trevordayschool

and hospitalized. once I was old enough to understand, I found that I had an interest in how something like this could have happened, and a fascination surrounding the politics behind it as well. and once I got my academic self in order in 5th or 6th grade, I started reading books on the subject. And then it just took off in college. When you are a working-class student in Rochester, your definition of social mobility is to go to the University of rochester. at is just what you do. I went there as a full scholarship student and found a number of people who were very engaged in the civil rights Movement and the study of american race and slavery. arguably, rochester in the 1970s was the best history department in the world if you wanted to study slavery and civil rights. RM: What understanding did you gain by studying the civil rights Movement from a historical perspective? SR: Like most people who were educated in history, we were taught from the top down. In high school, that is how I saw history. "Who was really important?" ose guys up at the top— Washington and so forth. But in college, I got into the people's history. I was trained as a social historian—you both are, too, of course, because we were all a part of that movement in the new social history. I studied with eugene Genovese, christopher lasch, Mary young, and John J. Waters—and what I came to appreciate in studying the civil War, was that lincoln did not free african americans. ey freed themselves. is was an enormous movement which lincoln saw as it was occurring. If you think about his last conversation with Frederick Douglass, which took place on inaugural day 1865, Douglass comes to the White house for the celebration, and no one lets him in because he is a black man. e doorkeeper comes and says, "Mr. President, there is a man outside named Douglass," and the President says, "Well, let him in, let him in.' " Douglass comes in, tall as the President, and the President asks him, "What did you think of my speech?" referring to his great second inaugural address, and Frederick Douglass looks at him and says, "It was a sacred effort, Mr. President." hundreds of thousands of people engaged in a movement to win their own freedom. at's what I took away from my education. How do we collaborate to get things done? and what does real leadership mean? Sometimes it means being really courageous—like in the Civil Rights Movement—and standing in the face of an injustice and figuring out how to convince other folks to be as morally outraged as you. I took that away as a lesson of history over and over again. I'm not one of those folks who think that those who don't know their history are bound to repeat it. historical circumstances are unique. RM: and context is very important. I remember a fellow teacher telling me that a great way to start a discussion about the civil War is to say that the South won the war because slavery ended, and slaves represented such a large part of the South. NR: Do you know this story? In Mississippi, high school students were taught that reconstruction was a failure because african-american representatives were "not ready" to govern. SR: right. is was the Dunning School. ey taught right up through the 1950s that reconstruction was a disaster. e other historical argument comes from W.e.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America, which he wrote in the 1930s, which really I think is the best thing until Eric Foner wrote his book on reconstruction … RM: his tome … SR: Indeed. and the thing that I took away from Du Bois is that he understood that it was from the bottom up, not the top down. and you look at Reconstruction and this "awful time." Well, it was not an awful time for the Southern conservatives. It was an awful time for the people who had been promised their freedom. It's like when King said in his "I Have a Dream" speech, "We're here to cash the promissory note." Finally, we are here to cash the check. is is what you promised. is is what your own laws say. NR: Just a hundred years later … SR: a hundred years later. RM: Still waiting … SR: Still waiting. NR: at leads nicely to our next question. We know how you feel about the reverend Martin luther King, Jr. and as a deacon, you probably have some personal affinity to him. But we wonder, who are the other leaders from the civil rights Movement you admire? SR: When Nelson Mandela died just this past year, I felt that I had lost a member of my family. Because, point in fact, there are very few people who I would look at in the world that we grew up in and say, "he is my hero." If you look at civil rights writ large, look at how Mandela, through his commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience—which he finally came to; he wasn't there in the beginning— realized the effectiveness of teachings by people like Dr. King and Ghandi.

• Cover