A few weeks later, I found myself in Somerville, Tennessee, the county seat of Fayette County. I remember almost nothing about the project\u2019s headquarters. What I remember is the heat. The oppressive humidity wrapped around me like a hot, dripping blanket. I remember watermelons, huge and ruby red, sold at roadside stands. I remember endless two-lane roads disappearing into walls of green. Cotton fields stretching toward the horizon. Red clay shoulders along the road. Front porches. Screen doors slamming shut. The smell of earth after an afternoon thunderstorm. Everywhere I looked, the landscape seemed larger, greener, and more alive than anything I had known on Long Island.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The project director was a white man whose name I no longer remember. What I do remember is that he was cold, impatient, and mildly annoyed by my presence. I was another volunteer, another kid from the north. He gave me a few instructions, told me where I would be staying, and quickly moved on to more important matters.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then someone told me I would be living with a woman named Mrs. Meadows.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n She changed everything for me.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Mrs. Meadows lived on a large piece of property on the Mississippi-Tennessee line. Her son and his family lived nearby. She was a small woman, about 80 years old, with gray hair, freckles, and a beautiful smile. Looking back, I realize that what struck me first was not how she looked, but how she made me feel. After the chilly reception at project headquarters, she welcomed me with a warmth that immediately put me at ease. I had traveled hundreds of miles from home and landed in a world completely unfamiliar to me. Yet from the moment I arrived, she treated me as if she had been expecting me all along.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n She fed me well. Most evenings, we sat together and talked. She asked me about my future. I told her I wanted to become a lawyer. Sometimes she spoke about growing up in Mississippi. She described the Klan, the beatings, and the lynchings she remembered from childhood, as well as the complicated hierarchy within the Black community. She was light-skinned and explained that, for generations, lighter skin often carried social advantages. I listened carefully, or at least I thought I did. At 18, much of what she told me washed over me. Only decades later would I begin to understand the world she described.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n What I remember most vividly is her voice. It was warm, melodic, and comforting. She had a twinkle in her eye and a homespun wisdom that seemed effortless. We made each other laugh. She treated me almost like a son.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The next morning, my guide arrived. I no longer remember his real name, so let\u2019s call him Big Sam. The first time I saw him, he rode toward the house bareback on a horse. He was tall, athletic, handsome, and completely fearless. He reminded me of Jim Brown. More than anything, he carried himself like a prince. He had a quiet confidence that fascinated me from the moment we met.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Together, we went door-to-door, encouraging people to register to vote. I wish I remembered more of the mechanics of the work. What I remember are the people. Sometimes, small children would see me coming and run. I can still picture them disappearing behind their mothers or around house corners. At the time, I was confused. I felt like some kind of evil white ghost. Big Sam wasn\u2019t confused at all. He would kneel, speak gently to them, and assure them I was okay. Only later did I appreciate the significance of those moments. Before I could help anyone, someone first had to make me trustworthy.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Big Sam introduced me to his world: his friends, his church, and the rhythms of a life that was completely foreign to me. What strikes me now is how quickly they accepted me. Looking back, I don\u2019t know why. I was a Jewish kid from Long Island who knew almost nothing about the South or Black life and certainly almost nothing about the realities these young men and women faced every day. Yet somehow they welcomed me into their circle.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n What I remember is the energy. The laughter. The teasing. The music. The dancing. The flirting. There was a spontaneity and vitality that captivated me. I felt more alive than I had ever been. During the day, we drove dusty roads and knocked on doors. At night, we gathered on porches, at parties, at church events, or wherever young people happened to be. I had come south believing I was joining a movement. In many ways, I had also stumbled into a world that expanded my understanding of life itself.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n For the first time in my life, I attended a Black church. Nothing in my suburban Jewish upbringing had prepared me for it. The music seemed to rise from deep within the congregation. People sang with their whole bodies. The church felt alive. I remember looking around and feeling something I couldn\u2019t articulate at the time. I felt at home, even if it did not resemble anything I knew\u2014or maybe because it didn\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n One evening, Mrs. Meadows said something that has stayed with me for more than 60 years. She told me that Black people in the South had learned to be cautious around white people. Too much history stood between them. Too many consequences. I heard her words but did not fully grasp their meaning. Today, I understand that she was describing something far deeper than simple distrust. She was describing what generations of oppression do to human relationships.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Not all of my education came from Mrs. Meadows or the voter registration project. Some of it came from the ordinary dramas of being 18. One night, Big Sam took me to a party. There, I met a young woman with striking green-brown eyes. We spent hours talking. Somehow, the conversation turned to Harper Lee\u2019s\u00a0To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>. I told her I admired Atticus Finch and wanted to become a lawyer. She told me she wanted to leave Fayette County and see more of the world than the one she had inherited.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then one day she told me she loved me. No girl had ever said those words to me before. I was terrified. I was in love, too, but the words stuck in my throat. History was unfolding around us. Civil rights workers were risking their lives. We were trying to register voters in counties where Black citizens had been intimidated and excluded for generations. Yet we were still 18.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n As summer drew to a close, I found myself facing a realization I had never anticipated: I didn\u2019t want to leave.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I had arrived believing I was helping others. I left carrying far more than I had given. Mrs. Meadows, Big Sam, the church, the young people, the roads, the fields, the conversations\u2014they had all become part of me. I could not have explained it then. I knew only that leaving felt wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I don\u2019t remember saying goodbye to Mrs. Meadows. I wish I did. I am certain she hugged me and that she cried. I suspect I was emotional too, though I wasn\u2019t very skilled at understanding my own feelings. If she gave me advice, it was probably something simple, like \u201cFollow your dream.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n A year later, I returned to Tennessee with several friends. I wanted them to meet this remarkable woman who had welcomed a Jewish kid from Long Island into her home and treated him like family.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n When I arrived, I learned that she had died. I don\u2019t remember much else from that trip. Only the shock and the sadness.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n For decades, Mrs. Meadows gradually faded into the background of my life. I thought about her occasionally, but not often. Marriage, graduate school, children, a career, moving to Israel, and my wife Deborah\u2019s Alzheimer\u2019s\u2014life kept unfolding, as life does. The years accumulated, and the memory of that summer grew fainter, though it never entirely disappeared.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then a faded plaque brought her back.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n As I sat, talking about Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s dream and the need to restore what has been neglected, Mrs. Meadows began to emerge from the shadows of memory. First, her smile. Then her voice. Then her laughter. Then the warmth with which she welcomed me into her home.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I can imagine her sitting on her porch, rocking slowly back and forth and listening, smiling, and shaking her head in her gentle way. Then, in a voice that sounded more like music than speech, she might say,\u00a0Honey, you followed your dream<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I found myself wishing I could sit with her one more time. Not as the 18-year-old boy she knew, but as the 80-year-old man I have become. I would tell her about my life, about becoming a psychologist, about Deborah. About my children and grandchildren. About moving to Israel. About all the twists and turns she never lived to see. About how even though relations between our respective communities have frayed since I stayed in her house, I\u2019m still working to keep Dr. King\u2019s dream from fading.<\/span><\/p>\n Michael S. Tobin<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0is a clinical psychologist and award-winning author. His memoir,\u00a0Riding the Edge, won the Silver Prize in the Nonfiction Book Awards, and his novel\u00a0The Veil\u00a0earned a Quarterfinalist Award in the BookLife Prize. His recent novel,\u00a0Resonance, co-authored with Daniel Chertoff, will be published this October by Amplify\/Subplot. Michael sits on the Advisory Board of the\u00a0ProHuman Foundation<\/a>, founded by Daryl Davis.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em> The Dream We Let Fade Michael Tobin When I was an 18-year-old civil rights volunteer, a Black woman took me into her home in Tennessee and treated me like a son. Now, at 80, I worry that the fragile bond between our communities has frayed. Civil rights demonstrators, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[33,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133438"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=133438"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133451,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133438\/revisions\/133451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=133438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=133438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=133438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a>The Dream We Let Fade<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\nA few months ago, I joined the advisory board of the Prohuman Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes every person\u2019s individuality and shared humanity. When I met its leadership shortly thereafter, they showed me a graphic for a new campaign to restore the weathered plaque at the Lincoln Memorial marking the site where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech. Millions of visitors pass by it each year, yet few notice it. The plaque itself had faded badly. The words are still there, but time has nearly erased them. It was a stark reminder of how easily even our most important memories can disappear, not because they no longer matter, but because no one has paused long enough to restore them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I found myself thinking about one of King\u2019s most famous lines: \u201cI have a dream that one day little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.\u201d Visions, like plaques, require maintenance. Left unattended, both can weather, fade, and eventually disappear from view. It became clear to me that restoring the plaque was about more than bronze and stone. It was about reviving something that has faded over the years: Dr. King\u2019s dream.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The alliance between Blacks and Jews that once stood at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement seems far weaker than it did when I was a young civil rights worker in the 1960s. My conversation with the foundation\u2019s leaders took me back to those years and to the work I was privileged to take part in. I picked up a book by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel that sat on my table and showed it to them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHeschel marched with King from Selma to Montgomery,\u201d I said.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then I added something I hadn\u2019t considered for years.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI was there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n They immediately wanted to know more.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n As I began to talk, faded memories returned. At first, they came in fragments: the growling of police dogs, the hatred on the white faces behind barricades, the spittle that landed near our feet, the cheap hamburgers I seemed to eat nonstop, and a church in Atlanta where we were taught to remain calm when people screamed at us, cursed us, and wanted us gone.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then another memory surfaced. The summer after Selma. The West Tennessee Voters Project.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n My mother was horrified when I told her I wanted to volunteer. Only a year earlier, two young Jewish civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, along with James Chaney, had been murdered in Mississippi.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cYou want him to end up like Goodman and Schwerner?\u201d she asked my father.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n My father reacted differently. An adventurer by temperament, he shrugged and said, \u201cIt\u2019s what he has to do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Visions, like plaques, require maintenance. Left unattended, both can weather, fade, and eventually disappear.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nMichael Tobin<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n
\nWhen I was an 18-year-old civil rights volunteer, a Black woman took me into her home in Tennessee and treated me like a son. Now, at 80, I worry that the fragile bond between our communities has frayed.<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n
![](\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/b0241f54e71f39d77fe72cf38d7c72c7a53637e9-1024x813.jpg?w=1300&q=70&auto=format&dpr=1\")
Civil rights demonstrators, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, March 22, 1965. \/ AFP via Getty Images<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n\n