“Children,” Anne said in her assumed command, “Do you know who Dr. Martin Luther King is?” The third graders, one of them my son, settled into immediate silence.
I had invited Anne to ‘Learning Unlimited’ a school in Columbus, Ohio, over thirty five years ago to talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She was a manager at IBM at the time and became a close friend.
“Dr. King taught us to make our voices heard without violence. He wanted all to be treated the same. So we even broke laws that were unfair and applied only to some people. Then the police came to put us in jail. We went peacefully. And children, we were very afraid. But we did not resist or fight, instead we sang this song together and took courage..”
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome, someday
Oh, deep in my heart
I know that I do believe
We shall overcome, someday
We shall be alright
We shall be alright
We shall be alright, someday
Her melodious voice washed over the children. My son still remembers Anne’s words from that visit in 1991.
Anne H. (Left) and Jay R. (Right), Summer 2024.
I visited my friend again this summer of 2024. And now in our seventies, we who had overcome barriers as aspiring professionals during the seventies, looked back on our lives to thread our insights into stories that spanned cultures.
Anne recounted: “Martin relied on students like me for Civil Disobedience asking us to break unfair laws because we could go to jail and come out without serious consequences to our livelihoods and families. Also it was good optics to gain the population’s sympathy. For thirteen years, starting in my late teens, I devoted every summer to protesting alongside Martin against unfair laws and ordinances such as simply drinking water from ‘Whites Only’ fountains.”
She remembered being there on March 7, 1965, when the 25-year-old activist John Lewis led about 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. She remembers facing brutal state troopers with attack dogs and batons and local people with hate painted on their faces. The footage of the violence shocked the nation. She says: “Martin did not want to go out on the march that day because of a lack of Federal troops to protect us. He was on the phone with Mr. Johnson asking for more Federal protection. But John Lewis did go ahead.”
The events in Selma galvanized public opinion and mobilized Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which President Johnson signed into law on August 6, 1965. Anne entered the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri in the fall of 1964. She came to Stanford University in the fall of 1970. Her undergraduate work was completed in Physics and graduate work on Computer Science. She had a successful career at IBM culminating as a senior technology manager.
I recounted: Dr. King had visited India. I discovered this when a few years ago I was at the historical building from where Mahatma Gandhi launched the first phase of non-violent freedom struggle in Mumbai, India. Dr. King had stayed in the very building, now a museum. In March of 1930 Mahatma Gandhi conceived of the Dandi Salt March which became the simple act of Civil Disobedience that would inaugurate tax resistance and nonviolent protest against the British salt monopoly and inspire millions to follow Gandhi's example.
Said Dr. King, “India is the land where the techniques of nonviolent social change were developed that my people have used in Montgomery, Alabama and elsewhere throughout the American South” (Press Conference 02.10). And wrote Dr. King "Mahatma Gandhi resisted evil with as much vigor and power as the violent resistor, but he resisted with love instead of hate. True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love."
For those of us that grew up in the wake of Dr. King's and Mahatma Gandhi’s principled Civil Disobedience to gain equal rights on behalf of all men and women, the continuing threats to Democracy by minority factions are dismaying.
While we fought for the right to vote, today the full value of our vote may be wasted in many states here in the US. By opposing the extreme use of partisan gerrymandering we prevent a political minority from taking away the voice of the rest of us.
Today it remains extremely important for us to continue to safeguard the right to vote and improve the very laws that govern us. Reach out to your family, friends and neighbors and remind them to vote this November!
---Story by Jay R.