Read Online My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Gloria Steinem
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who said that asking for help from Washington was too needy, not self-sufficient, and unlikely to succeed.
For all those reasons, I decided not to go to the march—right up until I found myself on my way. All I can say years later is: If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.
On that hot August day, I was just one person being carried slowly along in a sea of humanity. I washed up next to “Mrs. Greene with an e,” an older, plump woman wearing a straw hat, who was marching with her grown-up, elegant daughter. As Mrs. Greene explained, she had worked in Washington during the Truman administration, in the same big room as white clerks, but segregated behind a screen. She hadn’t been able to protest then, so she was protesting now.
As we neared the Lincoln Memorial, she pointed out that the only woman seated on the speakers’ platform was Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women, an organization that had been doing the work of racial justice since the 1930s, yet even she hadn’t been asked to speak. Mrs. Greene wanted to know:
Where is Ella Baker? She trained all those SNCC young people. What about Fannie Lou Hamer? She got beaten up in jail and sterilized in a Mississippi hospital when she went in for something else entirely. That’s what happens—we’re supposed to give birth to field hands when they need them, and not when they don’t. My grandmother was dirt poor and was paid seventy-five dollars for every live birth. The difference between her and Fannie Lou? Farm equipment. They didn’t need so many field hands anymore. These are black women’s stories, who will tell them?
I hadn’t even noticed the absence of women speakers. Also I’d never thought about the racist reasons for controlling women’s bodies. I felt a gear click into place in my mind. It was like India, where high-caste women were sexually restricted and women at the bottom were sexually exploited. This march was magnetic because living in India had made me aware of how segregated my own country was. But only Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste—and how women’s bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.
Mrs. Greene’s daughter rolled her eyes as her mother told me about complaining to their state delegation leader. He had countered that Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson were singing. 3
Singing isn’t speaking,
she told him in no uncertain terms.
I was impressed. Not only had I never made any such complaints, but at political meetings, I had given my suggestions to whatever man was sitting next to me, knowing that if a man offered them, they would be taken more seriously.
You white women,
Mrs. Greene said kindly, as if reading my mind,
if you don’t stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?
As streams of people surged toward the Lincoln Memorial and the speakers’ platform, the three of us got separated. I used my press credentials to climb the steps, hoping to see them. But when I turned around, all I could see was an ocean of upturned faces. It was a scene I will never forget. Stretching over the expanse of green, past the reflecting pool, past the Washington Monument, all the way to the Capitol, there were a quarter of a million people. The sea of humanity looked calm, peaceful, not even pressing to come closer to the speakers, as if each one felt responsible for proving that the fears of violence and disorder were wrong. We were like a nation within a nation. From nowhere, a thought rose up:
I wouldn’t be anywhere else on this earth.
Martin Luther King, Jr., read his much-anticipated speech in a deep and familiar voice. I’d always imagined that if I were present at the creation of history, I would know it only long afterward, yet this was history in the moment.
As King ended his speech, I heard Mahalia Jackson call out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” And
For all those reasons, I decided not to go to the march—right up until I found myself on my way. All I can say years later is: If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.
On that hot August day, I was just one person being carried slowly along in a sea of humanity. I washed up next to “Mrs. Greene with an e,” an older, plump woman wearing a straw hat, who was marching with her grown-up, elegant daughter. As Mrs. Greene explained, she had worked in Washington during the Truman administration, in the same big room as white clerks, but segregated behind a screen. She hadn’t been able to protest then, so she was protesting now.
As we neared the Lincoln Memorial, she pointed out that the only woman seated on the speakers’ platform was Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women, an organization that had been doing the work of racial justice since the 1930s, yet even she hadn’t been asked to speak. Mrs. Greene wanted to know:
Where is Ella Baker? She trained all those SNCC young people. What about Fannie Lou Hamer? She got beaten up in jail and sterilized in a Mississippi hospital when she went in for something else entirely. That’s what happens—we’re supposed to give birth to field hands when they need them, and not when they don’t. My grandmother was dirt poor and was paid seventy-five dollars for every live birth. The difference between her and Fannie Lou? Farm equipment. They didn’t need so many field hands anymore. These are black women’s stories, who will tell them?
I hadn’t even noticed the absence of women speakers. Also I’d never thought about the racist reasons for controlling women’s bodies. I felt a gear click into place in my mind. It was like India, where high-caste women were sexually restricted and women at the bottom were sexually exploited. This march was magnetic because living in India had made me aware of how segregated my own country was. But only Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste—and how women’s bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.
Mrs. Greene’s daughter rolled her eyes as her mother told me about complaining to their state delegation leader. He had countered that Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson were singing. 3
Singing isn’t speaking,
she told him in no uncertain terms.
I was impressed. Not only had I never made any such complaints, but at political meetings, I had given my suggestions to whatever man was sitting next to me, knowing that if a man offered them, they would be taken more seriously.
You white women,
Mrs. Greene said kindly, as if reading my mind,
if you don’t stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?
As streams of people surged toward the Lincoln Memorial and the speakers’ platform, the three of us got separated. I used my press credentials to climb the steps, hoping to see them. But when I turned around, all I could see was an ocean of upturned faces. It was a scene I will never forget. Stretching over the expanse of green, past the reflecting pool, past the Washington Monument, all the way to the Capitol, there were a quarter of a million people. The sea of humanity looked calm, peaceful, not even pressing to come closer to the speakers, as if each one felt responsible for proving that the fears of violence and disorder were wrong. We were like a nation within a nation. From nowhere, a thought rose up:
I wouldn’t be anywhere else on this earth.
Martin Luther King, Jr., read his much-anticipated speech in a deep and familiar voice. I’d always imagined that if I were present at the creation of history, I would know it only long afterward, yet this was history in the moment.
As King ended his speech, I heard Mahalia Jackson call out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” And
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