Commentary broadcast on WEVO, Concord, New Hampshire, winter
1996
Coyright © J. Kates 1996
What do I have in common with a naked Vietnamese child and a grieving student in Ohio?
My mother called me early in the morning on Martin Luther King Day, and coyly asked, "Guess whose picture is in the New York Times today?"
"Is it that picture?" I asked her in turn. Yes, it was, and in the Boston Globe as well the same day, advertising a television documentary, and on the jackets of a couple of books published during the last few years. And other places, too.
That picture was taken in June 1964. I am nineteen years old, standing with my back to a bus in Oxford, Ohio, my right arm crossed over my left, my right hand held by a black man my age, my left by a white woman. We are all volunteers in the Mississippi Summer Project, and we are singing "We Shall Overcome" with our whole heart. A photographer named Steve Shapiro was there, and the photograph is owned by a commercial archive. It has become, like the pictures of the napalmed Vietnamese child and the screaming girl at Kent State, an icon of an age, a representative image of a time, and of an event that has passed not only into history, but into a kind of mythic space.
The first time I came across the picture, on the dust jacket of Douglas McAdams' Freedom Summer, I saw it the way almost everyone else does. I recognized the scene (and knew I'd been there) but didn't see myself in it. It took a second look, an almost tactile recall of the roll of a shirt sleeve and the way the wristwatch turned inward on the right wrist for me to recognize myself. And the picture has forced me to accept my own place in it, not as a named figure with a rounded life and children of my own, the whole personality I think myself to be, but, more humbly, as a tiny, anonymous (but not inconsequential) part of something much larger and grander — a generation, an idea, a hope, a universe.
So it's not really a photograph of me. I just happened to be in the range of a camera that was recording — on speculation — something that later came to be called history. The day after that photo was taken, three of my colleagues were dead. And year after year I trot myself out, like the picture, as a living exhibit of history in classrooms and lecture halls. I connect the events of 1964 with the events of the 1990s as best I can. Every year I get a little older, my perspective deepens, and every year that nineteen-year old boy keeps singing "We Shall Overcome" with my whole heart.
I am proud of the boy in that picture. What Im most proud of about him is what makes him different from the running Vietnamese child and the college girl whose arms are flung out over a corpse he is not a victim of his times, but an agent of them. He did not wait to have things happen to him, but he did what he could to make things happen, and he is memorialized forever in that posture, hoping with my whole heart and an open mouth that "We Shall Overcome." I have put a copy of that picture in my infant daughters memory box and labeled it "Papa," not merely out of pride in the boy who is now her father, but also in the hope that it will help to inspire her likewise to make her place in the world, so that if she ever gets snapped by chance into an iconic image of her times, it will be for singing the hope of her own acts, not for weeping the pain of someone else's.
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Also, if anybody's interested, I've developed role-playing workshops that are very successful with junior-high, high-school and college students, based on Albany, Georgia, Birmingham, Alabama, and northern Mississippi.
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