About sixty years ago, I was a young Air Force officer stationed at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama - a city at the heart of the struggle for black civil rights.
One day, my commanding officer assigned me the duty of escort officer for a funeral. The funeral was for a captain who had been killed in an airplane crash. Such assignments are routine. The officer commands two groups of airmen: the pallbearers and the rifle squad. Each of them has a sergeant overseeing their participation in the ceremony.
Except this funeral was not exactly routine, and trouble was anticipated. The captain was black and he was going to be buried in a white cemetery. Intelligence suspected KKK opposition, which might be violent. Colonel Harris told me my sergeants would have clips of live ammunition in their uniform coat pockets. And I was to see to it that the funeral and burial were not interfered with.
The funeral was in a small church in an isolated clearing. surrounded by the piney woods of south Alabama. After assessing the situation, and with apologies to the pastor, I kept my rifle squad outside the church to deal with any potential threat. I suspected we were being watched from the surrounding curtain of trees, and wanted any watcher to know we were on guard.
The funeral went off without a hitch. The procession to the cemetery was uneventful, too. But I became alarmed when I saw that the small cemetery was completely surrounded by a double row of huge cypress trees. We were essentially trapped within that green wall, and gunmen could be anywhere between those trees. But once again, the ceremony went off without a hitch. Finally, the 21 gun salute was fired, the flag was folded and presented to the widow with the words, "I present you with this flag on behalf of a grateful nation."
The men were formed up and marched away, out through the cemetery gate and to our waiting bus. Then the penny dropped: there was another bus - labeled "U. S. Marshall Service." There were as least twenty-five of them. Unseen from within, they had ringed the outside of the cemetery.
They drove away quickly, and the family never saw them.
Now, sixty years later, I wonder how far we've really come. My men and I potentially went into harm's way. But the captain's family lived in harm's way all the time. The temporary fear I felt, trapped inside that green wall of trees, was a way of life for them.
And for many of my fellow Americans, this remains true today. For people with darker skins, or of a different religion, or a minority sexual orientation, there is always the threat of violence that is bred by hate.
We must stand up to that and say, "no more!" We Americans must develop better hearts and minds in our common civil life. If not, the axe of hate will be laid to the tree of liberty.