DUers, At What Age Did You Become Politically Minded and Why?

[Thunderbeast]

128. I was eleven years old in 1964

when our family went to an unfamiliar neighborhood to march with several thousand strangers to the Federal Courthouse in downtown Portland. We were protesting the murder of the three civil rights workers (Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner) in Philadelphia Mississippi.

Angry whites lining the route shouted hateful things at us as we peacefully walked across the Willamette River.

A frail old black woman walked with us. At one point, she turned to us with tears in her eyes and thanked us for joining the demonstration.

Ten years later, I was a community worker in the same Birmingham neighborhood where four little girls had been murdered by the Klan.

My family was very supportive of political causes. Among candidates I worked for were Wayne Morse, Robert Kennedy (meeting him ten days before his assasination), and Walter Mondale.

The image of that frail woman who had lived her whole life under Jim Crow (or the watered down Oregon equivalent) changed me.