In 1968, My Parents Were Still Negroes—
In 1968, My Parents Were Still Negroes—
By Lynne Thompson
even when Lyndon Baines signed the Civil
Rights Act, my parents were still Negroes
who would never mourn for Malcolm X
the way they would mourn for Doctor King.
They were still Negroes because despite My Lai,
their son was career military. Despite the Prague
Spring, they still watched Wagon Train and could
i.d. every has-been on What’s My Line? In 1968,
a minor pop star, Frankie Lymon, overdosed—
heroin—but my parents were still Negroes in
love with Nat King Cole and NBC. While nerve
gas leaked near Skull Valley, did my folks know
people freed themselves in Mauritius? In Phong
Nhat, there was a massacre but Rowan & Martin
kept on laughin’. I graduated high school the year
Sirhan killed Bobby but my parents were still
Negroes when I left for college, knowing three
students were killed in an all-white bowling alley,
South Carolina. But A Space Odyssey premiered;
Hair debuted on Broadway & my parents, orthodox
Negroes, didn’t get the Beatles or why students were
rioting in Paris. They were cheered by a Manchester
team winning the European Cup but remained mute
when Pope Paul VI condemned a little white pill.
My parents were still Negroes that August but watched
Chicago’s convention in horror: Jerry Rubin, the Guard,
the Democrats and Daly—all the world reading his lips:
…you Jew sons of bitches…motherfuckers…go home!
Still, my parents were Negroes because they were no
longer niggers; because my Daddy drove a long, black
Cadillac and we lived on a cedar-lined street right next
to a white man from Georgia. White South Africans
excluded the Marylebone Cricket Club just as women
protested Miss America. When the Irish troubles got
worse and the 19th Olympiad cold-cocked Mexico City,
my parents didn’t feel less Negro because John Carlos,
head bowed, raised his fist. But I did. The Rodney Riots
rocked Jamaica. The Queen of Soul won Respect. At Yale,
women enrolled and Miss Chisholm got the votes. In 1968,
my parents were still Negroes. They never would be again.
Lynne Thompson is the author of three chapbooks and won the 2018 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize for Fretwork (2019); see marshhawkpress.org. She also authored Start With A Small Guitar (whatbookspress.com) and Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press Book Award (perugiapress.com) and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award. She is the recipient of an Artist’s Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles and Special Mention in the 2018 Pushcart Prizes. Thompson’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, Nelle, and the New England Review; her prose is included in Jane Cooper, A Radiance of Attention issued by the University of Michigan Press (2019). Follow these links to find examples of her work: www.poetrynw.org and www.poetryfoundation.org.