i really enjoyed having dinner with roscoe jones, and that’s not just cause i got to have kidney beans & other viable vegan options! what an amazing human being. i mean, there was the surface- he was a civil rights activist supposed to have been in that car with schwerner, chaney, & goodman, but got called to another engagement- but i got so much out of that. i found him incredibly inspiring.
here are a few things he said that really resonated with me.
“ i am a freedom fighter.”
“how many of you know what integrity is? do we have it? well, start having it. it’s a bible. if you don’t have integrity, you have nothing. when i see the lack of integrity...well, let me say this. you should all be fighting to have it.”
“under democracy we have power, contrary to popular belief.”
“the truth will set you free. a lie will go on & on...the truth hurts. a lie doesn’t hurt me. so i keep on marching.”
“i really wasn’t worried about my life.”
“if you see a wrong, you gotta right it.”
“at first i thought... hey! we had overcome!”
“don’t tell me about it. do something about it.”
“you don’t go to school for an education! life gives you an education! you go to school to learn how to learn! that’s my philosophy. in life experience, i’ve earned a doctorate degree. the price was very high. i could’ve died.”
“when you become silent, you lose power. don’t be like everyone else. don’t be scared to stand out, cause everybody is looking for somebody else to make a difference. stop & think. we react instead of thinking. stop regurgitating what you hear & think before you act. think before you do. think before you speak.”
“it’s not about you!”
“we need to look at the bible & see what happens when the israelites left egypt. they didn’t immediately go to the promised land.”
“we need to get back to our obligations.”
enough said, tbh. he was terrific. tremendously engaging guy!
something that struck me was, looking in various museums, that these sentiments of ‘do what needs to be done’ is what motivates the kkk & all hate groups as well. it’s a common idiom that love & hate are different sides of the same coin, but now i think good & evil are too. i hope this doesn’t come across weird but- i was really inspired by what roscoe said, but sometimes the most inspiring messages of love can be eerily reminiscent of ‘inspirational’ messages of hate. i tried looking into messages of the kkk online that could serve a point of what i meant. “I am opposed to globalism, I am opposed to colonialism, I am opposed to any sort of complusion of one nation over another. (...) I also deeply believe in human rights.” david duke said that one. & the way they recruited people? they told people to do what they knew was right. i don’t know. there might be nothing there at all! there probably isn’t! maybe that’s just the sign of an effective recruitment system. but it still bothered me, those parallels, for reasons i’m not really sure about. i’ve always been hesitant to call someone evil.
the more time i spend in the south, the more time i realize everyone is everyone. we’re all people. black people, kkk members, we’re all so much the same.
my friends recently told me after i voiced my concerns to him that he thought that we all have latent, dormant hate & love within us, and our cultures bring them out. i think that’s just... so true. so right.
anyway, i loved roscoe’s story & truly took a lot from that. i get more & more conflicted every day.
- naomI
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