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"He Never Got Those Letters"
After our show about Which Protests Work, a few weeks ago, we got a comment from Bejail that brought many of the issues of the hour into sharp personal relief. She wrote:
I was a college student in Richmond, VA during the late sixties. My brother was in Vietnam, I grew up in a military family, and I was a nursing student in Richmond seeing black people treated in separate wards in the hospital with inferior equipment and care. I watched the protests against the war and about civil rights across the street from my dorm at city hall. I saw how people vilified returning soldiers and I watched war scenes on TV with my mother crying while searching for her son in those news clips. What I found was that the extremes of the war scared me, did not solve my moral dilemma, and alienated me. Whereas the real life images of black people being mistreated mobilized me to fight for civil rights.
Bejail's real name is Barbara Limandri, and she teaches nursing at Linfield College in northwest Portland. Last week I called Barbara to learn more about her story, and she agreed to sit down with me in her office for an interview. I went expecting to talk about the hows and whys of protesting, but we spent most of the time on her relationship with her brother.
Barbara told me that, somehow, commenting on our site opened a door to a conversation between the two of them that had been dormant for 40 years.
You can listen to her talk about their conversation in our interview (mp3).
