By Frances Stebbins – Contributing Writer
Before Black History Month ends, I am going to reflect how events of the past three years have educated me in understanding more about what are now known inclusively as “people of color.”
This has come about to a great extent by my work relationship with a Black man the age of my granddaughter. Working with Shawn Nowlin as a writing colleague on a weekly newspaper has done far more to break down barriers for me than all the rhetoric about the need to erase my proud Southern heritage as symbolized by the changing of Confederate names and the removal of statues.
Shawn, now 32, was employed in 2017 by Mountain Media, the current publisher of the weekly newspapers that serve Salem, Vinton, Botetourt County and Craig County along with a number of others in Western Virginia and in West Virginia. Soon after he started work in the Salem office, Shawn took me to lunch where he outlined his life at a local cafeteria.
I was pleased but surprised to be seated across a table with a Black man who at 6’ 7” towered over me, an elderly white woman old enough to be his grandmother.
Hearing him tell me the facts of his life with his rearing in several places mostly by a hard-working mother whom he clearly respected highly, her encouragement she and a teacher at a Roanoke high school gave him to follow his enjoyment of writing, the African name he and a sister were given as part of a family tradition put a personal face on what I had long read about young, single Black youth.
I told him a bit about my own rearing as a white child also raised by a widowed mother in a small Virginia town where racial segregation was a way of life. No one in my world questioned it. I knew no children with skin different from mine; integrated public schools would not come until my own younger son was in fourth grade and had a seasoned Black teacher who worried over his learning disability more than those who were white.
In our community my mother would have no one cut her straight dark hair but “Ben,” the skilled proprietor of the town’s best barber shop. That he, as an elderly small business owner, was called only by his first name, was typical of the times. I knew too my aunt’s house and yard man, also aging and polite but clearly a hired servant.
It was not easy as a young adult for me to adjust to the pressures put on white Southerners who valued their Confederate heritage as I still do. I deplore the changing of names everywhere, the apparent effort to erase from history a period still honored especially in states where fighting affected lives and homes.
In an effort to right the wrongs done through demeaning enslaved Blacks it should not be necessary to demean those of us who also value our heritage.
Two wrongs do not make a right.
My colleague Shawn also writes occasionally for other publications such as the magazine “Colors Virginia,” published in Roanoke especially for the African-American readership. In the September 2020 issue Shawn Nowlin expressed his views on statue removal, making it clear he favors getting the familiar form of a man usually identified with the Confederacy off the spot in the center of a community. His article is comprehensive and fairly presented and enhanced with his pictures.
Here’s where my colleague of a different race and generation and I can meet on common ground. Nowlin suggests statues be moved to a museum and identified as a symbol of the history that they are. I would be happy to see Salem’s Confederate pioneer moved up the hill to the grounds of The Salem Museum.
My colleague and I have shared political views. Each week at his request I read carefully each newspaper story in “The Salem Times-Register” making a few comments for possible improvement. Shawn understands that I exclude sports since I am as ignorant on that pastime that so many enjoy as he is enthusiastic about basketball.
My increased understanding is not due entirely to Shawn. As I have become a regular viewer of evening Public Television news, I am more aware of how the appearance, speech and education today elevates the status of people who were separated Negroes decades ago. Over the past difficult year I have been made aware of the reality of unjust treatment young Black men like Nowlin have often received .
It takes time.
