Why I Walk

Since being raised in an all-white area of Chicago during the 1940s and l950s, I have been searching for a way to more directly engage with my own and this nation's legacy of slavery. Going to west Africa with the pilgrimage, after walking through some of the eastern and southern regions of the U.S. where slavery and reconstruction have been so generative-and where racism continues in sometimes virulent forms-will help me struggle against my own racism and find ways to help others overcome theirs. The objective: cracking through denial, comprehending the system of racism, ending it. The objective: living in the spirit that is based on respect and love.

One afternoon in the early 1950s, riding an elevated train through a Black section of Chicago, on my way home with several friends, a young Black man about my age, 12, came up to me and said, "Want to see what I have in my hand?" He quickly closed his fist around a shiny object and, before I could reply, he punched me in the mouth. I was shocked, angered, and felt I had to be tough in front of my friends, but I feared chasing him off the train into his turf. I paused, waited until the train was about to leave the station, and as the doors were closing I started my pursuit of my attacker. As I'd anticipated, the door closed, he went through, I didn't.

I lived with my anger of Black people-and with my fear. (Perhaps that Black boy did also.) Inwardly I seethed and cowered. And here I was in Chicago, as the Black community expanded, relentlessly moving south into my homeland, Chicago's South Side.

Two years after the train incident, my family, unsure of what might happen to our home's monetary value, decided to sell and move to the suburbs-we were the first of our circle to engage in "White Flight." The year was 1955, the year a young Black boy from Chicago, Emmett Till, was murdered in the south while visiting relatives, the year of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. I completed high school, then college, married, had two daughters, never once coming back to my old neighborhood. I remained blocked, by my own inability to overcome fear.

Now I need to go deeper, to break through another barrier: slavery and its legacy of racism, my own and that of others, societal, structural, among the Religious Society of Friends, my core community, and wider than Friends. Racism bars people from being fully human with each other. I might be able to help build a bridge by making a pilgrimage.

--Skip Schiel