In light of all that’s happening in our country, I started thinking about Ruby Bridges.

Ruby was the first black child to attend an all-white elementary school in the South. She was escorted to and from the school by U.S. Marshals and was met upon arrival by an angry mob holding signs calling her terrible names. They spat and cursed at her. A mob of white adults, yelling at a 6-year-old (one even threatened to poison her).

The date was Nov. 14, 1960. Imagine how scared her parents were, sending their baby into that situation.

Today, black parents everywhere worry about their babies and the situations they are in every day. Some people who have taken the time to read this may be thinking “all parents worry about their children,” but black parents have an entirely different set of worries that I, as a white parent, can’t begin to understand. But I can listen.

When I was still in college, I had a discussion early on in a women’s studies class that stuck with me. The focus was on what it means to be a woman, the frustrations and fears that exist solely for being one. The men in the class participated in the conversation, but they couldn’t understand, they listened.

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about Martin Luther King Jr., a lot of voices touting peace and using him as the example. Some of those same voices calling for peace spat vicious words a few years ago when Colin Kaepernick took a knee. He was peaceful. And silent. And was still met with anger. “A riot is the language of the unheard”: MLK said that, too.

I feel right now what is happening in this country is a symptom of a much larger disease, the result of hundreds of years of oppression, of a systematically broken society on many levels. And now, when there are people in large numbers loudly voicing their pain, what we need to be and should be doing is listening. When black people say they feel attacked or scared or watched, that they are made to feel different, lesser, criminal, let us resist the urge to defend ourselves as a response and shut our mouths.

Today, Ruby Bridges is only 65. That is young. We aren’t many years removed from the day she walked into that school. Let us listen.

MAGEN R. CURTIS

Weare