One Small Voice: Parents’ gift to me was tolerance

by Lynn Mandaville

One of the many, many things that grabbed my interest this week was a posting about Morgan Roof, sister of mass murderer Dylann Roof. (Dylann was responsible for killing nine black church members in a prayer group he had attended prior to the killings.) Morgan was suspended permanently from AC Flora High School in Columbia SC for bringing weapons to school on March 14, the day of the student walkout against school violence.

She did not bring a gun. Morgan was armed with a knife and pepper spray and hatred. She had posted racist and alarming language on Snapchat that caught the attention of school officials, who took immediate action against her.

We should not be surprised that she thinks like her brother, that she spouts racist remarks about African Americans, or that she hopes for violent actions toward those she dislikes. Prejudice is learned. Hate is learned. Vile speech is learned. She learned it along with her brother, probably at the feet of her parents.  

But just as those negatives are learned, so are their counterparts, tolerance, love and uplifting turns of phrase.

So I share with you a story about my mother and what she taught my sisters and me.

My Ma, Ruth Richards, was born and raised mostly in Newark, New Jersey, in a section called Weequoick. (That’s from the language of the Lenni-Lenape Indians meaning “head of the cove.”) That neighborhood was primarily a middle-class, Jewish neighborhood, with many temples and Jewish businesses. My mother’s Christian family was a very small minority there. 

(The schools closed for Christmas and Easter, but remained open on Jewish high holy days. Ma and her sisters were three of only a dozen or so kids who came to school on those days.)

Ma was a very bright little girl.  By the time she had reached sixth grade she had skipped two years, making her by far the youngest in her grade. By the time she reached junior high, she was the only girl not yet maturing physically. By her own telling, she was teased, even bullied, because she had not begun her monthlies or sprouted breasts or underarm hair. And because she remained the youngest she was the easy target of the girls around her. For the rest of her high school years. She became quite introverted and filled with self-doubt.

Because her tormentors were Jewish, Ma developed a dislike for Jews. It was deep-seated in her. But she didn’t act on it. She never spoke ill of Jewish people throughout our growing up. I, in fact, didn’t know about it until I was in college and she confided in me that my high school years were very difficult for her, because my best friend in the world, Esther Cohen, was Jewish, and a great number of the kids I hung out with were Jewish, and, subsequently, so were the kids my sisters hung out with.

I was fascinated by Esther’s family. They kept kosher. They celebrated bar- and bar-mitzvahs. They celebrated Jewish high holy days. They introduced me to matzoball soup. And they accepted me and my curiousity openly, teaching me the hows and whys of their religion. Though I was Christian, it was wonderful to understand some of the Old Testament history and tradition that led up to the New.

Esther and I had birthdays two days apart, and it became a tradition for our mothers to take us out of school on the day between for a very fancy lunch at The Manor, a super fancy restaurant near our hometown. Ma had to bury her biases and anxieties about spending time with Esther and her mom.

Lo and behold, she found out they were nothing like the girls who made her life so miserable when she was a child. She had so much in common with Esther’s mom, and they became friends. Thus began several friendships she made with mothers of our other friends, Jewish women she continued to see after the kids were all grown and gone.

I’m sure if Ma had disparaged Jewish people in general, we three girls would have formed some kind of prejudice that might have stood in the way of making friends with some amazing people. And if she hadn’t challenged her own long-held misconceptions about Jewish people in general, she would have deprived herself of close friends. Instead, we all became vocal opponents of the mayor of our hometown for his blatant anti-Semitism and hate speech in the ’60s.  

This was a legacy gift our Ma gave us.

Ma didn’t fall prey to any urges she might have had to pass on her own feelings toward a group of people for her experiences with them. Of course, we didn’t know it at the time. It was later in our lives that we understood that she and Pop didn’t go in for easy criticism of people based on something as unimportant as their race, religion, ethnicity or physical appearance. They could have.

Newark and nearby New York City both have had long reputations for discriminating against whatever ethnic group was currently immigrating to America. Every group had its day in the pit of hatred — Jews, Catholics, Irish, Italians, Polish, Germans, blacks, you name it. My parents, if they ever held such beliefs, never uttered them to their daughters.

My sisters and I aren’t perfect women by any standard. But when we are no longer of this earth, no one will be able to say, truthfully, that any of us ever engaged in hate speech against anyone. And when our children leave this mortal coil, no one will ever say such a thing about them either.

As it is said, you learn what you live, then you live what you learn. Thanks, Ma.