Faithful to My Father's Dream
Bevel, Enoch
Faithful to My Father’s Dream ENOCH BEVEL It has been more than a year since I sat with my older brother at my father’s side, watching him slowly succumb to pancreatic cancer. At the age of...
...His interpretation of the event was that God had intervened on his behalf...
...In the background, my brother’s beautiful singing filled the room...
...The song ends “I just wish I could have told him in the living years...
...In November 2005, nine of my siblings and I decided we could not allow our younger sister to live in the same house in Selma, Alabama, as our father...
...I began to suspect the truth of everything I had learned from my father...
...Why would you sign onto those affidavits...
...he asked me once, referring to the charges of molestation my sisters had made against him...
...Well dad, they presented charges against you and you never addressed the issues,” I told him...
...But his frailness made me cry...
...You must decide to be a brother and a husband...
...When my father was a kid an older sister had sexually abused him, and we decided that we had to stop the cycle...
...In this case, it was how a man must live a principled and upright life so that God could use him...
...Thus my idol had fallen, and realizing that fact shook me to the core...
...In the era of Twitter, Facebook, iPhones, and other daily distractions, few take time to reflect on the struggles that shaped our present and future...
...Once in the room, he looked up at me standing in the doorway and smiled proudly...
...I guess our musical tribute was fitting...
...As my older brother and I sat at our father’s side, we sang the hymns and freedom songs he had taught us when we were kids...
...Behind every movement story my father told, there was a principle he wished to impart...
...Once you decide to be these things, you’ll realize you cannot stand aside and do nothing when your children or any other child is being miseducated or the community looks like this...
...But I realized the work as a server that I had to do on weekends and nights to pay for books and food paled in comparison to the work my father did in the fields of the Mississippi Delta and in a steel mill in Cleveland...
...He preached that if black people decided to stand up for themselves, no one could hold them down...
...Contrary to that lyric, I will not ”blame” my father...
...Ever since I could remember, my father had been a vegetarian, and he raised me to be one too...
...I 20 DISSENT SPRING 2010 Dissent Spring 2010:Dissent, rev.qxd 3/4/2010 11:08 AM Page 21 PARTY OF THE FUTURE did not want to confront a man I still respected and loved...
...The carriage rolled past the Klan’s wouldbe ambushers, who, he later learned, had been waiting for him just a few miles from where his car had stopped...
...Instead of placing blame, I took responsibility...
...Lying in the back of the carriage, he and his companion fell asleep...
...My father was a prime mover of the civil rights revolution...
...When she refused to give up custody, the next step was clear: we had to go to court...
...When I first heard the charges, I was about twelve, and I quickly dismissed them as slander...
...When, in the 1990s, I traveled with him through Alabama and Mississippi, visiting his old comrades, churches, and family members, I stayed awake all night, hugging my seat in fear we would be ambushed and my father taken from me...
...It is a struggle for people of my generation to understand how far African Americans have come since the days of slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, and the black freedom movement...
...I smiled back, and responded, “I’m all right, dad...
...At the age of seventytwo, James Bevel had seen and experienced more than most men...
...it was akin to giving honor to a great general or statesman...
...Faithful to My Father’s Dream ENOCH BEVEL It has been more than a year since I sat with my older brother at my father’s side, watching him slowly succumb to pancreatic cancer...
...A lone black man in a horse and buggy, whom my father believed was an angel, pulled over and offered to drive him into town...
...In Selma, my siblings and I met with our father...
...In school, I felt ashamed and, to my unsuspecting friends, I became distant...
...Perhaps it reminded him of the relationship he had with his own father, whom he adored...
...He and a companion were heading to a town in Mississippi to organize voters when three of the tires on his old, used car went flat...
...Enoch...
...Acknowledge God in all your ways and he will direct your path,” he quoted from the Bible...
...he said, ignoring my tears...
...You must decide to walk with God...
...My bone structure was identical to his, and I thought about the day when my own children might have to help me in a similar way...
...My father was from the same generation as the grandparents of many of my peers...
...Although many civil rights activists returned to civilian life, for my father, the movement never died...
...He overcame his beginnings and set the historical groundwork for me to attend an elite university...
...He would often play it on repeat for hours as we drove...
...A close friend said about his own father that “he had many imperfections, but if I dwelled on them, I would alienate myself from myself and, in so doing, I will lose all that I learned from him...
...When I was about eight or nine, my father, for the first time, failed to follow a principle he had carefully imparted to me...
...SPRING 2010 DISSENT 21...
...This was a rite of passage I had not anticipated...
...So I decided it was fruitless to compare myself with my peers at Georgetown...
...When I was born in 1985, my father was fortynine years old, and most people considered the movement to be finished...
...In college, I longed for the familial and financial support many of my peers enjoyed...
...Revisiting my father’s struggles has given me strength...
...At times, when my father awoke from his pain, I could see he did not entirely trust me...
...The irony of the situation was clear: we would be confronting our father and demanding the custody of our younger sister in the same town where, forty years earlier, he had led the campaign for voting rights...
...How’re you doing, Mr...
...Enoch, you must decide to be a father,” he told me one day while we were driving through the ghetto on Chicago’s South Side...
...I have learned to forgive him...
...As a top leader of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he organized five major campaigns of the civil rights movement...
...despite our resolve, you denied the charges and forced us to present our case in court...
...Because of his old battle stories, I was terrified of the South...
...In part, the lyrics reflect on how children blame the generations before them, in particularly our fathers, and how we, the following generations, feel the pressure and frustration of our parents, being held hostage by their dreams, hopes, and fears...
...We came to your home and tried to solve this issue as a family, in private...
...it resonates loudly in President Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father...
...With the support of my thirteen loving siblings, I was the only son of James Bevel to become a college graduate...
...I could never answer his question directly...
...EB is the youngest son of James Luther Bevel...
...When President John Kennedy criticized the involvement of children in the movement, my father threatened to march the kids all the way from Birmingham to Washington, D.C...
...The year since my father passed has been a reflective one for me...
...A proud man and unashamed of his nakedness, he accepted our assistance...
...Perhaps, deep inside, I always knew my father was a deeply flawed man...
...Sometimes a tear would escape, but otherwise, I cried alone...
...So I did what he had taught me to do: I protested...
...though the scars are not so visible on the surface, the wounds are still healing...
...They led him to abuse several of his daughters, and we sought to prevent him from having the opportunity to abuse my younger sister, who was just ten at the time...
...A local Klan group once planned to capture him...
...When confronted, he never really denied the charges, and after hours of his evasive talking, plus numerous sycophantic disruptions on the part of members of his community, he essentially said that the decision to give up custody was his wife’s...
...But later, I learned that my sisters were telling the truth...
...But, I also saw remnants of the skinny farm boy in old photos, the James Bevel who picked cotton as a SPRING 2010 DISSENT 19 Dissent Spring 2010:Dissent, rev.qxd 3/4/2010 11:08 AM Page 20 PARTY OF THE FUTURE sharecropper with his seventeen siblings in Itta Bena, Mississippi...
...But while having dinner with some associates at a restaurant in Omaha, he placed a piece of chicken on his plate...
...The most famous was the Birmingham Children’s Crusade of 1963...
...As I looked at him, I thought about the father he was to me, the civil rights leader he was to many, and the flawed and troubled man whose fate seemed to coincide with one of the subjects in the great Greek tragedies he enjoyed so much...
...I am sure it was a shock to him, for it was the first time so many of his children were congregated with him...
...There is a song called “The Living Years” by the band Mike and the Mechanics that my father loved...
...Many had a safety net to use if they ever needed it, but I was carried by a legacy that would not allow me to fall...
...Yet, as his son, I was constantly reminded of what it took to get to where we are today...
...It was also the year of the inauguration of the first African American president and the year I graduated from college— events my father influenced but did not live to see...
...He graduated from Georgetown University in 2009 and works in Washington, DC...
...During my final day with him, even though there was a portable urinal chair next to his bed, my father walked the fifteen or so feet to the bathroom...
...We wrestled with the backlash and embarrassment we would face and the terrible damage it would do to our father’s legacy...
...The failings of one’s parents is a common theme in our lives...
...In the hospice room with my father, however, I could only sit with my head between my knees at the foot of his bed...
...At the same time, I had to wrestle with my father’s demons, which I first heard about in 1996...
...Shocked, I loudly objected and then stood up and moved to another table to eat my vegetables by myself...
Vol. 57 • March 2010 • No. 2
