The body of John Lewis was finally laid to rest today after a five or six day ordeal of services and ceremonies, including a two-day stint in the rotunda of the U. S. Capitol. As I currently live minutes away from the D.C. metro area, I had considered making a pilgrimage into the city to pay my respects. The Lewis family issued a public statement of caution in the midst of a nationwide pandemic, though, and I opted to honor their advice to avoid the crowds. I also remembered the example of John Lewis himself, the statesman and civil rights icon, who would have admonished me to do something about his life work rather than stare at his lifeless body.

I am pretty much the prototype of the white American who is susceptible to racism, even while denying it. As a kid, I grew up in a solidly middle class environment—never rich, but certainly not poor. I went to schools that were predominately white. My family would never have seen themselves as prejudiced, and yet “Little Black Sambo” was a favorite bedtime storybook, along with the Uncle Remus tales from Disney’s “Song of the South”. There was nothing overt about our racism, but it was there.

The path out of racism for someone like me is one that should be embraced as a lifelong journey. I will not ever look at myself in the mirror and believe I’m looking at a man who is cured of all his prejudices. This is something I will need to continually work on as long as I live. BUT! I can look at one moment in time and identify the marker for where my personal journey began.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in April of 1968. My father was a military man at the time, assigned to a signal station in Alexandria, Virginia. We lived close enough to D.C. to be able to hear the booms of explosions and to see on the horizon the glow of the fires in the city during the days of upheaval that followed Dr. King’s death.

I was a third grader that year. My teacher was a fiery African American woman named Barbara Johnson whom I had learned to accept with equal parts affection and fear. She could yell over the loudest of dins within the classroom. She could cast a silent, angry scowl that would induce shudders out of our bravest miscreants. She had a thick, twelve-inch ruler that was for slapping hands (yes . . . this was back in the day when teachers could still do that sort of thing), but I can only recall seeing her actually use it once. She was pretty much able to keep us in line without having to resort to slapping and spanking.

Many would have labeled Miss Johnson as a mean teacher—and I suppose my classmates and I judged her that way at first. But even as we feared her, she had a mysterious knack for drawing us toward her. She called me out one day for talking when we were all supposed to be working on an assignment at our desks. “Stand out in the hallway!” she barked. I obediently rose and made my way for the door. Then I heard her say, “Hang on. Come here a minute.” She was working on a St. Patrick’s Day themed bulletin board. She instructed me to grab a chair in order to stand on it so that I could reach the top border. “Hold those cut-outs in place so that I can staple them.” And before I knew it, I had spent twenty or twenty-five minutes assisting her—a chore which would ultimately include my own creation of a Crayola-colored rainbow stretching down into her cut-out pot of gold. “That’s actually very nice,” she said. “You’re good at this. Now, go stand out in the hallway.” I had forgotten that I was still in her doghouse. She had not. And I still recall the tangled yarn ball of my feelings as I trudged out to the hallway. This woman had the capacity to be mad at me and pleased with me at the same time! Who does that!?

On April 9, 1968, there were two funeral services for Martin Luther King, Jr., one for his family at their home church in Atlanta, and a public service at Morehouse College. It was a Tuesday. Miss Johnson’s class followed its normal daily routine. Other than being perhaps a bit more subdued, we hadn’t noticed any difference in our teacher’s demeanor. To be honest, I’m not sure we connected Miss Johnson with all that had transpired in Washington D.C. and in our nation over those past five days. We weren’t blind to the fact that she was a black woman. But we only knew her in the context of our classroom and the confines of our school. Eight and nine-year olds haven’t quite gotten to that point of being able to conceptualize any kind of life for their teacher outside of that realm. A couple of years earlier I remember being almost traumatized at seeing my first-grade teacher at a local department store, not being able to even identify her at first, and then finding it almost impossible to wrap my head around her existence outside of my school.

On that Tuesday we finished up some assignments around mid-morning. There was a television in our room, and we were delighted when we saw Miss Johnson quietly turn it on. We grew solemn when we realized we were watching the funeral proceedings for Dr. King. The private service had just concluded at the Ebenezer Church, and the casket was now being loaded onto what looked like one of those wagons you use for hayrides. I didn’t know it at the time, but a young John Lewis was one of the men who led the slow procession through the streets of Atlanta to Morehead College. An enormous amount of people lined those streets, and yet . . . I remember thinking that it seemed so quiet. At points I could even hear the clop, clop, clop of the mules who were pulling the wagon.

I don’t remember a lot of the specifics of the service afterward. There was singing—I remember Mahalia Jackson singing “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” There was a sermon by the president of the college. Miss Johnson finally stood up and turned off the television. “Time to line up for lunch,” she said quietly. We scrambled to grab lunch boxes and money for ice-cream bars. She stood by the door watching us as we gradually formed a line. A little ahead of me, I heard one of the boys say, “Miss Johnson, what’s that on your cheek? Is that . . . a little tear?” We all stared as, suddenly, a cascade of tears flowed down her dark face. She turned away from us and stepped out into the hallway, closing the door gently behind her.

We all looked at one another, bewildered and perhaps even a little frightened. After a long moment of silent confusion, one of the girls—one who often took charge on the playground—spoke up. “Well,” she said, “we need to go to lunch. Let’s stay in line. If we get stopped in the hallway, I’ll explain what happened to Miss Johnson.”

As we filed out into the hallway, we were met by the teacher of the class that was across the hall from us. “Shh,” she whispered as she gestured toward the cafeteria. “I’ll lead you down to lunch.”

“Is Miss Johnson—?”

“Miss Johnson is going to be okay. It’s just a very sad day for her.”

None of us seemed to be that hungry on that particular day. We huddled around our lunch table and pondered over what we should do if Miss Johnson met us back in our classroom. Was a hug appropriate? Should we all dispense hugs individually or give her one big group hug? We shook our heads, dubious over the general idea. Miss Johnson didn’t strike us as being someone who liked hugs. Should we try to say something to her? What on earth could we say? We were just about to the point of composing a short little speech and electing a spokesperson when the school’s principal approached us and informed us of an alternate plan for the remainder of that day. We were going to be joining the class that was across the hall from ours.

When I got home that day, I asked my mother if she had watched the funeral services of Dr. King. “I had it on the television,” she said as she transferred a pile of my baby sister’s diapers from the diaper pale to the washing machine. I waited for her to offer something more, but that seemed to be all she had to say about it.

My appetite still hadn’t returned when we sat down at the dinner table that night. “Why are you picking at your food?” my mother finally asked. “Are you not feeling well?”

“I feel fine.”

“Then what’s on you mind?”

After a moment of hesitation, I confessed, “We saw Miss Johnson cry today. She left right before lunch.”

My mother quietly laid her fork down. “That’s why you were asking about Martin Luther King’s funeral.”

I nodded.

“That was her king, I suppose,” she said softly.

Miss Johnson was back in our classroom the next day. She never said anything about the scene we had witnessed the day before, and throughout the remainder of that school year she never brought up the subject of Martin Luther King, Jr. or any of the broader challenges faced by African Americans in our country. To my knowledge, none of us ever mustered up the courage to say anything to her. But something definitely changed in our classroom from that point on. All of us felt it. We worked harder for Miss Johnson. We paid more attention to her. We fought harder for her in the course of all those inter-school kickball and softball tournaments.

Sometimes it takes a lifetime to process the true impact of something that happened in your childhood. I’m still not sure that any of us third graders equated our ultimate feelings for our teacher with the larger issues of equality and fairness in our society. What I do know is that the image of those tears cascading down Miss Johnson’s dark face has stayed with me all of my life. I may not have known much about racism and injustice when I was nine-years old, but I saw how deeply it hurt the strongest woman I knew at that point in my life. And I’ve never forgotten that. Those tears ingrained in me an acute sensitivity toward those in our world who are marginalized and demeaned, a sensitivity that has fueled my relationships, my activities, my choices and my values.

I grieve the loss of John Lewis today (along with the passing of that generation of civil rights icons), and I celebrate his legacy. But for every John Lewis I’ve known in my lifetime, I’m also grateful for every Barbara Johnson. John Lewis personified the fight for justice and equality at the national level. But the seeds that lead to true freedom from racism are planted and watered by teachers, classmates, work colleagues, friendships—all those who show us the true beauty of their ethnicity and the enormous value of their contributions to this life we live. I received that first seed on the day that Miss Johnson’s tears opened my eyes to something I hadn’t seen before. She wasn’t just my teacher. She wasn’t just a black woman. She was a human being.