Pernell: A time for new beginnings, a time for honesty

As a man raised in a large religious family in a small rural community, I always thought of April as colorful spring dresses, the first beach trips of the year and bright new blossoms. But April is important to me for deeper reasons, too.

In April, just 49 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case of tremendous significance to my family. In Loving v. Virginia, the court unanimously upheld the legality of the marriage between a black woman and her white husband, ending all race-based marriage restrictions nationwide. In April one year later, our nation’s preeminent racial justice advocate, Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated.

Fourteen years to the month after King’s assassination, my parents, once seventh-grade classmates, got married. In the tiny country town where they still reside, my white mother, the daughter of a hog farmer, was the high school’s salutatorian and white homecoming queen (students traditionally elected a separate black queen). My black father was a talented athlete who lived just down the street with a mother who could barely make ends meet.

In the face of death threats, severed relationships with close family members and other racially hostile acts in direct response to their marriage, they fulfilled the promise of Loving and chose love.

It was in April 2009, when my parents had their first grandchild, that my father met his white in-laws for the very first time in his life. Until that time, and still now, my parents bury the turbulent circumstances of their young romance under family holiday gatherings, smiling family portraits and the mundane tasks of daily life.

Instead of the truth about the in timate role violent racism played in our fate as a family, silence. Instead of reconciliation, willful ignorance.

We distracted ourselves by focusing on how our family’s lives had steadily improved. No matter the emotional and psychological damage that still brews underneath it all.

In law school, Bryan Stevenson spent class time calling our attention to the legal implications of our nation’s insistence on doing the same — that is, choosing not to explore the very difficult history of racial subordination in this country. And, moreover, paying the price with perilous ignorance of how that history affects all of us today.

Stevenson, whom South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu dubs “America’s Nelson Mandela,” speaks of this country’s need for the same type of “truth and reconciliation” that followed South Africa’s horrible apartheid system. Just 20 years ago, South Africans confronted the pain of their history of racial violence by witnessing public testimonies of how apartheid had affected individuals’ lives. Two years prior, in April, they elected Mandela.

My personal story is a small example of our country’s need to similarly wrestle with our own violent racial past. The truth is that the era of race-based slavery has gravely influenced all of our lives, as has the era of terror between Reconstruction and World War II, the era of Jim Crow that led to the civil rights movement and, now, the era of mass incarceration. Black history recognition and the removal of old symbols of a racist history are important starts, but they cannot be the entire solution for addressing this legacy.

Without a deeper understanding of our past, we will never be able to appreciate how my father’s marriage to his white wife, in April, destroyed solid family relationships and threatened community ties. Or how last year, in April, a white police officer could so easily shoot a fleeing black man in the back. Or how two months after that, a white man could enter a church and shoot its black parishioners just because they were black.

The word “april” has its Latin derivation in aperire, “to open,” likely referring to new blossoming flowers.

My hope is that by making more meaningful efforts to engage with our racial legacy, we might begin to be able to take delight in “blossoms” of a different kind. With national organizations such as the Equal Justice Initiative, led by Stevenson, and emerging local groups such as the S.C. Collaborative on Race and Reconciliation leading the way, I think it is possible.

This story was originally published April 10, 2016 at 5:00 PM with the headline "Pernell: A time for new beginnings, a time for honesty."