December 23, 2002 | I am a story teller. I was drawn to journalism by that urge and progressed eventually to highly accurate historical novels that are built around the nation's story. By far the greatest story I ever covered as it was unfolding was the magnificent challenge to the old vestiges of slavery based on the ruling class's assumption of superiority over the ruled. Much of the civil rights fight could be characterized as an attack on that superiority-inferiority vision enforced by violence.

I spent my boyhood on military posts which then were segregated in the extreme. So it was that with World War II rumbling in the immediate future my father was off on new duties, my family was broken and at the age of 13 I was throwing a paper route in a black ghetto on a street called Short Line in Shreveport, Louisiana. Unpainted shotgun houses lined the dirt streets, rentals paying to a white landlord, each structure three or four feet from its neighbor, each stoop letting down to the path that passed for sidewalk, and in those days it simply did not occur to me that there was anything out of true in this scene.

Only when the civil rights scene hammered such matters into the national consciousness did they penetrate my obliviousness. And so, as was happening for millions of similarly oblivious whites, the movement came as a great awakening for me. And, awake at last, I saw a beautiful people who were clever, able, intelligent, immensely courageous. That was what beat its way into my consciousness: their courage.

I remember the funeral for the four children killed in the church bombing in Birmingham, and the striking young African-American men and women who organized it. They knew exactly what they were doing when they concealed a Life photographer in the organ with a magnificent wide-angle view of the whole church. Those men and women, alert, decisive, authoritative, physically handsome, remain unforgettable, living on in memory as refutation of the blind images of a 13-year-old throwing the Shreveport Journal.

I remember the intellect and the iron fortitude of Myrlie Evers, and her raw courage, after Medgar Evers, the militant NAACP leader in Mississippi, was shot to death on their doorstep as she prepared supper in the kitchen. I sat down with her in a Washington hotel room two days later and in her steadfast way she told their story right through that fatal evening. She had cried before and she would cry again but now there were no tears. She was doing her duty to him as living refutation of the old hatred that had murdered him. I wrote all that night, slept an hour and took the finished story back to her since it would carry her byline. She read it in silence; only once she cried out in pain and asked for the change of a word. One word. The story ran prominently in the then weekly Life, her portrait on the cover.

That courage, that assertion of rightness until it lodged in the view like a mote in the eye, pounded the message day by day, lesson by lesson, that the world had changed and that a little of the wrong had been (or was being) made right.

Not long before he died my father watched television pictures of the Birmingham riots. He was a fierce and proud man, a Regular Army colonel, holder of five Purple Hearts from World War I, and his heritage was the segregationist mode that gripped the country for nearly a century after emancipation and still hangs grimly on in the shadows. The pictures shook him. I showed him the magnificent spread of photographs Charles Moore took for Life of police dogs attacking men and women seeking no more than their rights as citizens.

At last he looked up and muttered, "I hope the blacks win. They deserve it."

Turned from a lifetime view by their rightness and their courage.

About David Nevin
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