Still haunted by past, but looking to the future

SELMA, Ala. -- On one of my flights here, sheer luck took a liking to me. I got seated next to Thelma Adair, a 94-year-old black woman coming down from New York City for the Jubilee. It had been 50 years from when civil rights marchers were beaten bloody by the police wielding truncheons and the entitlement that comes from centuries of racist tradition. We talked about the civil rights movement for a while, which is why she told me about her nightmares. They are so terrifying that she screams in her sleep. When she awakes, she remembers nothing.

It is only a feeling that sticks with her. It's a feeling from her childhood in North Carolina, where her father, the Rev. Robert J. Davidson, was an “activist.” He had been targeted by the Ku Klux Klan. This was around 1925, during an era when there were lynchings of black men all across the South -- 17 that year alone.

Rev. Davidson was speaking out. This was not common. Black ministers were accountable to their parishioners but they, if they were middle class, were in turn accountable to their usually white employers. It was often deemed prudent to say nothing, to limit the protests to a mumble, to suffer the indignities of Jim Crow rather than the pain of poverty.

“He was marked by the Klan,” Thelma Adair said of her father. She was around 4 at the time and so the specifics elude her. Only one thing remains clear: terror. “I remember the fear.”

The nightmares have come on more or less recently. Mrs. Adair lives in a Harlem brownstone with other family members, and they come running when they hear her screaming. They ask if she is all right and what the nightmares are about. But she remembers nothing. No details. Just the feeling. Terror.

I suggest that she suffers from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, the now famous PTSD. She agrees. A friend of mine, a psychiatrist at a VA hospital, treats many veterans for PTSD. She describes their look, the way they pull their baseball cap down to shield their face. One of her newer patients is a combat veteran. He last fought in 1945.

I know of a man, a Jew, who hid in the forest from the Nazis, sneaking into town from time to time for food, brazenly strolling past the dreaded SS, trying to look like everyone else. He had many close calls, many brushes with death, but he was a brave, strong man, and he survived the war and came to America. Here he had a business, raised a family and retired eventually to Florida. One day, a meter maid approached him and he went to pieces. He was old -- a brave, strong man no more. Uniforms suddenly terrified him.

I did not tell Mrs. Adair those stories. Instead, I listened to hers. She had moved eventually to New York, married Eugene Adair, a minister, and got an advanced degree from Columbia University's Teachers College. When she traveled south with her children, she would drive at night so the sleeping kids would not suffer the humiliation of signs announcing “Whites Only” or “Colored Hotel.” The incessant humiliation, the degradation, clings to her to this day. She cannot forget it. It needs to be remembered -- not by those who cannot forget, but by those who never knew.

At Montgomery, we went our separate ways to Selma. On Saturday, President Obama spoke here and members of Congress were all over the place. The Selma of old has turned upside down. State troopers were now protecting a black president and other black leaders. Along with thousands of others, I walked the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge and toured the places where Martin Luther King had preached. I felt as I did when I was in Vietnam 15 years ago: Why were these people so friendly, so polite? Why didn't they hate me just as people who looked like me once hated them?

There is no hate in Thelma Adair. There is, instead, a determination to keep progress progressing, to always move forward but to never forget the past -- its victims, its lessons. We parted when the plane landed and I went off to see history -- mummified in churches and places where great men once did great things. But history had been seated next to me all along. It imbues an old woman who wakes a Harlem family with her shrieks. It's a nightmare that, for all of us, still has not ended.

Richard Cohen's email address is cohenr@washpost.com

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