Copeland's Corner: November 9, 2022
What happened to thinking about what serves the greater good?
Since I’ve been doing my new solo play, Grandma & Me, Grandma and the stories she used to tell us have been on my mind a lot. My grandmother was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1921. She lived there until 1945, when my great-grandfather packed up his wife, their entire brood of six children (along with the spouses of those who were old enough to marry) and his grandchildren (including my 3-year-old mother) and moved north to Akron, Ohio, as part of what has become known as the Great African American Migration following World War II. At the time, Akron, which was nicknamed the “Rubber Capital of the World” due to the tire manufacturing behemoths Goodyear and Goodrich, was perceived by the family as a beacon of freedom from the oppression of the segregated deep South. The timing meant that Grandma had spent her first quarter century under the Jim Crow apartheid of Alabama, the Great Depression and the Second World War. I guess we call them “The Greatest Generation” for a reason.
My great-granddaddy was a coal miner for a minute before settling into the “better” position of sharecropping. He raised a little livestock on the side to feed the family. I don’t know what he grew or all the animals he raised, but I am aware that there were hogs as well as chickens. Grandma told me that Granddaddy (as we called my great-grandfather) had her wringing the necks of chickens for Sunday dinners by the time she was 7. She also told me about the cooperation between the Black families in the area to survive. If they slaughtered a hog to eat, some of it went to families on neighboring land to supplement their meals. In return they would get mason jars of whatever crop or orchard that family was growing in order to supplement theirs. They traded with each other, and they bartered to make sure that, despite the inequities of a social system that considered them sub-human, they could all survive. All they did was for the greater good, that being the health and well-being of the whole African American community.
When the Second World War came, the men went off to join the service. Some enlisted. Most were drafted. They knew from the experiences of the previous generation, who’d fought in what was then known as The Great War, that fighting for the liberation of white Europeans didn’t amount to a hill of beans once the war ended. Upon returning home, they were once again relegated to the role of second-class citizenry. Despite this, when the call came to fight Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini, they went. They realized that they were fighting for the greater good.
Grandma told me that when they arrived in Akron, the extended family of about 20 crammed into the small house of friends who’d previously moved from Birmingham while they looked for a place that could permanently accommodate all of them. For the family who took them in, it was a major inconvenience. Especially since the place had only one bathroom for all of these people to share. Still, these folks took Grandma’s family in for a period of months until the men landed jobs at the rubber plants and saved up enough money for a home of their own. From what I understand, these generous folks took in several families of Alabama migrants over the years. They realized that helping their fellow African Americans escape the horrors of Jim Crow was for the greater good.
The point of all this is that I was weaned on stories about how people put themselves out, how they inconvenienced themselves, how they sacrificed and got by with a little less if it served the cause of “the greater good.” We no longer live in an era or a country like that. We live in a time when the richest man in the world can buy a major 21st century means of communication and immediately fire thousands of its employees to further enrich himself. We are in a period where the dominant caste in our society, which already disproportionately benefits from all that America has to offer, from the best schools to the best housing to the best medical care, screams about their oppression when the tiniest governmental accommodation is made to attempt to at least address the unlevel playing field. It’s a time when millions of people will literally vote to end American democracy and the autonomy of others to determine the fate of their own bodies because of the inconvenience of spending more for a gallon of milk or gas. It’s all about “ME, ME, ME.”
Whatever happened to even thinking about what serves the greater good?