Two angry men are stoking racism reminiscent of 50 years ago

It’s the smiles for me. The smiles on the faces of the three children in a photograph taken 50 years ago in Springfield, Mass., over the knowledge that they were going to school.

Two days before the photograph was taken, 80 buses filled with kids just like them rolled through Boston to enforce an order by U.S. District Judge Arthur Garrity in Morgan v. Hennigan, who commanded the city to bus Black kids to white schools and white kids to Black schools because the city’s de facto segregation of children by race was unconstitutional.

They rolled — accompanied by a police escort.

All but one of them rolled without incident, it was reported at the time. The one? It was pelted with debris, bricks and racist epithets from white parents in South Boston. Pelted with kids inside. Kids who wanted nothing more than to go to school and learn.

Buses like these rolled all over the country. Children like these were on buses all over the country.

Including in Tulsa, Okla., my hometown. Two years prior, half the Black students who would have attended Booker T. Washington High School on the city’s predominantly Black north side were bused to white schools in southern Tulsa. “Booker T.” became a magnet school, which it proudly remains to this day.

In September 1971, 89 white children from the south side were bused to the north side, to John Burroughs Elementary School, which had previously been all-Black. All things considered, it went relatively smoothly, according to reports.

I chose to write about this photo and those children with their smiles today for myriad reasons.

I chose it to demonstrate that racism then was not confined to the South. Just as it isn’t now.

The stoking of unfounded fears is a virus of deadly, pandemic proportions — it exists everywhere. Right now that virus is being hatefully hurled at our Haitian neighbors — men, women and children in our community seeking to work, live, learn and pray.

Just like us.

Children just like those in the photo. Children who just want to go to school.

Yet too many now fear for their safety due to threats from cowards infected by the virus, stoked by two angry men who want to lead our nation — though only part of it, it seems.

Not the part that is different from them. The part they do not understand. The part they’d rather demonize than embrace.

Stoked too, this week, by Alabama’s infantile senior U.S. senator, Tommy Tuberville.

The good people of Springfield, Ohio, are indeed struggling to absorb an infusion of an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Haitian immigrants (most here legally, by the way, under the federal Temporary Protected Status program) to a city of about 58,000. These immigrants are escaping unrest, violence and hopelessness.

Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine — who, along with his wife, supports a school in Haiti named for their daughter — described these immigrants as “family-centric, hardworking and in search for economic opportunities and safety,” according to the Dayton Daily News.

Springfield’s struggle is about resources, not race, though you wouldn’t know that if you listened to hateful stereotypes spewed by the two angry men who want to lead us — some of us — and their parrot minions.

This week, DeWine committed $2.5 million in state funds for health care needs and state troopers to help with new traffic issues.

I also chose the aforementioned photo to show how far we’ve come in half a century but, man, how far we still have to go. As a nation and in the South, too, where racists in Alabama are pathetically attacking Haitian immigrants, not with bottles and bricks but with more lies, misconceptions and baseless stereotypes.

With hateful, vile ugliness that sounds so much like what their parents and grandparents likely hurled at my parents and grandparents.

Last month, at a community meeting in Albertville, Ala., convened to diffuse the baseless rhetoric emerging in the city over its growing Haitian community, one person, as reported by my colleague William Thornton, stood and said Haitians have smells to them. “They’re not like us. They’re not here to be Americanized. They don’t care about schools. They’re scary, folks.”

Who’s scary here? Start with the two angry men who want to lead us — backward.

Oh, I also chose the photo, too, because I wonder where those three beautiful, joy-filled children are now. They’d have to be, what, in their late 50s? I wonder if they remember that day, remember how brave they and their parents had to be.

Just to send them to school.

I’d like to thank them for making us smile half a century later. When we really needed to smile.

And for causing us to wonder if, when we look back on this year — on our actions, choices, and treatment of others 50 years from now — we’ll smile then, too.

Roy Johnson is a columnist for al.com, a member of the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame, an Edward R. Murrow Award winner, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary.