It Started

With a text.
"Hey, want to go to the martin luther king jr freedom march with me from paul and babe to the baux arts room? There will be chili!"
How could I resist chili? Even IF the sun was going down, the wind picking up, and the temperature dropped below freezing again. And even IF I had a headache. And two tests to study for. And a paper to write. And a presentation to research. And notes to take. I could go on, but I digress.
My friend Sara and I suited up (she was still expecting the weather from the day before, not the sleet and freezing rain we encountered, and so she only had a light jacket on) and walked against freezing rain to Paul and Babe. The group we met there was small, but I saw we were going to have a police escort. This obviously meant this was going to be more than just a walk down the sidewalk, like I had figured. There was someone from a TV station interviewing the man heading up the walk. And then they handed out flags. Someone pushed one into my hands--it was the Chinese flag. There were others that I didn't recognize, the flag for the British colonies, and one for Japan. I still didn't know what to expect by this point, except that I was probably going to be an icicle by the time I returned to campus. I was right. But I can't think of a more memorable experience since arriving at BSU. Here's what happened:

We began walking, the police giving us one lane of traffic and slowed down all the others (it was about 5:30 at this point, meaning people trying to get home must have been pretty upset). Sara and I had fun staying out of the way of flags whipping in the wind and pointing out houses we liked or ones we could imagine fixing up. Some cars honked in support while a few newspeople ran around us or in front of us with heavy TV equipment or cameras trying to get something useful. There were some kids behind us that were using us as a shield from the wind--which was pretty darn smart. They were both holding flags of their own. When we finally reached the Baux Arts room back on campus, wind battered and frozen to the bone, we discovered chili. So we ate chili and waited for people to speak (which I wasn't expecting, I was just expecting chili).

Here's the really memorable experience part. The keynote speaker was a woman (I think her name was Dr.Anne B. Henry) who met Dr. King Jr. She began by saying how much she loves shopping. So when Dr Anne went to stay with her cousin and her cousin's husband, the cousin told the husband to take the Dr shopping. He had a plan to drop her off at the mall and pick her up later. But first, he had to drop something off at a friend's house. She thought this was a good deal, so they went to the friend's house. When they got there, he asked Dr. Anne to go up to the door and knock while he got something out of the trunk. So, she went up and knocked. When the door opened, she began to stammer apologies for intruding, because the man who opened the door was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She also told us that she met this man in 1968.
She said it was the first time she went to a new city and didn't go shopping.
He invited her in and they talked about his hopes for the future. He told her that someday she would be able to go to college to earn her masters and someday her doctorate. She refused to believe him.

She went on to talk about not just tolerating, but accepting, people. About how Mississippi wants to celebrate a KKK leader on their license plate and that this is just one of many signs (another is that two men in Brainerd beat a man apparently only because he was black just ten days ago) that we are not yet the "United" States of America. She told us that if someone told her in the 60's that she would live to see a man of color become our president she would have called them crazy.

Now, to quote my mass media teacher, I do not drink the Obama Kool-Aid. But I saw what she meant. It's very cool that as a country we were able to vote in a man of color to presidency. I believe that this act is a landmark in time that we will be proud of as a nation.

What I thought about the most during her speech was this: northern Minnesota (I'm being specific to northern Minnesota because I haven't lived anywhere else and actually been able to remember living there) does not know a lot about living with people of different nationalities. Or so it seems. I know that in elementary school there was one black kid in our class until fifth grade. Then there were two. By the time we hit high school, it was culture shock. I think people started moving to TRF from all over (I know some kids were from South America and South Africa) for the jobs at Digi Key (why else move to Thief River Falls?). My point is that before this time, we never really got to experience anything other than that single dominating race. What does that do to a person's mentality? Does it affect how a person thinks racially? Are they less able to accept people of other races because they weren't raised to accept, not just tolerate, them in daily life? I hope an answer to that last question has more to do with the general goodness of a person's mentality toward the world. I know that there were kids in school who were downright shockingly racist, but from what I observed from afar, I think even though the experience with people from different cultures had been relatively minimal, the general population didn't just tolerate their classmates. They accepted them, became their friends. Does that say something about people in general, people from small towns, or just about our town?
I think I would consider living in a big city (maybe New York. Go big or go home, right?) just to see what the difference is. In all aspects of life. Of course, I would return to a small town somewhere (somewhere soon, I would bet), but I think there's something to be said about big city living.

I digress. I just thought our keynote speaker was a really sassy, New Orleans type lady; a person I never got the chance to meet even when I WAS in New Orleans (I was surrounded by 4000 other church kids, the city was overrun with tourists). Her experience was worth thinking about and listening to. If you want to read about it here it is. So, thanks for the text, Sara.