In August, 1968, the country was still reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King four months earlier, and the race riots that followed on its heels. Nightly news showed burning cities, white flight, radicals and reactionaries snarling at each other across the cultural divide. A brand new children's show out of Pittsburgh, which had gone national the previous year, took a different approach. Mr. Roger's Neighborhood introduced Officer Clemmons, a black police officer who was a kindly, responsible authority figure, kept his neighborhood safe, and was Mr. Roger's equal, colleague and neighbor. Around the first anniversary of Martin Luther King's death, Mr. Rogers invited Officer Clemmons to join him in soaking their tired feet in a plastic wading pool. And there they were, brown feet and pasty white feet, side by side in the water. Silently, contemplatively, without comment. 25 years later, when the actor playing Officer Clemmons retired, his last scene on the show revisited that same wading pool, this time reminiscing. Officer Clemmons asked Mr. Rogers what he'd been thinking during their silent interlude a quarter century before. Fred Rogers' answer was that he'd been thinking of the many ways people say "I love you." |
