Educated

I didn’t understand it as meaning anything at all. I’d only ever seen one black
person, a little girl, the adoptive daughter of a family at church. Dad
obviously hadn’t meant her.
Shawn had called me Nigger that entire summer: “Nigger, run and fetch
those C-clamps!” or “It’s time for lunch, Nigger!” It had never given me a
moment’s pause.
Then the world had turned upside down: I had entered a university, where
I’d wandered into an auditorium and listened, eyes wide, mind buzzing, to
lectures on American history. The professor was Dr. Richard Kimball, and he
had a resonant, contemplative voice. I knew about slavery; I’d heard Dad talk
about it, and I’d read about it in Dad’s favorite book on the American
founding. I had read that slaves in colonial times were happier and more free
than their masters, because the masters were burdened with the cost of their
care. That had made sense to me.
The day Dr. Kimball lectured on slavery, he filled the overhead screen with
a charcoal sketch of a slave market. The screen was large; as in a movie
theater it dominated the room. The sketch was chaotic. Women stood, naked
or half naked, and chained, while men circled them. The projector clacked.
The next image was a photograph, black and white and blurred with age.
Faded and overexposed, the image is iconic. In it a man sits, stripped above
the waist, exposing for the camera a map of raised, crisscrossing scars. The
flesh hardly looks like flesh, from what has been done to it.
I saw many more images in the coming weeks. I’d heard of the Great
Depression years before when I’d played Annie, but the slides of men in hats
and long coats lined up in front of soup kitchens were new to me. When Dr.
Kimball lectured on World War II, the screen showed rows of fighter planes
interspersed with the skeletal remains of bombed cities. There were faces
mixed in—FDR, Hitler, Stalin. Then World War II faded with the lights of
the projector.
The next time I entered the auditorium there were new faces on the screen
and they were black. There hadn’t been a black face on that screen—at least
none that I remembered—since the lectures on slavery. I’d forgotten about
them, these other Americans who were foreign to me. I had not tried to
imagine the end of slavery: surely the call of justice had been heard by all,
and the issue had been resolved.
This was my state of mind when Dr. Kimball began to lecture on
something called the civil rights movement. A date appeared on the screen: