Rich Mintz  

Last month, PBS’s “American Experience” series rebroadcast the first six episodes of Henry Hampton’s stunning 1987 documentary about America’s civil rights revolution, “Eyes on the Prize”, and my DVR caught it. I’m watching the series now for the fourth time in my life.

This is probably the most affecting documentary film series I’ve ever seen, and if Americans were required by law to sit through it once every five years, we wouldn’t be worse off as a nation.

It’s difficult for people of my age (I’m in my mid-40s) to believe that within our lifetimes, in the United States of America in the twentieth century, one half of the population in a dozen American states was systematically kept subjugated by the other half — in substantive ways that affected not just their emotional satisfaction, but their livelihoods and their lives. But it happened. And it didn’t magically end with Brown v. Board of Education, either — I knew someone in Atlanta, younger than me, who personally experienced de facto segregated waiting rooms in the 1970s in Charleston. Habit dies hard.

Each time I watch this footage, I’m reminded of how ordinary the people were through whose actions the systems and customs of segregation evolved; how ordinary the people were who decided they had had enough, and took incremental, ordinary actions — in the course of their normal lives — to begin to make change. Small rearguard actions, driven by fear, are what kept the system going; and small acts of courage — refusing to stand up on a bus, insisting that one’s brutalized son have an open-casket funeral, standing firm in front of a firehose, speaking up to bullheaded church friends in a lily-white neighborhood — are what initiated and propelled the momentum that tore it down. Eventually, the force of the United States of America oriented itself decisively on the one side rather than the other, and after that, change could not but come.

Last month in Dearborn, Michigan, at the Henry Ford Museum, I sat in the actual Montgomery bus where Rosa Parks kept her seat. It’s in a quiet room, in a quiet gallery, as much shrine as history exhibit. There’s no better place to contemplate the small choices that lead to historic change than in Rosa Parks’ seat. Parks herself has been hailed as a hero, and rightly so, but there were millions of other Americans — black and white, of all religions and cultural affiliations — who sat in, or stood up, and said “this is not right, and it must not continue.” These are all heroes; may we remember them, and walk in their path.

I’m watching a “Rockford Files” episode in which Nazis are about to figure (so it seems) in the plot, and something occurs to me: in 1977 when this episode was made, the Nazi era was precisely as recent as the Jimmy Carter/Ronald Reagan era is now.

To me, Nazis are part of “history,” but I remember Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan perfectly well, not as history but as lived experience from my childhood. In fact, in 1980, I was practically old enough to vote for (er, against) Ronald Reagan, so it doesn’t feel so long ago. But Jim Rockford (and, for that matter, James Garner) in 1977 would remember Nazis not just as childhood experience, but from their (earlier) adulthood.

As a child, I often wondered why so much of our popular culture (TV, movies, etc.) was “about” World War II, and Nazis in particular. Some sliver of this presumably had to do with the fact that the crimes of the Nazis were so extreme, and some part of it presumably had to do with the overrepresentation of Jews in Hollywood. But I realize now that most of it was simply due to the fact that World War II was a big disruptive thing that had recently happened to all the grownups in the world. Even my parents, young as they were, were old enough to have been affected by it — my father was even stationed at Great Lakes Naval Station in Waukegan, Illinois for a time, although the war ended before there was time to deploy him.

Similarly, I wonder whether the young political people I work with are curious about why Ronald Reagan looms so large in the popular consciousness. Part of it is no doubt due to the fact that he was larger than life even in life, and part of it due to his charisma, and part of it due to his ideas; but part of it is simply due to the fact that Ronald Reagan was a big disruptive thing that happened to all of the grownups in the world. Everyone my age and older — that is, basically, everyone old enough to have kids in middle school now, or older — has personal memories of that era.

And if you really want to blow your mind, consider this: when my grandmother was born (and she is still alive and well), the Civil War was as recent an occurrence as the Vietnam War is now, give or take a year or two. And I remember the Vietnam War, or at least the end of it; and I’m not that old. So my grandmother must have interacted with people in her childhood for whom the Civil War was part of their adult lived experience. And the oldest of those people, in their childhoods, would almost certainly have interacted with people who remembered the Revolutionary War from their adult experience. That’s a pretty remarkable formulation of the short duration of American history to date.