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Your experience is extremely well-documented. I’ve had experiences of watching movies about you, videos about you, seeing Norman Rockwell paintings about you, seeing all of these things, and I think it’s really important to notice the amount of violence that surrounds you in these moments, and the protection that you needed as a young Black girl in the face of racism. Although we don’t all experience those kinds of egregious shows of violence, a lot of young Black girls are still being mistreated because of the color of their skin. How do you think that educators like Mrs. Henry or parents can protect Black girls and keep them healthy, alive, and well?
You know what? The first thing that I think is extremely important, it should come from home. Because it’s very hard to protect our young people, our babies, our kids, from what’s out there in the world. We can’t keep all of you in a bubble. There is good and evil in the world. Those of us who consider ourselves good, we have to stand up and be counted so that we know that there’s more good than evil in the world.
But make no mistake, it is out there. There’s no real protecting you from it. The only thing that I think grownups—whether it be your parents or someone very, very close to you, like your grandparents—can do is tell you that you are special, that you should feel good about yourself. And then when you go out into the world, it won’t really matter to you as much what other people think of you, as long as you feel good about yourself.
I think that that’s what our kids need before we open the door and let them out into the world. Because until we all come together to unite, to make this world a better place, that element is out there. That is what we’ve seen in this year. It is out there, as it was out there in 1960. You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, and know that you are gorgeous and that you are loved, and that no matter what people say, you are going to feel that way.
What kind of skills or tips and tricks do you think you could give to young people to be brave, even when it’s hard?
People tell me all the time, “Oh, you are so brave.” I used to hear it all the time, and to be honest with you, I didn’t feel that way. Even at six, I didn’t feel like I was really being brave. In a sense, in hindsight, I was. In the beginning I didn’t know that all of those people were out there to keep me out of the school. I wasn’t aware that they could have really harmed me. That didn’t dawn on me until much, much later.
But for me, I’m the kind of person that I need to know the truth. I have to know the truth and be able to process it and know how to deal with it, and then I can walk on. I can walk ahead with my head held high. If you think about it that way, maybe that does make me brave, but I didn’t feel that way. Today, as an adult, I don’t feel brave. But what I do know is that when I’m backed into a corner, I can’t stay in the corner.
