When I was four, my mother told me a story about a civil rights activist she admired. He was a contemporary of Dr. Martin Luther King, and his name was James Farmer. He was among the bravest people who ever lived because he was one of the Freedom Riders who rode buses throughout the South, testing how successfully and safely Blacks could assert their newly established equal legal status on public transportation.
This was a time when Jim Crow, separate but equal laws were in force in a de facto way, meaning that forcing blacks to the back of the bus was supposed to be illegal but was a stubbornly lingering practice. What Farmer did was dangerous, and Blacks were frequently beaten and lynched for this kind of "brazen" behavior.
Long before he was a Freedom Rider, when my mother was a girl, Farmer visited the church camp she was attending, spoke with the children, and took them swimming in the lake. I was impressed by this and bragged to my Sunday school class that my mother had gone swimming with Sammy Davis, Jr. I loved Sammy Davis, Jr. I also lived in an all-white neighborhood since neighborhoods, even in the north where I was from, tended to be segregated then. The Black men in my life were either Sammy Davis, Jr. or Nat King Cole. I loved him, too.
When my Sunday school teacher fawned over my mother, telling her what I'd shared with the class and swooning over how thrilling it must have been to go swimming with Sammy Davis, Junior, my mother, who never swore - even in her mind - had a WTF moment. Immediately, she whisked me aside and abruptly demanded to know what that was all about.
Once I'd explained, and she saw how guileless I was, she laughed.
Then she had to explain things to my Sunday school teacher who probably thought James Farmer was a singer too.
But my Sunday school teacher wouldn't have had my excuse.
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