This blog is based on a speech I wrote for a public speaking class. I wanted to share it somewhere, and it's too long for facebook, so here it is.
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Imagine me at 11 years old. I am a little Welsh girl. 4 foot nine, skinny, and a tomboy, and I am madly in love with the idea of America.
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| Me on the pier, a bit younger than 11 |
That summer, two seemingly quintessential American things were everywhere – the first Starwars movie and Donna Summer’s I Feel Love.
But it was more than Han Solo and Disco that fueled my passion for the U.S. I
was on love with America because of my American mother.
She was lively, vibrant, and forthright. She wore jeans, she had hair about as short as mine is today. She treated kids as if they had brains and should use them.
She stood out from all the other mothers on our street.
When I was 11, I thought she was the best thing ever.
I attributed most of her difference to her nationality. Something that I wouldn’t dream of doing today. But at the time, I pretty much thought she was the way she was because she was a Yank.
I was also in love with America because, in an age where most people we knew didn’t travel very far, we did. We’d spent four summers in the U.S. by the time I was 11.
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| Williamsburg 1968 |
The only trip I really remember was the one we took when I was 10.
It was 1976, and the U.S. was celebrating its bicentennial. We went to see the liberty bell in Philadelphia, ate Astronaut ice-cream a the newly opened Air and Space Museum, spent time in Williamsburg.
America seemed like a vast and open and amazing land to me as a small child, and I was unabashedly and straightforwardly proud to be ½ American. I may have even tried to cultivate an accent.
So it was horrifying to me when, after that trip, I was watching tv and I saw an image of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dressed a dark suit, with a narrow tie. He looked dapper and handsome, as he usually does in the images we see. He was marching. Maybe at Selma. Maybe during the March on Washington.
It was one image, one moment, and that image changed how I felt about the United States.
During that moment, my simple vision of the United States as the land of the free began to crumble. I turned to my mother and said something like, “I didn’t know they had movies and suits in the 1860s.” and she said, “what are you talking about?” And I said, "well slavery ended in the 1860s, isn’t that what this is about?"
And she had to tell me that yes, slavery was abolished in the 1860s, but these images were from 1960s.
The US was not living up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence……not living up to the idea that all Americans could have liberty, and the chance to pursue happiness.
It broke my heart.
It made me want to know more.
It led me to question – pretty much everything.
This wasn’t a trait that endeared me to my school, or authority figures in general. And it wasn’t a trait that made it easy to be a kid.
And I wouldn’t change it for anything, because moments like this one shaped my life for the better, eventually leading me to a Ph.D. and a career in public history.
Moments where you connect to the past can be profoundly life shaping. A photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr., helped me realize that history is not just dates and facts – It’s a journey through ideas.
Even if we don’t recognize it, the past is always with us, in the landscape, in the laws, in the space between people, in our shared and unshared histories.
When we do recognize it, we can let history help make connections across cultures so that we better understand others and ourselves. History lets us think through what it means to be human.
Perhaps most importantly in these divided times, if we let it, history can help us explore difficult topics - like the gap between the ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the lived experiences of African Americans.
So let me leave you with a question:
What will you let the past teach you today?
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