We’ve met plenty of people on this journey who insist they have no civil
rights stories because they were born in the mid-1960s or more recently. But
that isn’t true. Just because the movement and its most publicized events
have ended, doesn’t mean that the civil rights experience is over. Fortunately,
some young people recognize that. Today in New Mexico, we heard more of their
stories at a gathering at Hobbs High School, which practically straddles the
Texas border.
Mandi Costa, 39, recalled her first face-to-face encounter with discrimination.
As a 13-year-old in New Bedford, Massachusetts, she and a friend were Christmas
shopping at a department store and waiting in a long line to pay for their
purchases. When they got to the front of the line, though, the clerk bypassed
the African American teens and immediately began helping the woman behind
them, who was white. Adding further insult was the fact that the customer
ignored the girls too, stepping in front of them as if they didn’t
exist.
“It was kind of shocking,” said Costa, who now lives in Albuquerque.
For years, Costa refused to step into any store in the chain. She even
took longer routes to enter shopping malls in order to avoid their entrances.
She also told her friends not to shop there.
This went on for 15 years. Then Costa learned of a big sale at the store
she so avoided. “I decided that enough time had probably passed,” she
said.
Costa’s 20-year-old friend, Ashley Lynch, has had brushes with close-minded
attitudes more recently. Lynch is Caucasian.
Her aunt and cousins live in an all-white Ohio community that has so few
minorities that Lynch can count only one Asian family. When Lynch visited
a few years ago, she was appalled when her relatives apologized that an African
minister was officiating at their church. “They actually thought I
couldn’t understand his speaking, but he sounded perfectly fine,” said
Lynch, who lives in Albuquerque, but grew up in Alexandria, Virginia. “And
there I was, having gone to school with lobbyists’ kids as well as
kids who lived in trailers.”
Her relatives’ attitudes have even shadowed the family during the
most difficult of times. Lynch’s father died in the September 11 terrorist
attacks when one of the planes struck the Pentagon. Among the mourners at
his funeral was a family friend who’s African American. The friend
sat with the Lynch family at the service.
“Some of my relatives were asking why this friend was sitting with
us,” Lynch said. “We were supposed to be bonding as a nation
during that time, and that was all they could ask?”
It’s a cliché, but it’s true: The more things change,
the more they stay the same.
