Obama's Tucson Speech, and Memories of a Revival Tent Part 3

I had been on the base two months by that August, coming to terms with my new surroundings as military kids do.  The day was a typical bayou country scorcher, and the evening promised little relief.  In the distance, somewhere to the south of our on-base quarters, I sensed, more than heard, a din of activity over toward the banks of the Red River.  I rode my bike to the base perimeter gate, and looked across a field bordered by groves of pecan trees where a large white tent had been erected, and into which several lines of people were making their way.  A loose caravan of automobiles and pick-up trucks meandered from the highway to the field, bumping and jostling and dodging chuck holes and hummocks, as each driver sought a place to pull over and park and disgorge their families and friends.

As I watched from the edge of the field, the tent seemed to swell with the incoming stream of folks, mostly white, but also a small number who were black.  There were loudspeakers hung on the corners of the tent, and the scratchy sound of a record playing a hymn filled the evening air.  I don't remember the particular hymn, but I do recall that it evoked a "come-in-here" feeling, though I kept my distance, fascinated by the scene in front of me.

Obama's Tucson Speech, and Memories of a Revival Tent Part 2

Intellectually unprotected against the encounter, I had no way to parry the blunt-force trauma of the separateness of segregation that hit me in the face when we drove down from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Shreveport.  All the symbols were there: white-only drinking fountains; white-only entrances to rest rooms, restaurants, hardware stores; and "No-Colored" signs outside hotels, rooming houses, and laundromats.  That there were two ways of life--one acceptable, one shunned; one worthy, one reviled; one white, one black--was a concept promoted by white men and women (and their children) of nearly every station in the civilian world of Shreveport, and the "N" word was as commonplace as pecan pie in a diner.

This is all old news today, in 2011, and it would seem to hardly merit attention, save for several summer nights in 1962 when I encountered a singularly powerful force for change: the power of the spoken word.

Obama's Tucson Speech, and Memories of a Revival Tent Part 1

Late on a hot summer afternoon in 1962, in northwestern Louisiana,  not long after I'd turned 13, I discovered the great curiosity that was the Southern revival tent. The impact of that discovery, though somewhat faded today on the almost-62-year-old surface of my life, is capable of letting itself be known, given the right call. And such a call it heard when President Obama spoke in Tucson in the wake of the shooting that took the lives of six, and changed the lives of millions.


I was living on an Air Force base outside Shreveport, Louisiana. It was my first encounter with the South.  Although my father's line is founded in strong and deep Southern roots nurtured by six-generations of Tennessee-raised Moores, his father, also  military, had raised my father in the Philippines, half-a-world away from his birthplace near Montgomery, Alabama.  On  my mother's side, the blood is as New England blue as it can get--traced to the decks of the Mayflower, and well-beyond--far back to England's shores and on up through Scotland to the Firth of Forth. Her life, begun in Albany, teethed on Providence, and influenced by her teen years in Hollywood as the daughter of a movie producer, was cradled in the care of white servants, cooks, gardeners, and nannies.

As a peripatetic military brat--the son of a cavalry officer--my dad experienced little of the traditional Southern growing up that might have bent his thoughts toward racism or bigotry.  When it was his turn to travel the world with his small family of four, he took us to his duty stations in Germany a decade after WW II, and then back to the U.S., at the height of the Cold War, where we lived in modest little towns, mostly in the Midwest--Ohio and Nebraska.  For me, Negroes, or "the colored," or just black people, were invisible--not because I chose not to see them, but because the eddies of life had not cast me into that stream of multi-racial encounters.  This is all to say that nothing in my first twelve years prepared me for the jolt--the palpable electric shock--of reality that followed my father's transfer to Barksdale Air Force Base in 1962.