Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

by Drew Gilpin Faust

Black people were women; I must be a lady.

I endeavored from a very young age to protect as much independence from my mother as I could, to preserve the freedom of action I could exercise when she simply did not know what I was up to. It

In 1950, only one in three white women over twenty-five had completed high school, and only one in twenty had completed college.

chivalry, with its implicit acknowledgment of dependence, came at considerable cost to those it claimed to defend.

For many white southerners of my generation, a life-defining question has been how long it took us to notice the contradictions between the democratic and Christian ideals intoned in church and school and the patterns of injustice in which our lives were imbedded.

There is a clarity about how children see the world that the complexities of adult life often muddy. And there is a fervor children feel when they believe adults have misled them or disguised or hidden the truth.

The white southerner, the Nobel Prize–winning writer observed, “faces an obsolescence in his own land which only he can cure.”

decided my parents were right: it was better not to have a shelter at all than to be confronted with such impossible decisions.

The Sixties began with Little Rock and with Sputnik and with the seeds of doubt and disappointment they sowed.

Perhaps it was Nancy Drew who persuaded us we could Have It All.

Judith Miller has written, “We must remind ourselves that the Holocaust was not six million. It was one, plus one, plus one … Only in understanding that civilized people must defend the one, by one, by one … can the Holocaust, the incomprehensible, be given meaning.”

Perhaps I, too, could succeed in becoming a person.

Children did not have to see things exactly like their parents; they did not have to grow up to be their parents. They had not yet been co-opted and corrupted by evils that surrounded them; they took risks because they did not even understand they were doing so; their innocence was their power.

She charged us not to be “victory addicts”—those “whose each successive victory creates a craving for another.”

Laws were necessary; they might not “change the heart but they could restrain the heartless.”

Even if I could never succeed at being cool, I knew I was good at being smart.

Take your work seriously but always remember it is never complete, can always be better.

War had defined my parents’ and my grandparents’ generations. Now, in a very different way, it was defining mine. I began to wonder if that was what a generation is: not a biological measure so much as the maximum length of time human beings can forgo mobilizing to destroy one another.

Camus: “I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague stricken.”

One of my greatest challenges as an activist was probably that I was too polite for the revolution.