The barstool shakes beneath me.
Dishes smash around my feet.
A loud chorus of ugliness surrounds me.
A particularly cold, harsh voice shouts in my ear.
“Boy, get up! Get up! I’ll kill you, boy. I’ll kill you right here! Get up!”
I jerk away from his cruelty but remain firmly planted.
The counter vibrates from a pounded fist. Someone shoves me.
Not quite two minutes elapse and I spend the last seconds repeatedly reassuring myself, “This isn’t real. This isn’t real. This isn’t real.”

I open my eyes, move my hands from the electronic sensors on the counter and shakily remove my headphones. Tears threaten to drip down my face. My trembling knees struggle to support my weight and I stumble as I step down the raised platform.

__________________________________

I experienced the Lunch Counter at the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Ga., a couple weekends ago. We almost didn’t do it because of the long line and not knowing what to do with the girls. The Lunch Counter is not recommended for children under the age of 13. I know why now. They stood quietly beside us while Danny and I got the merest glimpse, an inkling of what it was like to be a brown-skinned college student at a whites-only lunch counter in 1961.

While this exhibit was by far the most memorable, we found ourselves moved to tears several times as we made our way through the beautiful building. People from all over the world joined us to read and watch and feel. I thought it was pretty fitting that such an international crew convened because while most Americans think “civil rights” and recall Jim Crow laws, national marches, a speech about a dream and a woman on a bus, civil rights are really a global desire.

Think about Christian persecution all over the globe, victims of female circumcision, human trafficking (yes, slavery is alive and well in the 21st century) and explosives strapped to children’s bodies in the name of revolution. Civil (human) rights are worth fighting for wherever we are.

With the push of a button, a display of truly unbelievable state laws changes and we find ourselves shaking our heads, gasping, making eye contact and even laughing nervously. Whites can’t play baseball within two blocks of blacks playing baseball. If a woman “has got herself pregnant by a Negro” she faces imprisonment. A school district that serves both white and colored schools can’t store textbooks used by Negros with textbooks used by white kids. It is unlawful for a Negro and any white person to be in company of each other while playing dominoes, cards, dice or checkers. Of course, all marriages between blacks and whites is prohibited. Of course.

We stood under stain glass windows representing the church where four, young girls were doing their hair between Sunday school and worship. They were blown to bits because a segregationist thought it a good idea to toss a bomb in the building to prove how lesser-than blacks were. That makes sense.

Disturbingly so many segregationists claimed to be Christians. They screamed obscenities at Ruby Bridges. They threw rotten fruit and vegetables at a little pig-tailed girl who just wanted an education. Parents removed their children from the school. They allowed fear and hate to overcome them and the result was disgraceful. Danny wondered aloud at their actions. Are they ashamed of their behavior now? Is it embarrassing to have one’s image of rage and animosity displayed in a museum dedicated to the rights of all humanity?

On the other end of the spectrum, other photographs showed men and women of all ages, colors and social status. They held hands, linked arms, marched side by side, helped each other keep walking, shared stories, sang songs, prayed.

Viola Liuzzo was a white woman from Detroit. She felt compelled to travel south to help as she could. She transported marchers in her car including a young African American man. Ku Klux Klan members saw the duo, chased down their car and shot them both. The kid survived because he played dead. Viola really was dead. Did the KKK stop to think about her husband and children waiting at home? Or were they so consumed with hatred for a guy whose pigmentation was darker than theirs that killing a fellow human being was the only viable option?

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a walking Bartlett’s. Everything he said, it seems, was powerful and applicable to the movement and just humanity in general. He called for peaceful demonstration, determined to achieve equality through Christ-like actions. He inspires all of us with his words even now or maybe especially now. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” was the last phrase we read as we exited the Center.

Injustice can be found all over this big, ol’ world and standing in the gap are this generation’s lunch counter protestors and bus riders and speech givers and I want to be one of their number. I want to look back on my life knowing I did all I could to build up and not tear down, to help and not hurt and to “do life with” instead of apathetically ignore.

Civil rights.
Civility is a right.
Be civil.

How hard can it be?