A couple of months ago on a Saturday morning, a few friends and I drove from Atlanta, Georgia to Birmingham, Alabama. It was a short but enjoyable trip. We arrived around lunch time so after a bite, our hosting friends took us around to do some sightseeing.
Our first stop was Kelly Ingram Park, the location for some large demonstrations during the American Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. This iconic park features several monuments dedicated to the most important events of those tumultuous times.
One of those demonstrations took place in May 1963 and many of the participants were children and high school students. Hundreds of them faced arrests and attacks with police dogs and high-pressure firehoses from both the police and the firemen, following instructions from Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor. Also in September of that year, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church (located right at one of the corners and frequented predominantly by African Americans) was the target of a racial bombing that killed four girls.
The fact that children and teenagers were victims of such violent repression and discrimination made me wonder what it must have been like to them to have to live through such absurd cruelty. It also brought two stories to mind, regarding children’s innocent view of the world where the differences in color, race, social/economic class and culture simply do not exist or they just make it a more beautiful one and how discriminatory actions may just change that perspective abruptly and forever.
Around 2002 when I was working as children’s entertainer at an all-inclusive hotel in Riviera Maya, Mexico I met this wonderful Spanish family who lived in Chile at the time. They had a sweet 5-year old daughter who had a very outgoing personality. They told me they felt she was more Latin American than Spanish in many ways. I could see why they thought that…even when she danced she definitely had the Latin flare! I said that to them and the father laughed and proceeded to share a story with me. During a vacation in Dominican Republic, when she was only 3 years old, she was so mesmerized with the way Dominicans danced that she asked him: “Papá, ¿por qué yo no puedo ser negrita?” or “Dad, why can’t I be a little black girl?” She wanted to look like them so she could also dance like them!
My nephew Augusto, on the other hand, had a very distinct experience a few years earlier in Lima, when he was 6 years old. One day, he and his then 2-year old sister Marielisa, my sister, my mother and I went to a local super market to buy groceries. Outside the store they had installed a bouncing house for the clients’ children. They started playing there with some other kids and they were having a blast. It turned out, however, these other kids they were playing with were “different”: they were poor, street children. When the “security” guard in charge realized they were in there he kicked them out because they were not allowed to play there. My little nephew was brokenhearted when he saw them run away and disappear. He kept on asking where his “friends” had gone and why they were not there anymore. Since we were also surprised by what had just happened, we could not give him a reasonable explanation.
In both instances, their innocence prevented both children from seeing differences as something negative. In the first case, the little girl even saw them as something good and desirable. In the second case, the boy saw all other children just as his playmates because in his eyes they were equal. Yet, a discriminatory act made him suddenly aware that, unfortunately, they didn’t have the same rights. That was the end of innocence for him. And this is what takes me to formulate the following questions: Wouldn’t it be fantastic if children’s innocence was somehow impossible to go away? What if it couldn’t get lost as we became adults? I think the world would be a much better place to live in for more people, not only for a few. So, let’s work in gaining back that lost innocence!