country.
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Cynthia Samuels
Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families.
For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million.
She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings.
She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.
Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World.
A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.
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Very seldom do I notice my age. But as I have read the outpouring of grief and rage (which I share) over the Michael Brown grand jury verdict, I am deeply aware of the decades I lived before most of these friends, and other writers who are otherwise strangers, were born. Things they learned about, but I lived through.
i have a different view than you expressed, and I too lived through the civil rights movement.
I went to an integrated camp in 1962 which I must confess was a bit scary for me at the time when I was sixteen. And years later helped to fund the California Afro-American Museum.
About twenty years ago I mentored a gang in L.A. In my discussions with the gang members, I asked, “Why do u wear gang colors to antagonize the police, and then complain about your rights have violated?”
“If you want to meet up change your clothes, and they’ll leave u alone. ” To make a long story short, I was attacked by the adult leadership in Pacoima, for telling these kids to move out of the neighborhood into a larger world. That the American Dream was to keep going and growing. I was attacked as a white woman telling these kids to leave the ghetto. The ghetto czars wanted to use them to fight. I told them it wasn’t their responsibility to change the police, the low income housing, the parks, etc. that was beyond their ability. That that they were at the bottom. And that public housing would never have cable. But that they could go to the community college, get credit cards and move out. And they did just that.
So this gets me back to Ferguson, racism etc. Yes it’s there, what else is new? What I question is the responsibility of the parents not to teach their son manners for his own protection. The world can be a dangerous place. And it’s the responsibility of parents to teach their children if you act a certain way you’re probably going to get hurt. That’s what having a child and family is about. I used to warn my teenage girls about things that could happen to them if they were in places they shouldn’t be with friends who were doing drugs or drinking too much.
Clearly society can only do so much, and cops aren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. So, the biggest loss will be to Ferguson. For the life of me I can’t understand why you would burn down your own community. I can’t relate to that. They should have demonstrated quietly like we did, you get better media coverage.
And then you have the black irresponsible leaders who feed on victimization. Al Sharpton should be fired from MSNBC to begin with…I partially blame the media too.
And what about the black teenage thug who was killed, who was stoned? Did u see the picture of him online with a wad of cash in his mouth and a gun? And his mother says “He could be your son?” Cindy, I honestly don’t think he could be your son.
I think what happened is bad for Democrats and bad for Hillary if she decides to run for President because it’s a losing situation either way.