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Much is
Expected
Or Down By Riverside
with Juanita
By
Elijah E. Cummings
(Maryland's
7th District)
I
could not have been older than nine or ten when
"Captain" Jim Smith from our neighborhood recreation
center and the NAACP’s Juanita Jackson Mitchell joined forces
to stand up for us. It happened at a swimming pool called
Riverside. We were just children looking for a way to escape the
summer heat of South Baltimore’s concrete and asphalt streets.
In those days, South Baltimore’s white
children swam and relaxed in the Olympic-sized Riverside Pool
that the City maintained not far from where I lived. Black
children were barred from Riverside by the cruelty of
segregation. We were consigned by the color of our skin to the
aging wading pool at Sharp and Hamburg Streets, a pool so small
we had to take turns to be able to sit in the cool water. Upset about our exclusion
from our neighborhood’s public pool, we complained to Jim
Smith. To their everlasting credit, Captain Smith,
Juanita
Jackson Mitchell, Clarence Mitchell III and Michael Mitchell
organized a march, a struggle that others soon joined.
I would like to be able to
tell you that the white families at Riverside accepted us
graciously – after all, we were just little children. Sadly,
that is not what happened. As we tried to gain entrance to the
pool each day for over a week, we were spit upon, threatened and
called everything but children of God. We were afraid, and our
parents became concerned for our safety.
Captain Smith requested
police protection for us – but no help was forthcoming. It
seemed as if we were alone in a hostile world. Then, when all
seemed lost, Juanita Jackson Mitchell marched up the street
toward our little group like she was the Empress of South
Baltimore. With her were two reluctant but grimly-determined
policemen, clearly more afraid of her anger than of the jeering,
racist crowd.
Today, more than 40 years
later, the history books say that the Riverside pool was
peaceably integrated. It was – by the authority of Thurgood
Marshall’s Constitution, the NAACP’s growing political power
and Juanita Jackson Mitchell’s determination that all children
would be treated fairly.
Reflecting on my childhood,
I think it was at that moment – there at the gate to Riverside
– that I realized that the law and service to the community
would define my future. As Eleanor Roosevelt once observed:
"Human rights must
begin in small places close to home. They are the world of the
individual person, where every man, woman and child seeks equal
justice, equal opportunity and equal dignity without
discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they
have little meaning anywhere."
The desire to go swimming
on a hot summer day – and the terrible impact on me when were
denied the use of that Riverside swimming pool – kindled a
fire in me, a fire that enlightened my understanding of my own
nature and destiny. Lawyers like Juanita Jackson Mitchell helped
people. And that, I had come to understand, was what I was
destined to do with my life. The only problem was that I was a
poor child of color – one of seven children of parents who
were denied an education.
I had spent most of my
elementary school training in South Baltimore as an unhappy
member of what then was called the "3rd Group" - what
we today call "special education." To this day, I
remember the cold, incredulous, rejecting words of my 6th grade
school counselor. "You want to be a lawyer? Who do you
think you are?"
When I think back to that
time, I do something I have done every morning of my adult life.
I thank God for the wonderful adults who gave me my head start
in life: I thank God for Mr. Hollis Posey, the sixth grade
teacher who listened to my dreams, who believed in my potential
as a human being, and who taught to my strengths, not my
limitations. And I thank God for my parents, who convinced me
that I could become whatever I decided to be. With their help
– and the help of many other people – I made it through the
gauntlet of prejudice and poverty, cruelty and indifference.
I made it out of the 3rd
group. I graduated second in my class from Baltimore City
College High School. I became a Phi Beta Kappa at Howard
University. I became a lawyer at the University of Maryland. I
was elected to public office and rose to the position of Speaker
Pro Tem of the Maryland House of Delegates and,
today, I serve the people of Baltimore in the Congress of the
United States of America.
For all of us, our
experience in life is the foundation upon which we construct our
education about what is important. So, it will not surprise you
that, today, my foremost goal in the Congress is to give every
child in America the opportunity to develop their unique and
diverse abilities - to achieve excellence on their own terms.
Source:
Commencement Address at Savannah State University (12/
8/ 2001) *
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*
updated 30 April
2009
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