Thank God My Mother Isn’t Here to See This

The Muldrow Family Reunion, Prescott, Arkansas, 1937. My mother, the future Mamie Weems, aged six, is seated in the front row, the first girl from the right. Her father, Calvin Muldrow, is seated directly behind her.

My grandfather was Calvin Luther Muldrow. One of a dozen brothers and sisters, he fought in World War I. Although he died when I was young, I recall his stories about how he survived the Great War. I remember hearing how he spent weeks in a foxhole in the Alps, sick from the malaria that nearly killed him. He returned home bearing the helmet of a German soldier whom he’d dispatched in battle as evidence of his wartime experience.

Two of my uncles, Calvin L. Muldrow, Jr. and Roger Johnson, fought in World War II, and the Korean War, respectively. Like my grandfather before them, they fought to defend America’s ideals. They all fought against fascism and Nazism. They fought for democracy. They did these things despite being forced to serve in a segregated military.

On Saturday mornings in the late sixties, my parents would dress in their best clothes and head to downtown Little Rock, Arkansas. Along with hundreds of other Black Americans, my mother and father marched for basic rights: the right to vote, the right to buy a home in whatever neighborhood they could afford, and for me and my brothers to attend schools that weren’t segregated from white people.

Because they dared to protest, the Arkansas State Police beat my parents along with the other protesters who dared to march up the stairs of the Arkansas State Capitol…