Diaries
of Girls and Women: A Midwestern American Sampler
by Suzanne L. Bunkers, edt.
[Editors note. This excerpt from Diaries of Girls and Women is a 1947 diary entry of Martha Furgerson Nash, an African American girl who grew up in Waterloo, went to College at the historically black Talladega College in Alabama, and then moved back to the Cedar Falls/Waterloo area.]
Today I had to make a speech - horrors. I got roped in on that. Anyway, I was to tell a Ladies' Aid Group - who had suddenly discovered that race relations were a part of "Christian Education" about the Negro in the South today. The talk was composed of a few formal notes to keep me on track ... plus a few meanderings and mumblings of Talladega.
I hope those women really realized what race relations & minority problems are. I doubt it, it's too remote from them. One of the ladies did , though, mention the fact that it had occurred to her that her grandparents had once, perhaps, been a minority here in America- she's Danish.
She is beginning to have an inkling of what it means. But, unlike the Italians & the other Latin-Europeans, her ancestors were of Germanic stock, which was not too strange to the Anglo-Saxons, & so they probably never felt like too much of a minority group.
I hope my little effort brought the women a knowledge of what Negroes (some, anyway) are thinking & to make them gradually realize that a man is a man no matter what his external problems. But, if the old folks - as I told them - be quiet, the young people might work it out.
(Mrs. Nash died in Waterloo on April 14, 2000.)
Suzanne L. Bunkers is a professor of English and director of the Honors Program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, MN. Her book Dairies of Girls and Women: A Midwestern American Sampler was recently published by The University of Wisconsin Press.