Today, I learned another reason to hold my dad in great admiration. While helping my parents get ready for their impending move to an apartment in Kingswood Manor, I found old newspaper story about my father. During the late 1950’s into the early 1960’s, Dad was a journalist for the then-Atlanta Journal. He wrote a features column which often held a mirror to the city in the early days of the civil rights struggle. Dad interviewed Martin Luther King, Jr. the night that he was in the Atlanta jail- an interview that never was published, but that’s a different story . . .
Most of the time, however, his stories were more indirect. One of my favorites was his account of the segregated gallery for observers of the Georgia Legislature. Rather than rail against the injustice of the accepted practice of the time, my father simply narrated the story of a young African-American boy who kept slipping past the guard who was guarding the empty, whites-only front row seats. The boy was too young to read the “whites only” sign, and he was eager to get the best view of the proceedings possible. The boy’s persistence was no match for the guard, and so the color barrier was broken that day by a young child.
When my dad moved to another job, a colleague wrote an article about him. In that column, my father was described as “soft-spoken, yet outspoken.” I love that phrase. It describes perfectly the man I’ve been privileged to have as my father. I still want to be like him when I grow up!
