True Story: White, Southern, Anti-War, Anti-Racist Giant You've Never Heard Of

Edwin L. Sterne, my father

Aka, the Blonde Bomber for his capacity to crush his opponents on the tennis court (where he met my mother).

There is a tradition at some churches in which congregants are encouraged to give their "spiritual autobiography." When I finally got around to giving mine, I talked a lot about my father.

He was no stranger to adversity and prejudice but also the recipient of much privilege. Growing up, he had been among the wealthiest of Albany, Georgia, his father having gotten rich speculating on land in Florida among other things. His parents often vacationed in Cuba which was a cool place to vacation in the 1920s and 1930s. He had his own Packard, a luxury car, as a teenager and wrecked it.

Then, overnight, the Florida land bubble burst and he and his family, including his horribly racist grandmother, lost everything. They had to vacate their side by side mansions and move into a neighbor's garage apartment. Daddy didn't often talk about his childhood, but he did tell me that one day his father went to a wealthy relative in Atlanta to ask for help and his relative would not see him.

My grandfather was an alcoholic. When he became an alcoholic I don't know, nor whether the Depression and losing everything had anything to do with it. I do know he would be "sick" for weeks on end and my grandmother would keep Daddy and his sister away from his room, protecting all, I suppose.

As an adult, Daddy's sole goal for his family—my mother, my sister, and me—was stability. He valued routine to a fault; providing fun times for us girls was not something he thought about. He was patriotic; I recall standing on his foot stool and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and he would smile. It was never a question whether we girls would read books, argue with him over politics, and go to college. They were givens. We grew up on debate (I think that shows) and the inclination to challenge our culture, our country, and the church.

Daddy was a true patriot. Early on he decided to pursue justice rather than nationalism. When he decided to go to law school, he chose the University of Chicago because of its emphasis on human rights, turning down Harvard. I was born when he was in school there; the winters were so harsh, my mother remembered the snow coming in through the walls.

After taking jobs in Albuquerque and Billings, he returned to Albany with my mother, my infant sister, and me. This brings me back to my spiritual autobiography. I've said he was no stranger to either privilege or adversity. He had experienced loss, grief, and humiliation but he had other privileges of which we both were well aware: he always had his white skin, he spoke the King's English (but could and did sometimes code switch which is a thing among upper class Southerners often saying "ain't", for example), he knew what it meant to live large and didn't much need or want it (which is also often a thing among people who have had it, in itself a kind of privilege), and, as a lawyer, had a high social standing.

On the other hand, he would not let go of proclaiming his disgust with segregation and, later on, the war in Vietnam. He would not give it a rest. He did not give it a rest when people called him a "n***er LoVer". He did not give it a rest when people threatened the lives of his children via anonymous phone calls. He did not give it a rest when his colleagues at Birmingham’s Cumberland Law School where he taught were dismissive nor when the dean there told him he was annoying his students by talking about justice so much in his Legal Ethics class.

He never gave it a rest. Talk of segregation, desegregation efforts, and the cast of characters was a daily thing in my home which, ironically I suppose, created a lot of anxiety for me. I've said before that I think I identify with lgbt people because I was in a closet for a long time myself, fearing to come out, although I was constantly being outed one way or another. Now that I'm out, I am loathe to go back in and it shows. The idea of being silenced now is akin to being choked or suffocated and that is no exaggeration. But we girls well knew of his contempt for Sheriff Laurie Pritchett, Georgia Governor Lester Maddox, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett and that entire sorry cast of characters. We also were well aware of what could happen to those who protested too much and too vocally as he and my mother did. We knew what happened to the Freedom Riders, we knew what happened to Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, we felt we knew what happened to President Kennedy, we knew what happened to Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Viola Liuzzo.

Daddy was a diaspora Jew, although not religiously. Religiously he was nominally Christian. Yet, he always wanted us girls to know our diasporic heritage and that we all had been on Hitler's death list. He wanted us to be well aware of that. That said, I cannot conceive of any scenario in which he would have supported Israel in its genocidal land-grab in Gaza.

He evolved from being vaguely homophobic (about which I only heard him say anything one time) to being affirming. He supported the Equal Rights Amendment. When it failed in the 1970s and people said the time wasn’t right, he wondered out loud, ”Will there ever be the right time for justice?”

He never once cussed, commented on a woman's body, or made fun of anyone. Not once.

He smoked like a fiend, 3 packs a day, a habit he picked up while on night watch in the Panama Canal Zone out of boredom and loneliness “serving his country” in World War II. It killed him, slowly, horribly, and terrifyingly over the course of decades. The story in my family goes that he became such an annoyance to the military, that they sent him home early. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds right.

He despised the unjust war in Vietnam. He had believed Lyndon Johnson when, while running for president of the United States, he said he would end the war. When he did not, Daddy took it personally and would not look away. He would not pretend he did not see what was up.

It hurts me when younger activists today, white and Black, are dismissive of or even contemptuous of people like my father. That dismissiveness and contemptuousness are born of ignorance about how brutal the segregated Deep South was and how deeply courageous people like my father were. It also comes from an odd kind of arrogance which cannot admit that they actually are standing on the shoulders of giants, famous and appropriately lauded giants like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks but also little giants like my father who were notorious, who became targets in their own home towns but never made the papers or the history books.

Thanks so much for reading!