donbosco
Distinguished Member
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(This one is a couple of days late) Sunday was a big day for education in #Bonlee through the 1960s & 70s. There was a short lesson to read over then the three-minute drive up to #BonleeBaptist for actual Sunday School.
That was followed by ‘Preaching.’ We were neither a ‘Singing Church’ nor a ‘Fire-eater’ crowd but rather calm and serious with no ‘calling out.’ My memories of that place and people are centered on the years 1960 through 1976. Those times brought to us all the Civil Rights Movement, School Desegregation, the Equal Rights Amendment, The Vietnam War, the Draft, and the whole counter-culture rising, including the Peace Movement. It was a lot to take in. Nevertheless, like #Bonlee Baptist Church, my home was calm and serious with no ‘calling out.’
We did however, study it all. While the Sunday School lessons and the preacher’s sermons were part, most of the real learning went on in the kitchen, the den, or driving across Piedmont North Carolina. Whether it was to the farm, where Grandpa and Grandma Dunn lived and Deddy had his cows, to the homeplace of a #BonleeHardware customer to work on a water pump, or over to Brown-Rogers-Dixon in Greensboro to retrieve some needed supplies, those drives, often punctuated by hourly news on WPTF Radio were my political science seminars as Deddy critiqued the happenings in the nation and world.
By the time I was 8 or 9 it had become a conversation. Our prompts were the national and local news, the ‘Kiplinger Letter’ (a nonpartisan pamphlet on finance that came in the mail several times a month), the Sunday interview shows like ‘Meet the Press’ and ‘Face the Nation’ (helping to further turn The Holy Day into an education), Walter Cronkite, and quite regularly WRAL-TV’s ‘Viewpoint.’
Momma and Deddy kept their radios (car and kitchen) tuned to WPTF because it came out of Raleigh and in the days before cable that was where you learned what was happening first whether it was the farm report, a hurricane, or a riot. We did the same with the TV, always watching WRAL Evening News (a well-timed switch could get Charlie Harville over on WGHP/WFMY for the best ACC Basketball coverage during the most sacred time of the year). Watching WRAL meant that we always got our fill of Jesse Helms and his Evening News closing editorial column of the air, ‘Viewpoint.’
I have been told that even before I could fully comprehend his message that I was stirred up during that segment. He curled his lip into a sneer with every pronounced R - this I remember like yesterday. And in truth, having come to understand his stances and evaluations more fully, my childhood revulsion was exactly on target.
Martin Luther King Jr. was another prominent voice in those days. My parents respected his voice and his message. The calm and seriousness of church came over us when he spoke. Deddy watched the Civil Rights Movement closely-it was profoundly important even in #DeepChatham. Helms hated the Civil Rights Movement. A staunch segregationist and White Supremacist (who continued to affirm it over and over once elected to the US Senate in 1972), Helms regularly attacked UNC and MLK Jr. I already loved Carolina because of Coach Smith and from what I saw from my parents, and heard on my own (Little “Pitchers” have big Ears after all), the Reverend King deserved my support too. He had a dream that fit with all my home and church education. For Helms on the other hand, King (and probably Coach Smith’s team play defense and passing heavy offense) was just so much “action-oriented Marxism.” Made me wonder about a lot of things thank goodness. Today we remember a speech from 1963.
“Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
#OTD (August 28) 1963 Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have A Dream” speech at #TheMarchOnWashington. Equality and Freedom were themes and passage of The Civil Rights Act was the goal of the gathering.
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