Woodstock
For at least one attendee, the Woodstock Social Justice Initiative event was an opportunity to explore political activism for the first time.
In one classroom she sat, quiet and attentive, while workshop presenters discussed such concepts as white supremacy, implicit bias, systemic racism and institutional racism.
When, during an ice-breaker, the presenters asked why she had come, her answer was brief.
“I’m Elaine Pauley,” she said. “I grew up in the South and my father was a member of the Klan, and I am on a journey since childhood to try to understand white privilege.”
During a lunch break between sessions, Pauley, 71, spoke in more depth about growing up picking cotton and milking dairy cows on her family farm in Mississippi in the midst of the civil unrest that characterized the 1960s.
“On a sociological level I think we would have been considered white trash by the people of the North,” Pauley said.
She remembers the father of her childhood as tall, broad-shouldered and powerful. Though he was gentle with her, she grew up as a silent witness to his violent temper, once watching as he beat one of her two younger brothers to the ground when he talked back to him one day.
“I realize now that his violence was a result of deep frustration over his lack of intellectual ability to understand what was happening, and what was going on,” she said.
As she got older, she realized that every weekend, as the family milked the cows, the same thing would happen.
“My mother would take his place at 4 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and he would go in and take off his work clothes and put on nicer clothes and leave with a paper bag under his arm,” she said. “And he wouldn’t come home before we went to bed at night.”
She began to put together the pieces of the puzzle. Her parents taught the family that they were superior to the black people in the community. Across the South, whites angered by desegregation were sparking acts of violence and aggression.
“The next morning at church I would hear of cross burnings and terrorism, basically, at black homes. So I had that feeling, that my father was involved with something bad,” she said.
In 1964, when she was a senior in high school, she decided to confront her suspicions.
“My mother wasn’t in the house so I went to the closet to see what was in the brown paper bag,” she said. “I opened it up and pulled it out and it was his robe. That was what happened on Saturday nights.”
Later that summer, FBI agents came to the house to question her father about the murder of three civil rights activists in Philadelphia.
“I was afraid that my father would be found out,” she said. “I was afraid that he would harm another person. I was afraid that our family would be destroyed.”
Pauley said that a deeply instilled principle of respecting one’s parents prevented her from speaking out against hers. Not until she gained distance from the family, pursuing a nursing career in Connecticut, did she really begin to understand how pervasively the rhetoric of hate had suffused her upbringing.
As an adult, Pauley said, she began to confront her family’s racism during visits to her home. When they made racist comments or jokes, she would leave the room in protest. When her father was in his 60s, she got into an argument with him about a racist comment that turned so ugly, she said, she believes he would have struck her had her adult son not been present to defend her.
Pauley raised her own family, and said she tried hard to instill a sense of equality and respect in her own children. Today, she has a son-in-law who is black.
“When Barack Obama ran for president, it was difficult to tell my mother that I voted for him,” she said. “The phone went absolutely silent. After I said it, I felt liberated.”
But Pauley said that, when she moved from Connecticut to her current home in Plymouth, Vt., she was struck by the comparative lack of diversity.
That was why, in the wake of the violence by racist protestors in Charlottesville, Va., about a month ago, Pauley attended a vigil organized by the Woodstock Social Justice Initiative. It was the first time she had ever publicly engaged in political activism.
On Saturday, she said the workshops were teaching her more about how to navigate the complexities of racial justice and bring a positive change into the world.
“My challenge is having the courage on a day-to-day basis to stand up,” she said. “I don’t like conflict. But I would like to be able to speak intelligently enough about these issues to be able to talk to people without putting them on the defensive.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.