Two or three days ago (in April 2022), major league baseball celebrated Jackie Robinson for the leadership he provided to major league baseball and to the American way of life. I immediately thought of Mary Jean’s being a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. She became a fan because that organization signed Jackie Robinson to a contract and placed him in the lineup. I became a Dodger fan because of her example; we rooted for the Dodgers because Jackie Robinson played for them.
Our being fans of Jackie Robinson did not exist alone. Two other events on black civil rights stand out in my memory. One day mother related her experience as a delegate from our election district to the Utah State Republican Party Convention. In those years, the different parties held mass meetings in every election district on a designated date. This way, nobody could participate in the meetings of more than one party. In the mas meeting, attendees voted on delegates to both the county and the state conventions. Mom and Papa were both very active in the Republican party, so one year mom was elected as the delegate to the state convention. This occurred sometime in the early 1950s.
At the party convention, mom entered the large meeting room for the general session and noticed a row near the back with only one person, a black woman, sitting in it. She went in and sat beside the woman. As the meeting time approached, other attendees arriving later filled the row. At the end of the session, as everyone stood up to leave, the woman turned to mom and said, “Thank you for sitting by me. When I came into the room, several people were sitting in this row. When I sat down, they all stood up and moved to other chairs.”
When mom related this story to me, I was shocked that Utahns would be so bigoted.
The second event occurred in September or perhaps early October 1955. Mother, Susan, and I were living in Mesa, Arizona, so Susan and I could get better school attendance than we could in Utah. During this time, a black woman was trying to register as a student at the University of Mississippi. Mother’s sister, Auntie Mary, wife of Uncle Budd, an officer in the US Navy, was planning to visit us in Arizona. As I read the newspaper articles about the woman’s difficulties registering, I would express my sympathy for her. Mom warned me that when Auntie Mary arrived, I should avoid speaking about this because Auntie Mary’s opinions were quite contrary to ours. The first or second night Auntie Mary was there, I was reading the Arizona Republic, the newspaper we had delivered to our apartment. I was incensed at the attitude of the Mississippi state legislators. I forgot mother’s warning.
“I can’t understand why these men won’t let that poor woman go to the University of Mississippi,” I burst out.
Those were the last words anybody other than Auntie Mary spoke for the next hour. Auntie Mary railed on that “negroes were not capable of being equal to whites and they didn’t know their place and they shouldn’t be allowed in good universities,” etc., etc. I glanced at mother with a look of apology in my eyes. ‘I’m so sorry I forgot to avoid talking about this!’ I said with my eyes. I knew very early in Auntie Mary’s diatribe that this would not be a dialogue or discussion. We would just have to live with her expressing her opinions and let the topic eventually stop.
My mission experiences among Latinos/Latinas helped me to realize their lack of equality in our society. I saw the economic inequities practiced by whites, including Mormons, as contrary to the Gospel; one stake high councilman lived in a large home with air conditioning and a multi-car garage while the Mexican family he had as a farm worker lived in a house without running water or a swamp cooler and a dirt floor. I knew a woman well into her sixties who was born in the United States but who never had the opportunity of attending school. She had taught herself to read her Spanish Bible, but knew no English.
Years later, in the 1990s, I confessed to Mary Jean that my stance for Black civil rights was not totally altruistic; I was also campaigning for civil rights for gays and lesbians–for our right to have legal marriages and equal standing in the laws of the nation and all states.
All of these positions I hold, grow from the commitment to fairness and equality which mother championed throughout my childhood. It is a treasured legacy.
This essay is one of two originally written as part of the gift from my niece to collect writings of my life story for StoryWorth. The other is Papa.
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