Will we ever be color blind? Will we ever be able to construct a society in which we are not judged by the color of our skin? Some people are able to see beyond the surface and glimpse the essence of another. Margaret Chanin was one of those people—her life is an inspirational true story of compassion, resilience, and vision.
Born in rural northeast Arkansas in 1917, Margaret was a white daughter of the Post-Reconstruction South, where “Jim Crow” laws enforced racial segregation. Yet she was not a racist. She saw people as simply … people.
Margaret’s way of seeing was learned.
Her mother, Mae, was a formidable woman who didn’t let anyone tell her how to live. She marched as a suffragette for the right of women to vote and, later, wrote for the local newspaper. Her father, Robert “Haskins” Jones, was a well-regarded farm manager who treated the Black men and women who worked the farm with dignity and respect. For many years, Mae taught Sunday School, and her husband served as a deacon at their local Baptist church. But they believed their true calling lay beyond the chapel walls.
Following the accident that claimed her arms, Margaret returned to school and earned a dental degree and a master’s in public health. After several years of raising children and working part-time as a substitute teacher, she was invited to teach preventive dentistry at Meharry, a historically Black medical college in Nashville, Tennessee.
One of only a few white members of the faculty, Margaret was recruited by the dean of the School of Dentistry because of her knowledge and communication skills, but also because, through her own suffering and the accommodations she had to make on account of her disability, she understood perhaps as well as anyone the experiences and needs of the people she was being asked to serve. “She was Meharry,” a former student recalled. “You can be at Meharry and not be of Meharry. There’s a difference … Living with a disability allowed her to … reach those others couldn’t reach.”
Perhaps humility and power are not opposites, but companions. After Haskins died in 1967, his grandson, Robert Chanin, wrote, “He modeled for me that humility which brings power and love and respect into one’s life … Both Black and white mourned his death. I was 16 and knew that a great man had passed away.”
Years later, at Margaret’s memorial service in 2001, Robert made a similar observation. “Mom never loved anyone because of who they were or what they had accomplished,” he said. “She saw everyone as created in the image of God … Her humility came from that wonderful sense of powerlessness that enables one to connect with the One who is all power.”
And to connect, on the deepest level, with each other.