Emotions often run high during presidential elections, especially around issues of civil rights. 2012 is no exception. Women’s issues and marriage equality are front and center, but the underlying belief in human dignity and fairness come from the same passion for justice that drove the early civil rights movement.
Anne Schneider met with me for an interview as I was writing my book. Hers was among the interviews that was not included due to the book’s length. Below is an excerpt from that conversation.
Ann’s father was born in North Dakota in 1909 into a very small farming community. His father, grandfather, and many of his relatives had homesteaded in the area and remained there, and he grew up surrounded by a warm, loving network of relatives. His mother died when he was four; his stepmother died when he was ten. His extended family made sure he and his siblings were loved, cared for, and secure during his entire childhood. Out of that close-knit community, he formed ideas and values about family and community that he passed along to his only child. In this excerpt from our May, 2009 interview, Ann talks about how her father truly lived his values:
My dad’s insurance agency was right on what is now Martin Luther King Avenue when we moved to Portland. Many of his customers were African-American. That was a turning point in his life of understanding the real situation for those families and the amount of prejudice there was, which was reflected in even the insurance rates and blatant racism.
He was a very trustworthy person, with real integrity. He developed close relationships in the African-American community that then transformed my parents’ view of what needed to happen in society. And that’s how they got involved in civil rights.
I really respected the way they spent their time trying to improve relationships in the community. My dad sponsored a Little League baseball team. My parents went to the games and were intimately involved with those kids and those families. It’s interesting to me that he put a lot of his hope in young people. I think he really felt called to give kids a chance.
What did you learn from him with respect to his investing himself with children and with kids in the black community and being a social activist? Do you feel like you learned that from your father?
Yes, and from my mom, too. Okay, here they are: They’re just North Dakota, goodhearted, basic folks, decent people; they believed in American values of equal opportunity and that education was important.
And then, here they have customers who are sharing some pretty tough stories. They talked at home about what they heard from folks who had come from the South and how they’d been treated there. There were some poignant things.
I think there was some understanding, because there’d been pain in his own life and unfairness. He could relate to those stories and felt that he could contribute or do something.
Do you have any recollection of one of the specific stories that he shared?
Customers talked about people in their family had been tarred and feathered. My parents were close to an older African-American woman who talked about the lack of education and not having literacy skills. They heard stories about kids who hadn’t had an equal opportunity. The school I attended was probably a third black, and my parents gave me very strong messages of inclusivity. When I had a birthday party in about fifth grade, we invited the whole class, everybody. And it was not that common, I think, that some of those kids had been in a white family’s home. But I just remember them as just kids in our class.
When I went to Brazil as a college student, I got involved in the African-Brazilian community. And I’ve been very interested in the African heritage of this country. I feel like it was really because my parents embraced that and it impacted me positively.
In some ways, they were more radical than I was; my father wrote scathing letters to various congressmen and they ended up leaving the Lutheran church that they’d been part of because they felt the church community was not living their Christian beliefs and was way too passive in speaking out against injustice.
When we’d get together with family, my dad was always much more radical, much more left than anyone else in the family. So, if they started talking politics, it would always be challenging.
Those experiences with his customers really changed my dad’s life, and he supported my mom as she started a reading project. She had supported him in his business and then he supported her as she, in her late fifties and sixties, started to come into her own. He was right there with her helping her with her project, kind of quiet, behind the scenes, but acting out what his values were.
Those values meant that when I was growing up, I was really interested in other cultures and other people. I had these experiences where in that elementary school, I had friends later who were of my generation, of the same age who were African-American. I distinctly remember one young woman who said to me, “Ann, I remember that you were not prejudiced.” That was her memory of our seventh grade class. I didn’t have any memory of that. I know I was just living out my family values, to look at people for who they are.
What are the really big things you took from your relationship with him?
Living in a community and being connected in family was really important. Having integrity and treating others as you’d have them treat you–that went across cultures. He really believed in this sense of being a good citizen, and that meant being involved in your community and speaking up and participating at that level.
He challenged me to think in the bigger sphere of things, where to speak up. For example, on the civil rights thing, those were issues that involved social change and a lot of it was political fighting, so to speak. And it isn’t easy and it’s not comfortable.
Knowing my father’s quiet personality, it’s interesting that he was willing to make such strong statements and to speak up about important things that he felt really deeply about. It challenges me to step up and speak out about things that are really important.
We all have our disappointments and pain and different things that happen. But I think, in my dad’s life, he healed much of that pain. He made a difference in a lot of people’s lives. In his own quiet way, he really worked for the benefit of others.
