“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they
fight you, and then you win.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor;
it must be demanded by the oppressed." -- Martin Luther King Jr.
"... This is an illegal march. It's blocking the
highway," Selma sheriff Jim Clark
"... it means disturbing the peace, it means unrest, it
means resistance." -- Martin Luther King, in Selma.
Ava DuVernay's recent
film is a largely accurate account of one of the most famous, important battles
of the Civil Rights Era, the march from Selma to Montgomery to force a
federal law to protect voting rights for blacks in the South.
One of the truths
forgotten or overlooked in our official canonization of King and the era of
Civil Rights sit-ins and other protests is how intentionally provocative they
were. The movie makes this point very clear. At its start King laments
that a protest in Augusta, Georgia, has garnered no national attention because
authorities have treated protestors nonviolently and civilly, even while they
have refused to give in on the issue -- the minefield of local rules designed to prevent black citizens from registering to vote. We see these voting
"requirements" illustrated in an opening scene when a would-be voter
is asked to name the 62 district court judges in the state of Alabama. She's
already recited the preamble to the Constitution. But the clerk stamps her
application "denied."
But when police
don't manhandle protestors, King complains, "there is no drama." You
mean, a young community organizer, puts in, "No cameras." That's it,
exactly, the movement leaders agree. They then decide to move their efforts to
Selma, Alabama, where a particularly nasty, thick-headed local sheriff, Jim
Clark, is likely to give them the brutality they need to draw the cameras.
Now King's
movement was famously non-violent, and it's portrayed that way in the film. But
the movement's strategy is knowingly to provoke a violent over-reaction from
racist authorities in order to show to the world what American's black citizens
are up against in the racist American South.
That is, the
protest is intended to provoke the violence. It's the only way to exposes the injustice
of a status quo most of the country -- white citizens; white authorities -- allow
to stand.
The Selma
campaign's courthouse protest and highway march do provoke the reaction the
organizers expect. Brutality, the clubbing of women and old men, police and white
citizen violence against defenseless protestors.
It also leads to
some murders. Even before the big march, a smaller local march is broken up by police who chase some demonstrators into a restaurant and shoot to death a
young man in front of his family. Interestingly, in view of current events, the
officer claims he thought the victim was reaching for a gun. Since I was completely
unfamiliar with this crime, I researched its accuracy. It happened -- though
the victim took 41 days to die. Perhaps that's why this death didn't get the
national play other killings did.
And after King
appealed for supporters from the rest of the country to come to Selma to take
part in the march, many hundreds did, mostly white Northeners. Three ministers
were attacked by local racists, and one -- a minister from Boston -- died from
his beating. Again, the dramatization
of this incident in the film is almost exactly true to the historical facts.
The Selma March
was a great victory for civil rights -- but not a bloodless one. The mist of sanctification that hangs over
King and his movement causes Americans, particularly white people, to forget other
such unpleasant truths. In the film "Selma" as in the national
memory, most people, especially Northern whites, were firmly in King's corner.
However, as Jordan
Lebeau points out in an essay on Boston.com, "Gallup polls,
hate mail, voting records, and the desire to keep blacks out of voting
booths paint a different story of common sentiment towards King."
"In
the 1960s [Lebeau states] Gallup asked Americans to rate King. If they held a
favorable view, they were to assign him a rating between +1 and +5, and, if
their view was unfavorable, -1 to -5. In 1963, 37 percent of Americans polled
had an unfavorable rating of King. By 1965, it had jumped to 46 percent, and,
in 1966, 63 percent of Americans had an unfavorable view, with 44 percent
holding a highly unfavorable view of a man who led nonviolent protests in favor
of access to basic American and human rights." [http://www.boston.com/entertainment/movies/2014/12/18/selma-and-america-convenient-mlk-myth/a6sgdFgR6mqLegBEPtx90L/story.html]
As these polls
indicated, the majority of Americans did not rush to support the civil rights
protest movement. In truth racism was common and widespread in the North, if
less virulent and codified in the South. In opinion polls most Americans said
the demonstrators "should obey the law" and should not "disturb
the peace," and if they did should expect to face arrest. This was largely
George Wallace's point of view.
It took the
violent response of many white southerners and racist authorities such as
Sheriff Clark of Selma to breed sufficient political support for the
landmark legislation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law gave the federal
government the power to step in and assure that blacks could register to vote in
places where they had been denied that right.
The comparison of
those times to the troubles of our own times -- when blacks are protesting the de
facto racism of police shootings: why is it that the great majority of deaths
at the hands of police are black men? -- is apparent to some people. But not,
it appears to me, to most.
"Today,"
Lebeau writes, "the hatred
exhibited toward those among us who have crafted movements very much in the
likeness of King’s, affirms our nation’s hatred of the original King. It also
affirms our commitment to his myth."
Acts of
"hatred" to demonstrators protesting the Ferguson case have taken place.
After the decision not to charge the officer who shot Michael
Brown to death (because, apparently, he felt frightened by him), a vehicle
drove into a crowd of protestors in Minneapolis, knocking several down and
dragging one along the ground. The driver was not arrested. [http://kstp.com/article/stories/s3631519.shtml]
The racism behind
the treatment of black men, and children, by police, and by the larger society that accepts it, is harder to address than
segregation in the sixties. How American society demonizes black men, especially in
the North, is not codified in law, so we can't simply pass a law against it.
In my opinion,
this racism is endemic to American society and goes far beyond law enforcement. It's part of the way we live. For
that reason most white Americans will not "approve" of protest actions
intended to change it. As Lebeau points out, most white Americans did not
approve of King and his demonstrations back in the sixties.
To me the
unwillingness to confront the enduring racism in our society -- the de facto segregation in where blacks and whites live; the unequal schooling -- explains the widespread "outrage" against the demonstrators in Boston
who chained themselves to cement barrels (Jan. 15) and blocked traffic on an
interstate: we're in denial.
I wrote the
op-ed piece below in response to that outrage. For the record, I sent it to
newspapers. It was not published.
Our Northern Way of Life
Why should we all have to wait, hundreds and even thousands of us,
stalled in traffic because some black men have been killed -- perhaps
unnecessarily, certainly in eyebrow-raising circumstances -- by police
officers and because American society does not hold the officers, or their
superiors, accountable for these misdeeds? OK, let's admit it, if you're a cop
you get away with murder, as long as your victim is black.
But what good does it do to take down a busy highway at commuter
time and ruin everybody's day by making them late for work, for appointments,
for important meetings? Besides, at least one person in an ambulance who needed
emergency medical assistance was caught in that traffic. What an outrage! I
certainly hope that no ambulances tried to get to a hospital via Route 93
during evening rush hour on Martin Luther King Day, because my wife and I were on that
road and traffic was not moving. This happens, I understand, with great
regularity.
Nevertheless we are sensibly outraged by this wholly unnecessary,
self-indulgent "protest" by a few way-out extremists on the morning of
Jan. 15. This nonsense ruined our whole day and -- we are quick to add -- it
was dangerous too. We know what else is also dangerous: being black and male
while encountering a police officer.
But we are not particularly outraged by a phenomenon that has,
after all, been going on for decades. We are particularly outraged -- to the
point of ramming new laws limiting free speech (hard on the heels of "Je
Suis Charlie") through our legislature -- by people who stop traffic on an
interstate screwing up our whole day.
Admittedly, other causes for outrage exist. American police
officers tell us that their number one priority when they strap on their gear
each day is to protect themselves. We may have naively assumed their number one
priority was to protect others, including those they believe they must arrest,
such as Eric Garner, who was choked to death when he didn't go along quietly to
an arrest for supposedly selling loose cigarettes. Or Michael Brown, who was
shot to death for jaywalking. Sorry! But that's not what we're outraged about.
Cops in America should be outraged that they to worry about their safety. They police a civil society in which laws make it
easy for any nut to have a gun (such as the one who recently killed two
officers in New York City) and even supposedly sane people make a practice of
carrying guns around. Americans could do something to make their jobs safer: we
could pass a few gun safety laws. Oh, right, we can't do that, because in
America the gun industry makes the gun laws. Well, we could all just throw our
guns away! OK, that's probably not happening either.
But we're not outraged by that. We're outraged because a bunch of
extremist protestors who stopped a highway on rush hour. Hey, they broke the
law!
So did Martin Luther King, now that I think of it. Black Americans
held prayer meetings over segregation until they were sick of the sound of
their own voices. When they took the law in their own hands -- this is
forgotten today -- white Americans (in the South) hated those first public
protests or strongly disapproved (other regions). White Americans said that police have to enforce the laws, that sit-ins and unpermitted marches disturbed the
peace, so if civil rights protestors were arrested and often beaten it was
basically their own fault.
Now we say that it was all right for the civil rights protestors
-- in the South -- to break the laws because their protests were non-violent.
The militant protestors who chained themselves to cement barrels were also
non-violent. But we still have a right to be outraged because -- well, we're
us, we're not the terrible South and what they did interrupted our lives. Our
whole Northern Way of Life. Getting to work on time, cramming the highways,
taking care of business, taking care of ourselves.
It's outrageous! Let's pass a law against it. Let's get back to
business. Let's go Pats!
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