Lillian Secrest Buie's Weblog

Moral Courage on Race Relations

By Jim Buie

It's difficult today to imagine that by simply acknowledging, or quietly expressing opposition to a dehumanizing snub or social indignity, an individual could exhibit moral courage. But when racial injustice -- including separate bathrooms, separate eating facilities, separate schools, or even separate water fountains for blacks and whites were the order of the day -- moral courage was an almost daily choice, a daily test.

In the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, when Scotland County, NC and other regions of the South were in the throes of desegregation, Lillian Secrest Buie risked social ostracism, and made many of her elders and peers uncomfortable by her outspoken support for integration, and for treating all people regardless of race, with dignity and respect.

Early on, she exposed her students to the writings of black authors like Martin Luther King ("Why We Can't Wait"), Ralph Ellison ("Invisible Man"), Richard Wright ("Black Boy"), Dick Gregory ("Nigger"), and Eldridge Cleaver ("Soul on Ice"). She wanted her students to listen, for the first time, to black voices.

She routinely extended a hand or offered an invitation to blacks or native Americans to seek educational opportunities, or to attend social functions. In 1965, just as school desegregation began, she encouraged her eldest daughter Kathy, a fresh college graduate and new teacher, to teach Head Start in a primarily black school. When Kathy gushed to a relative that she loved her new job and her students, the relative admonished her: "Don't EVER use the word LOVE in reference to THEM. You can feel sorry for them, but you can never love them." Kathy's expression of love led a fearful neighbor in that hysterical time to confront Lil and her husband John: "Do you really want your daughter to marry a Negro?"

Lil brushed off such questions as silly and absurd. She announced that she'd be happy with whoever her daughter chose as a husband as long as she found true love.

Later, when one of Lil's black students wound up in jail on questionable charges, she decided to visit him and to express her sympathy to the family. A neighbor expressed shock. "Why in the world would you visit a black boy in prison?" she was asked.

"Because I'm his friend, his teacher, and he needs a momma right now," came Lil's reply.

The neighbor was appalled that Lil would think of herself as a "momma to Negroes" and insisted that what she was doing was unnatural, inappropriate, and wrong. People in the community would start saying bad things about her. Lil replied that she didn't care what people thought, and quoted Jesus: "When I was in prison you visited me. In as much as you do this to the least of these my children, you do this for me."

When Lil raised the salary of her domestic help by $5 a week, a neighbor complained that her own domestic help, as a consequence, had the audacity to ask for an equal raise.

This neighbor was further appalled when Lil paid several hundred dollars for the construction of a new home for her domestic help to replace a leaky shack. She accused her of being a "do-gooder." Lil laughed off the accusation, and considered "do-good-er" a compliment.

Lil knew her neighbors well and realized that they were not really as mean and hard-hearted as they seemed to be on the issue of race. They were basically good-hearted people who were expressing their fear that the social order was under siege, that the old ways of doing things in the South they had been taught for generations were falling away.

In 1969, she further "upset the apple cart," as one relative put it, by inviting three black high school students to join a dozen whites, on a six-week study tour of England and France, chaperoned by herself and her husband John. Lil encouraged the students to call them "Uncle John and Aunt Lil."  John, a gentleman of the Old South, initially wasn't comfortable with this idea or this arrangement. But overseas, he treated all the students with dignity and respect. One of the students could not believe that "Uncle John's a racist." Lil would later describe that summer as one of the happiest of their married life together.

Sadly, when John returned from the trip, his buddies teased him relentlessly about "going overseas and sleeping with Negroes."

In the mid-1970s, Lil campaigned actively for Howard Lee, an articulate and well-qualified black man, former mayor of Chapel Hill, gubernatorial cabinet secretary, and state legislator who was running for Lieutenant Governor in the Democratic primary against an old-line tobacco farmer. She chauffeured him around Wagram to introduce him to her neighbors. When her husband John saw what she was doing, he told her to stop the campaign foolishness, she was embarrassing him. But she refused to be cowed.

Election day rolled around. After voting, John confessed to Lil that "I voted for your man." But he instructed her not to tell anyone, as that would embarrass him.

Over the course of her career, Lil developed close friendships with black colleagues. When fellow educator Mary Helen Speller was recovering from surgery, Lil offered to come to her home, fix dinner, do laundry, and clean for her. While at the Spellers' home, a census worker knocked on the front door.

"Are you the lady of the house?" she asked.

"No," Lil replied. "She's napping right now. I'm here making supper and cleaning up."

The census-taker looked stunned.

For many years afterward, Lil and Mary Helen chuckled over that role reversal.

On Racism

Written in the 1970s, after teaching "Flying Home" by Ralph Ellison, about a black pilot whose plane crashes in Georgia:

Racism bothers me, regardless of whether it is expressed by black or white. I have too many memories of cruel and tasteless jokes about jungle bunnies, niggers, jigaboos -- expressions I often heard in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, up until the 1960s. I still have a sense of guilt that people of my race deprived others of basic rights, and I suppose the guilt is justified because I never faced up to racism or gave it much thought until the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education in December of 1954 outlawed segregated public schools.

When I defended that decision as morally right and moreover a Christian decision, I was shocked at the hostility expressed by close friends. We have come a long way since then, but other problems have developed. It isn't surprising that we have to travel the path of reverse racism before we can walk into the sunlight of brotherhood, but I find this getting-even process distasteful.

Last winter as we were returning from the state basketball playoffs in Greensboro, sharing the mutual disappointment of our defeat, our bus echoed with derisive comments by black students on the inadequacies of honky coaches. The defeat was a heartache to be shared by all Scotland High School supporters, not an opportunity for insults.

Overcoming the past isn't easy but some day I hope that all God's "chillun" will fly with wings unclipped by hatred and prejudice.

Old Racial Barriers Finally Fall

Journal entry, 1984: The rigid segregation of the past has given way. Black and Lumbee families now live on my street, in modern homes with swimming pools. The now deceased previous owners would consider this inconceivable, but I rejoice in these changes, because they prove that the American dream is indeed real.

But this progress does not allow me to shut my eyes and heart to the world of the have nots. They are still far too many.

Martin Luther King Jr., Forgotten By Many If Not For Holiday Honoring Him?

This journal entry from April 4, 1978, suggests why a holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became necessary:

The 10th anniversary of Martin Luther King's death raises not a ripple at Scotland High School. No one mentions King's assassination. Perhaps some would find that fact a cause for rejoicing, but I find it sad that young people seem so unaware of a great man's willingness to die that he and they might know what is to be "free at last." Will black children soon ask, "Who was he?"

Two months later, Mrs. Buie was thrilled when Dr. King's father, Martin Luther King Sr., affectionately known as Daddy King, visited Spring Branch Baptist Church in the tiny village of Wagram, NC. She wrote:

Wow! Not only was it evident that Rev. King felt the presence of the Lord, but he made us feel that presence, too -- a presence which did not deny the loneliness left by the tragic deaths of two grown sons and his wife, but one which filled that emptiness with love instead of hate, hope instead of despair, and faith in place of bitterness.

I thought of John Charles McNeill's "August Meeting," the setting the same as today's service, but in the early part of the century. Then if whites attended, the purpose was to be entertained and to laugh at another culture. Only a dozen (perhaps fewer) whites were among the more than 500 participants, and we were there in a spirit of love, and need of grace, having failed to recognize in our youth the injustices of society.

The old man carries his 80 years proudly. A portly, rotund figure, caramel face serene, dark eyes aglow with faith, and voice strong in praise of his Lord and ours. He too has known the sorrow of giving up his son before the quest for freedom was done, before his son had even reached the age of 40. But the old man doesn't grieve his loss, knowing truly the meaning of the cross. Our lives are not our own, but God's to use, seeds to be sown, and Martin sowed the seeds of love which his father harvests.

The final congregational hymn, "We Shall Overcome," might be better expressed for us, "We Have Overcome."

It's ironic that I learned to be less race-conscious not through hearing of "the word" at church -- I am still struggling with the barriers held fast to in our segregated churches -- but through my experiences teaching at an integrated school.

Memory of Vile Racism

John and I went to Chapel Hill to see the Playmakers’ Repertory Theater’s production of ‘Dracula.’ We stayed at Watts Motel outside Chapel Hill. John is friendly with the owners, they are business clients of his.

“Our room here is comfortable, but I find Mr. and Mrs. Watts the epitome of ‘low brow’. I can agree philosophically with Abraham Lincoln’s statement that “God must have loved the common people, because he made so many of them.” But I can’t think he had these kind of people in mind. I can easily believe the story that in 1963, to prevent blacks from entering and integrating her restaurant, Mrs. Watts squatted and pee-ed upon them.” -- From Fall, 1978 journal.