He remembered meeting my mother back in the ‘60s, he said. He told me that what he remembered might surprise me.

This was years ago, not long after my mother died. I was talking to a veteran DC-area activist, who as far as I knew had only met my mother at my wedding.

The activist, a guy in his 60s named Mike, already had the distinction of having been the college roommate of the leader of the religious community (or some might say irreligious community) that my family was part of in my childhood. We’d stumbled upon that random connection years ago. Now, he apparently had another small-world revelation for me.

Somehow it had come up that I’d grown up in Bowie, Maryland, in a Levitt development called Belair.  Well, Mike had been part of protests in the Belair development, back in 1963, because the developer would not sell homes to African Americans.

I mentioned clear memories of having Black neighbors, but admitted that it was perhaps 1968 or 1969. I actually don’t know when they moved in.  I was born in 1966 and simply have no memories, of any kind, before I was two or three.  But I couldn’t imagine my very-liberal parents buying in a restricted development I told him. He thought his memories suggested otherwise. He was cryptic.  But I was pretty sure that Belair hadn’t even been on my parents’ radar screen as early as 1963, and despite her strong political instincts, my mother wasn’t one to do civil disobedience. So he couldn’t have met my mother then. I didn’t say those things aloud. But I did decide to let it go.

Until this week.

This past Wednesday was the 50^th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. During the week leading up to it, I gifted myself two hours to go solo to a morning screening of the acclaimed movie, The Butler, which shows much of 20^th century American history through the eyes of an African-American White House butler and his family.

That same week, I also attended the first session of a bereavement group at my congregation. I attended primarily in memory of my Dad, who died after a traumatic decline almost a year ago this season. But as much as I’ve been struck, almost physically, by the approaching anniversary,  I was also there a bit for my mother,  who’d died seven years earlier.

At that meeting, I admitted that one of the hardest things about my recent loss is that, with both parents gone, there’s no one left to ask questions of. Whatever history I know (or think I know) about our nuclear family, that’s the end of the line. Or so I thought.

Suddenly, I had the images from The Butler, and the way they overlapped with my own childhood memories,  playing on a loop in my brain. I was deeply in the spirit of the 50^th anniversary of MLKs “I have a dream” speech. And I became obsessed with my own family’s history. Among other things, might my parents have bought a Levitt home before the developer had dropped restrictions against selling to Black families?

I turned to a Facebook group called “You know you‘re from Bowie, MD, if…”  and quickly discovered the genius of crowd-sourcing. For instance: the Black family in the Blue colonial behind our rancher? They were not the Nolans, but the Nowlins. It was Jimmie, someone confirmed, who had become a local policeman.  But no one could tell me when the family moved in to that house, only when they moved out (in ’73 or 74).

I also learned that there were no covenants in the sales contracts—buyers could resell to non-whites. (At least one group member recalled her father flatly refusing to be part of a plan to buy up houses on the market to keep them from being bought by Blacks.) But no one seemed to be sure exactly when the restriction in original sales was dropped.

As I’d told Mike, buying in a restricted neighborhood was not in character for my folks. There must be a back story.

Because this is what I do know about my parents’ choices in that era:

In the year or so after I was born, my parents joined the Baltimore Ethical Society (though it was an hour from our home and there was a similar community closer) in large part because it and its Sunday School were racially integrated.

My parents had met in the Ethical Culture movement in New York, and had been married by one of its leaders. (My paternal grandmother insisted on calling the leader “rabbi” at the wedding, and everyone stayed happy.)  Ethical Culture was a secular humanist religion, not unlike Unitarianism in spirit and practice, but with even less of a tip of the hat to traditional religion. And at the Baltimore society, Marian and Gil Banfield, a Black social worker and (I think) doctor, and their grandkids, and at least one grown daughter, were—in my eyes—very clearly the Society’s “First Family,” long before the Obamas.

When I was in first grade at Meadowbrook Elementary School, our county—Prince Georges County, Maryland—was forced by the courts to integrate its schools through busing, in the middle of the academic year.  Most Bowie residents were vehemently opposed to the plan. My parents were for it. And apparently my mother was vocal enough on the issue, that she remembered me coming home crying because some other kids, primed by their parents, had harassed me about her views.

Truthfully, I don’t remember that.  But I absolutely remember this:

In second grade, I got lice. In fact, I’m pretty sure I was Patient Zero, because only after mine were discovered were routine head-checks instituted at school.  School staff were very careful about keeping the names of the children who’d contracted lice anonymous, or—at least the name of the first child upon whom the whole epidemic might be blamed.

Soon after the head checks began, the school sent home a flyer that explained that African American hair was not a hospitable environment for lice.  Whether it was completely accurate or not is unclear. What is clear to me now is that this was a tool to defuse any accusations that the lice had been brought to the school by the new Black students.

After my mom’s death, I found a copy of that flyer among her things. And it occurred to me—and this would absolutely have been in character for my mother—that she was likely instrumental in getting that flyer printed, and in making sure it was distributed to each and every hothead parent in the school.

My Mom consistently acted from her gut, which was more precise an ethical compass than any other I’ve known. My Dad consistently acted from his head (when he wasn’t acting in anger, which he did a bit too often). As their marriage progressed, they acted less frequently as one unit.  But when it came to politics, they usually started from the same place, and arrived at similar conclusions. And they were also both incredibly loyal friends.

I remember when I was in my twenties, and helping my Dad find a new couch at a huge discount mall in Virginia, we took a detour to visit an old, ailing friend. This isn’t the only ailing friend I’d visited with my Dad. But this visit was especially meaningful for me.

The friend was Jim Farmer, one of the founders of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, who’d organized the first sit-ins in Chicago in the 1940s, and the famous Freedom Rides of the 1960s. He and my father had met through the Student League for Industrial Democracy when Farmer was an officer, and my Dad was a student, and had stayed in close touch.

Another friend from SLID (or SLOP, Student League for Organizational Paralysis, as they joked), Earl Mittleman, also moved to Washington, like my Dad, for a job in the Kennedy administration, and also bought a house in the convenient bedroom community of Belair.

By the time of our visit to his farm in Fredericksburg, Jim was blind in both eyes (where before he’d worn a prominent eye patch over one), and had been through at least one amputation of a lower leg due to complications from diabetes.  He stayed in bed during our visit. The man before me, and the man in my memory, were not quite night and day, but painfully disparate.

I remember seeing him speak at the 20^th anniversary of the March on Washington in 1983, when I was a senior in high school. I’d gone alone to the Mall that day, and felt a swell of pride when I saw my parents’ friend and heard his booming voice echoing over the loud-speakers from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It would have been even more profound if I’d realized at the time that he had not made it to the original march, but had stayed in jail in Birmingham when others were bailed out to attend.

My clearest memory of Farmer is when he came to our home in Bowie for dinner when I was in my teens. At some point in the evening, while my mom was working on something in the kitchen, he and I sat in the den watching Maya Angelou on the television. I think she was reciting a poem.  I have no idea what the context was, but I do remember him saying, “She’s really something, isn’t she?”

So at least 10 years after the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and probably once or twice in the intervening years, CORE founder Jim Farmer came to the formerly restricted “Belair at Bowie.”

A few days ago, I discovered a newspaper article that suggested that the practice of not selling the original homes to Blacks was officially dropped in 1967, by order of the county. But just today, someone popped up on the Bowie Facebook group, remembering a Black neighbor who moved onto his street in 1965, about the same time my parents moved to town. Maybe that was the litmus test—that at least one Black family had broken the barrier. I guess I’ll never know for sure.

But just in case, I called that activist, Mike, this week, to get details on what he remembered about my Mom. He didn’t remember much, he said. And no, no, no, it wasn’t in 1963 that he met my mother. He’d been invited to come to speak at a community event in 1967, about the time, or just before, Levitt was forced to officially change his sales practices. He thinks he may have met her then.

Those protests in ’63? Well, wouldn’t you know, they were organized by CORE.

I may never know what factors my parents weighed—besides the affordable price and the central air-conditioning—when deciding to move to Bowie. But I’m pretty sure they didn’t act blindly. They rarely did. And for that, I am forever grateful.