All of us have the right to equal opportunity to develop our talents.

John Kennedy


Martin Luther King Day always makes me think of Nettie Alsop and how much she would have benefited from the fruits of his lovely dream. Nettie Alsop was my mother’s maid in 1939 when I was 6 years old. I loved her so much that I still get tears in my eyes when I realize that she is gone.

Nettie cleaned our house, cooked our dinner and treated me like a precious treasure. Because she had a deformed foot, she walked on crutches but that didn’t seem to slow her down. When I was in trouble or a pot boiled over on the stove, she moved faster than a track star.

She was the kind of person who could see a child’s invisible pain and cure it with a hug or a story and a walk to the park. No matter how busy she was, she had all the time for me that I ever needed and when she held my hand, the world became a beautiful place. I can remember when I had chicken pox and only she could make the itching go away. I have always believed that there was so much affection in her application of the calamine lotion that she doubled its power.

Nettie lived with her sister Carrie in the Brand Whitlock Homes, a housing development for blacks in Toledo, Ohio. Brand Whitlock must have been a man with great vision and understanding because he believed that if you give people decent housing they will enhance the property and in this instance, he was right. Those brick units became a thing of beauty nestled in the heart of Toledo’s worst slum neighborhood.

Nettie had to quit school when she was twelve because her family needed the income she could provide if she went to work. She took in sewing and her needlework was so precise, it would win prizes if she were showing it today. She read so many books that she knew the answer to every question I ever asked. She was not just intelligent. She was wise. She taught me to understand my playmates and not waste my energy hating those that hurt me. “All they want is a little attention and a little love,” she’d say to me. “That doesn’t cost a thing to give, Lynn Ruth. When you make someone feel important, he won’t be afraid to be nice to you.”

I asked Nettie why she had to use crutches to walk and she said, ”When I was just about your age, honey, I was riding my bike over to my auntie’s house and a car hit me.”

“Didn’t someone take you to the hospital?” I asked.

Nettie nodded. “My parents rushed me to the emergency ward but the doctors must have been very busy that night and they didn’t have time to set a black child’s leg.”

I couldn’t believe what I heard. “But your leg was broken,” I said. “They HAD to fix it.”

Nettie shook her head. “Not if you were black,” she said and she wiped the tears from my eyes. “But it all worked out just fine, Lynnie Ruth,” she said. “I learned to run as fast as the next one and I’ll bet if you raced to the corner right now, I’d win.”

I don’t think a terrible injustice like that could happen today, although many of my black friends tell me I am wrong. I don’t believe we use color as a criteria when we select our friends or judge their character and it is illegal now to deprive a person of medical care because of his color.

When I was young, we defined neighborhoods by the ethnicity of their residents and I don’t believe we can do that anymore. Anti-discrimination laws won’t allow such a thing. But laws no matter how rigidly they are enforced, only enhance the hatred we instill in our children when we encourage them to evaluate a person by the color of his skin. If I could be God for just one hour, I would decree that all the races in the world be dumped in a bowl and mixed together until everyone’s skin became creamy beige. Then when a tiny eight year old with a broken leg was taken to a hospital with tears in her eyes, she would be treated like the treasure that all children are. She would have her leg put into a cast so that she would be skipping rope in six weeks and running to her classes at some a college campus by the time she was eighteen. She wouldn’t have to sew to earn her living unless that was what she longed to do.

Yes, if I had my way, everyone could have the right to create reality out of their own vision in life. I guess that’s what Martin Luther King wanted, too.


I have a dream that my four little children will live in a nation

Where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,

But by the content of their character.

Martin Luther King