tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/civil-rights-movement-16720/articlesCivil rights movement – The Conversation2024-02-26T13:39:42Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2192982024-02-26T13:39:42Z2024-02-26T13:39:42ZAnti-immigrant pastors may be drawing attention – but faith leaders, including some evangelicals, are central to the movement to protect migrant rights<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577394/original/file-20240222-26-s3kxsw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=63%2C7%2C4623%2C3224&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A 2010 protest in Phoenix by faith groups against Arizona's new immigration law.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/ArizonaImmigration/fbdf5704f5544e0393349bd76c9c70fb/photo?Query=southern%20border%20jesus&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=901&digitizationType=Digitized&currentItemNo=36&vs=true&vs=true">AP Photo/Matt York, File</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A convoy of far-right Christian nationalists calling themselves “God’s Army” have been <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/02/02/eagle-pass-texas-border-convoy/">staging rallies on the southern U.S. border</a> against migrants. </p>
<p>Under the banner “Take Our Border Back,” rally participants are using dehumanizing language about an “invasion” and citing the “<a href="https://theconversation.com/replacement-theory-isnt-new-3-things-to-know-about-how-this-once-fringe-conspiracy-has-become-more-mainstream-183492">great replacement</a>” conspiracy theory, which claims that a cabal of Western elites and Jews are promoting migration in order to replace white people and their political power with nonwhite immigrants.</p>
<p>Several prominent figures in the Christian right have offered <a href="https://relevantmagazine.com/current/nation/james-dobson-gives-into-fear-at-the-border-update">faith-based justifications</a> for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/12/10/why-franklin-graham-says-donald-trump-is-right-about-stopping-muslim-immigration">anti-immigrant rhetoric</a> and policies. The Christian right has asserted the need to protect the American culture and families from the alleged dangerous influence of Islam and from the supposed wave of hardened criminals crossing the southern border. Indeed, opinion surveys consistently show that white Christians, especially evangelicals, are among the most likely groups in the U.S. <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-98086-7#:%7E:text=This%20book%20examines%20the%20historical,between%20elites%20and%20laity%20within">to hold anti-immigrant sentiments</a>.</p>
<p>Yet our work with faith-based, pro-immigration advocacy groups points toward a different reality. As we argue in our new book, co-authored with sociologist <a href="https://www.nancywyuen.com/">Nancy Wang Yuen</a>, “<a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479816422/gods-resistance/">God’s Resistance: Mobilizing Faith to Defend Immigrants</a>,” faith leaders, including some evangelicals, are central to the current movement to protect immigrant rights, and they have been for over a hundred years. </p>
<h2>Faith-based movements for immigrant rights</h2>
<p>Historically, Latinx Christian leaders <a href="https://utpress.utexas.edu/9780292718418/">have been at the forefront of immigrant rights</a> in the U.S.. For example, Mexican-American Catholic leaders of the Jim Crow era such as <a href="https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/perales-alonso-s">Alonso Perales</a> <a href="https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/calleros-cleofas">and Cleofas Calleros</a> applied Catholic social teaching, such as the inherent equality of all human beings, to civil rights struggles. </p>
<p>They founded leading organizations like the <a href="https://lulac.org">League of United Latin American Citizens</a> and the <a href="https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h4322.html">National Catholic Welfare Conference</a>, which played key roles in landmark civil rights cases, such as <a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/mendez-v-westminster/">Mendez v. Westminster and Hernandez v. Texas</a>. </p>
<p>Mendez v. Westminster ruled in 1947 that segregation of Mexican-American children in schools is unconstitutional, which paved the way for the 1954 historic Brown v. Board of Education anti-segregation ruling. Hernandez v. Texas <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/hernandez-v-texas">ruled in 1954</a> that Mexican Americans and all other racial groups in the United States had equal protection under the 14th Amendment. </p>
<p>Many people also don’t realize the centrality of Christian spirituality in the immigrant-led farmworkers movement in the 1960s. Key labor leaders such as Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta incorporated Catholic social teaching as well as religious symbols and practices in their successful unionization of farmworkers. For example, Chavez <a href="https://theconversation.com/pilgrimage-and-revolution-how-cesar-chavez-married-faith-and-ideology-in-landmark-farmworkers-march-200043#:">led a 25-day “peregrinación</a>” – a pilgrimage – in California from Delano to Sacramento, under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a star of David, and a cross, which ended on Easter Sunday. This pilgrimage was a key turning point in the success of the movement. </p>
<p>In the 1980s, faith leaders in the U.S. and Central America joined together in the <a href="https://perspectivasonline.com/downloads/sacred-resistance-the-sanctuary-movement-from-reagan-to-trump/">Sanctuary Movement</a> to effectively challenge the Reagan administration’s asylum policies toward those fleeing the civil wars in central America. The movement ultimately led to changes in asylum law; those fleeing the wars were <a href="https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/central-americans-and-asylum-policy-reagan-era">eventually allowed to apply for asylum</a>. It also was partially responsible for the termination of U.S. military funding for wars in El Salvador and Guatemala. </p>
<p>Some of the largest and most influential immigrant rights organizations that exist today, like the Southern California-based <a href="https://www.carecen-la.org/">Central American Resource Center</a>, <a href="https://www.chirla.org/">Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights</a>, and <a href="https://ndlon.org/">National Day Laborers Organizing Network</a>, were founded by Latinx people of faith during this era.</p>
<p>Our book documents this history and also analyzes the key role of faith-based organizations in challenging the Trump administration’s crackdown in immigration enforcement, which led to <a href="https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/us-immigration-system-changes-trump-presidency">record-high levels of immigrant detention and family separations</a>. </p>
<p>We conducted case studies of six faith-based immigrant advocacy organizations in Southern California from 2018 to 2020, two of which are multi-faith, two evangelical, one Catholic and one mainline Protestant. We found that faith groups possess unique advantages, which when working in coordination with secular organizations, add significant power to the movement for immigrant rights. </p>
<h2>Religious language about justice</h2>
<p>Christian scriptures, symbols and rituals can vividly express ideals of the “Kingdom of God” or “Beloved Community” in which all people are equally valued and have the right to thrive and be safe from violence. </p>
<p>We saw how this religiously inspired vision can provide motivation, clarity, hope and endurance in the long and often discouraging task of mobilizing for social change. Religious or spiritual practices provide strength in particular to marginalized communities, which an emerging group of scholars is calling “spiritual capital.” <a href="https://www.csulb.edu/college-of-education/equity-education-and-social-justice/page/lindsay-perez-huber">Lindsay Perez-Huber</a>, a professor of education and counseling, in her study of undocumented Chicana students, <a href="https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.4.r7j1xn011965w186">defines spiritual capital</a> as “a set of resources and skills rooted in a spiritual connection to a reality greater than oneself.” In other words, religious beliefs and spirituality can be a source of resilience when people need to persevere and resist in the face of injustice. </p>
<p>In pleas to officials, and during speeches at trainings, rallies and protests, we consistently heard references to sacred scriptures. We heard the biblical command in the book of Leviticus that “the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born.” Advocates passionately recounted the experience of Jesus’ family as refugees fleeing state violence to Egypt, and references to Jesus’ statement in the book of Matthew that “I was an immigrant and you welcomed me.” </p>
<p>We also saw religious rituals combined with nonviolent direct action in fasts and hunger strikes, prayer vigils and worship songs at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities and offices, calling on the power of God to set the captives free. For these participants, they were not only engaging in an act of political protest, but personally connecting with God’s spirit for justice in the world. </p>
<h2>Faith as a bridge across social groups</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577372/original/file-20240222-16-ttlo1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C8%2C2955%2C1985&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="People, dressed mostly in shorts and T-shirts, stand in a line while a woman hands out packets to them." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577372/original/file-20240222-16-ttlo1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C8%2C2955%2C1985&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577372/original/file-20240222-16-ttlo1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577372/original/file-20240222-16-ttlo1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577372/original/file-20240222-16-ttlo1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577372/original/file-20240222-16-ttlo1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577372/original/file-20240222-16-ttlo1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577372/original/file-20240222-16-ttlo1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A church member hands out food to migrants on May 10, 2023, in Brownsville, Texas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/kimberly-ramierz-from-the-casa-de-oracion-church-hands-out-news-photo/1489006995?adppopup=true">Joe Raedle/Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Our book also shows that faith-based groups bring immigrants into contact with non-immigrants, church attenders in contact with activists, and activists in contact with politicians who have faith commitments. These connections are crucial for building a broad movement for change. </p>
<p>Among the things we documented were church volunteers becoming personally connected to asylum seekers, detainees and their families as they helped provide access to housing, basic needs, jobs, transportation and legal support. </p>
<p>We witnessed faith leaders connecting undocumented young people with public officials who influence the policies that affect their lives, telling their personal stories to those decision-makers. </p>
<p>Faith leaders also had ongoing “ministerial” and “discipleship” relationships with fellow Christian believers who are ICE officials, members of congress, and city council members. These relationships influenced these officials at different times in key policy decisions. </p>
<p>In summary, our research shows that despite media attention to anti-immigration Christian groups, faith leaders and faith-based organizations have also played a central role in past and current movements for immigrant rights. Faith-rooted organizing has unique strengths that add significant power to movements for social change.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219298/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brad Christerson received funding from The Louisville Institute to conduct this research. He is on the board of Matthew 25/Mateo 25, and has volunteered for CLUE and We Care, organizations that were part of this study.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rev. Dr. Alexia Salvatierra has received funding from the Louisville Institute to conduct this research. She is on the Board of Matthew 25/Mateo 25. She worked for CLUE from 2000-2011. Matthew 25/Mateo 25 and CLUE are organizations analyzed in the book.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Chao Romero received funding from the Louisville Institute for this research. </span></em></p>Religious beliefs can provide motivation, hope and endurance in the long and often discouraging task of mobilizing people for social change.Brad Christerson, Professor of Sociology, Biola UniversityAlexia Salvatierra, Academic Dean, Centro Latino & Associate Professor of Mission and Global Transformation, Fuller Theological SeminaryRobert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, University of California, Los AngelesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2201292024-01-10T19:11:47Z2024-01-10T19:11:47ZMartin Luther King Jr.’s moral stance against the Vietnam War offers lessons on how to fight for peace in the Middle East<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568105/original/file-20240106-29-vtf394.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=269%2C287%2C1769%2C1708&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., center, leads an anti-Vietnam War demonstration on March 16, 1967, in New York City. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/civil-rights-leader-rev-martin-luther-king-jr-is-news-photo/150253595?adppopup=true">AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since the onset of Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza and the West Bank after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/martin-luther-king-jr-mlk-israel-palestine-1967-video/">debates have arisen</a> among historians and media pundits about Martin Luther King Jr.’s stance on Israel and its conflicts with Palestinians.</p>
<p>Some claim King was a <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/martin-luther-king-and-israel">fierce Zionist</a> and point to his speech on Mar. 25, 1968, before the annual convention of the <a href="https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/story/conversation-dr-martin-luther-king-jr">Rabbinical Assembly</a>.</p>
<p>“Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all of our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity,” King said. “I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land almost can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy.” </p>
<p>Others, like American-Israeli scholar Martin Kramer, have pointed to <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/martin-luther-king-jr-mlk-israel-palestine-1967-video/">King’s views on Palestinian rights to their homeland</a>. During a 1967 interview with ABC News, shortly after Israel launched the <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/arab-israeli-war-1967">Six-Day War</a> against Egypt, Syria and Jordan and seized control of land in Gaza and the West Bank, King said that Israel should return Palestinian lands. </p>
<p>“I think for the ultimate peace and security of the situation it will probably be necessary for Israel to give up this conquered territory, because to hold on to it will only exacerbate the tensions and deepen the bitterness of the Arabs,” <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/martin-luther-king-jr-mlk-israel-palestine-1967-video/">he said</a>. </p>
<p>As a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=J44UCvEAAAAJ&hl=en">scholar who researches social movements</a>, racial politics and democracy, I believe there is a larger story beyond King’s stance on Israel and Palestinians. That story is on King’s views of war – and his courage to stand for peace.</p>
<p>This is the story of the anti-war King who understood that <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/loving-your-enemies-sermon-delivered-detroit-council-churches-noon-lenten">violence begets violence</a> and that the political courage to speak for peace is essential to democracy. </p>
<h2>Breaking his silence</h2>
<p>For King, joining the peace movement was tantamount to walking a political tightrope. On one hand, the Civil Rights Movement had <a href="https://prde.upress.virginia.edu/conversations/4002519">a great supporter</a> in U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2004/summer/civil-rights-act#:%7E:text=On%20the%20same%20day%20President,Voting%20Rights%20Act%20of%201965.">Civil Rights Act of 1964</a> and the <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/voting-rights-act-1965">Voting Rights Act of 1965</a>. </p>
<p>But LBJ was also at the heart of the <a href="https://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11202009/profile.html">escalation of the war</a> in Vietnam, and many believed <a href="https://time.com/5505453/martin-luther-king-beyond-vietnam/">King’s anti-war statements</a> could and would be used against him.</p>
<p>The U.S. government’s hypocrisy in supporting the Vietnam War was not lost on King.</p>
<p>In 1965, <a href="https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/vietnam/vietnam_pubopinion.cfm">61% of Americans supported</a> U.S. military involvement. </p>
<p>At the same time, King was asking hard questions about Johnson’s wartime decision-making and unmet promises of social uplift through his <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/opinion/vietnam-war-great-society.html">Great Society</a> programs. King wondered how a nation could drop tons of bombs and napalm on civilians in <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/vietnam-war#:%7E:text=In%20his%20last%20Sunday%20sermon,Remaining%20Awake%2C%E2%80%9D%20219">the name of peace and freedom</a> while violently subjugating its own Black citizens. </p>
<p>How could a nation spend so much money on a war, King asked, when it could not feed or protect its own people? </p>
<p>“The promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam,” <a href="https://www.aavw.org/special_features/speeches_speech_king02.html">King said</a> in a speech in Beverly Hills on Feb. 25, 1967. “Billions are liberally expended for this ill-considered war. … The security we profess to seek in foreign adventures we will lose in our decaying cities. The bombs in Vietnam explode at home. They destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.”</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.nps.gov/gwmp/learn/historyculture/lbjandmlk.htm">Johnson administration</a> argued that military force was essential to protect South Vietnam from the encroachment of communism from the north. As Johnson saw it, North Vietnam and its National Liberation Front were a threat to democracy in Southeast Asia.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A white man is shaking the hands of a Black man as a crowd of other men stand behind them." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568329/original/file-20240108-19-jsmytv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568329/original/file-20240108-19-jsmytv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568329/original/file-20240108-19-jsmytv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568329/original/file-20240108-19-jsmytv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568329/original/file-20240108-19-jsmytv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568329/original/file-20240108-19-jsmytv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568329/original/file-20240108-19-jsmytv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, left, shakes hands with Martin Luther King Jr. after signing the Civil Rights Act on July 3, 1964, at the White House.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-lyndon-johnson-shakes-hands-with-the-us-clergyman-news-photo/150253569?adppopup=true">AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>King’s <a href="https://www.thirteen.org/blog-post/martin-luther-kings-most-controversial-speech-beyond-vietnam/">advisers pleaded</a> with him not to speak out and argued that the political costs would be too high. Most importantly, they reminded King that there was more than enough work to do in the U.S. to end poverty and secure equal rights for Black citizens. </p>
<p>But King ultimately broke with his advisers and President Johnson. </p>
<p>By 1967, King followed the lead of his wife – and anti-war activist – <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/coretta-scott-king/552557/">Coretta Scott King</a> and began speaking out. </p>
<p>In March 1967, King led his first anti-war march in Chicago. <a href="https://www.jofreeman.com/photos/KingAtChicago.html">At the rally</a>, he called on peace activists to organize “as effectively as the war hawks.” </p>
<p>A month later, on April 4, 1967, King gave the speech at the Riverside Church in New York City that changed the course of the last year of his life – <a href="https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm">“Beyond Vietnam − A Time to Break the Silence</a>.” In that <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/beyond-vietnam">revolutionary speech</a>, King described how he was morally compelled to speak out against the war.</p>
<p>In the days and weeks after, he would lose masses of supporters, Black and white alike. He lost hard-earned political allies, <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/johnson-lyndon-baines">including President Johnson</a>.</p>
<p>King was also shunned and denounced by <a href="https://www.npr.org/2010/03/30/125355148/the-story-of-kings-beyond-vietnam-speech">168 newspapers</a> that questioned King’s failure to condemn the enemy, fueling long-standing rumors about communist ties.</p>
<h2>Saving the soul of America</h2>
<p>King had no regrets.</p>
<p>He understood the difficulty of speaking out against the war. “Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war,” he said. </p>
<p>For King, a preacher at heart, silence had become betrayal.</p>
<p>Calling the U.S “the greatest purveyor of violence today,” King said the soul of America “can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.” He warned that America had lost moral authority abroad and derided “the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long.”</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A Black man wearing a dark suit stands behind a lecturn atop a sign that says clergy and laymen concerned about Vietnam." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568104/original/file-20240106-27-wlq19b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568104/original/file-20240106-27-wlq19b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568104/original/file-20240106-27-wlq19b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568104/original/file-20240106-27-wlq19b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568104/original/file-20240106-27-wlq19b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1265&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568104/original/file-20240106-27-wlq19b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1265&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568104/original/file-20240106-27-wlq19b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1265&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Martin Luther King Jr. speaks at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration on Feb. 6, 1968, in Washington, D.C.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/view-of-american-civil-rights-leader-dr-martin-luther-king-news-photo/156039788?adppopup=true">Joseph Klipple/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>King pointed to the role of the U.S. in prohibiting the realization of “a revolutionary government seeking self-determination” in Vietnam.</p>
<p>Most poignantly in that 1967 speech at Riverside Church, King detailed the devastating costs of the Vietnam War and described the millions of children and women who were killed by American bombs and bullets and the poor masses who were spared slaughter only to face a slow, painful death by disease and starvation. </p>
<p>Then King turned to the so-called “enemy,” the North Vietnamese. “Even if we do not condone their actions,” King said in the speech, “surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.” </p>
<p>Then King called for a cease-fire. </p>
<h2>The fight for justice and humanity</h2>
<p>King’s words resonate today. </p>
<p>Unlike in King’s time, <a href="https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2023/12/5/voters-want-the-us-to-call-for-a-permanent-ceasefire-in-gaza-and-to-prioritize-diplomacy">61% of potential voters support</a> a permanent cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Anti-war <a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/12/09/palestinian-protests-us-israel-gaza-war">protests abound across the nation</a> and <a href="https://acleddata.com/2023/11/07/infographic-global-demonstrations-in-response-to-the-israel-palestine-conflict/">around the world</a>. </p>
<p>How can the U.S., as King would ask the nation, move forward from here? </p>
<p>In the 1960s, King grappled with this very question. On the one hand, he felt a deep solidarity with the Jewish struggle against persecution, and on the other hand, he rejected the violent occupation of Palestinian lands that would run counter to the noble cause. </p>
<p>He saw resolution through a commitment to breaking cycles of violence and practicing radical peace, “a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation.”</p>
<p>Nearly 60 years later, the fight for King’s “radical revolution of values,” where human life and dignity were the most valued, still rages. But as the life of King reminds us, speaking out for justice can be costly. Yet he would also say that the cost of remaining silent is far greater.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220129/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hajar Yazdiha does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. knew the political consequences of speaking out against the Vietnam War − and he did it anyway.Hajar Yazdiha, Assistant Professor of Sociology, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and SciencesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2138112023-09-29T12:24:33Z2023-09-29T12:24:33ZLessons for today from the overlooked stories of Black teachers during the segregated civil rights era<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549789/original/file-20230922-24-riaeuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=525%2C194%2C2981%2C2371&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A Black schoolroom in Mississippi in 1939.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/class-in-a-schoolroom-on-the-mileston-plantation-in-delta-news-photo/615301754?adppopup=true">Corbis via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>My grandmother’s name was Mrs. Zola Jackson. </p>
<p>As one of the handful of Black teachers in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era of racially segregated public schools, she faced a daunting challenge in providing a first-class education to students considered second-class citizens. </p>
<p>Educated at Rust College, a historically Black school, in the 1940s, she taught in the small city of Hattiesburg for over 30 years from 1943-1975, the majority of which was spent in elementary classrooms at DePriest, the school for Black children.</p>
<p>Before the 1954 landmark <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/brown-v-board-of-education">Brown v. Board decision</a> that deemed segregated schools “separate and unequal,” the efforts of Black teachers went unheralded, underappreciated and virtually unknown. </p>
<p>I, too, was disconnected from their stories until I became a public school teacher teacher myself and began <a href="https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/126660">my research</a> on the oral histories of Black female teachers in Mississippi during the civil rights era.</p>
<p>My research revealed at least one important lesson: What Black teachers face today is not that different from what we faced in the past. </p>
<h2>In spite of it all</h2>
<p>One of the initial questions that I wanted to answer was, how did educators in the past meet the academic and emotional needs of their students with little to no resources and the constant threat of racial violence?</p>
<p>What I found was that for Black people, education was in and of itself an act of active resistance against racial disenfranchisement.</p>
<p>As education scholar <a href="https://education.illinois.edu/faculty/christopher-span">Christopher Span</a> explained in his 2012 seminal book “<a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469622217/from-cotton-field-to-schoolhouse/">From Cottonfield to Schoolhouse</a>”: </p>
<p>“To be educated was to be respected; to be educated was to be a citizen. Accordingly, countless black Mississippians willingly sought out schooling, viewing it as the foundation for self-improvement and one means for attaining social and economic parity in slavery’s aftermath.” </p>
<p>At the center of that rich and complex history were Black teachers who believed that a good education was synonymous with freedom and the desire to move beyond the confines of second-class citizenship. </p>
<p>As a result, Black teachers used classrooms to not only impart the lessons of history, but also to encourage students to be actively involved in the fight for racial equity. </p>
<p>In “<a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807845813/their-highest-potential/">Their Highest Potential</a>,” education scholar <a href="https://naeducation.org/our-members/vanessa-siddle-walker/">Vanessa Siddle Walker</a> wrote in 1996 that Black teachers were “consistently remembered by their former students and colleagues "for their high expectations for student success, for their dedication, and for their demanding teaching style.” </p>
<h2>Education was paramount</h2>
<p>Black teachers used many approaches to ensure student success. Here are a few that serve as lessons for today: </p>
<p>Arguably the most important, the first is developing relationships and mentorships. </p>
<p>Because teachers were part of the community during the civil rights era, it was common for them to be an extension of their students’ families. If needed, teachers made home visits, were in regular communication with families about students’ well-being and held students to high academic and behavioral expectations. Further solidifying those relationships was the fact that many of the teachers had taught several generations of families. </p>
<p>These relationships enabled teachers to use what is now known as <a href="https://online.sou.edu/degrees/education/msed/early-childhood-education/whole-child-approach-learning/">the whole child approach</a> that focuses on a student’s academic potential as well as their social and emotional needs. </p>
<p>It was understood by Black teachers that educating the whole child helped to establish foundations needed for academic and emotional growth in young students. Because of their teachers, Black students valued education and modeled their own behavior to achieve their own potential.</p>
<p>A second lesson from the past that is useful today was the emphasis on civic engagement. Back then, classrooms were places to imagine radical change. Inaction in the face of injustice was not a viable option, and there was an expectation that young people work to become leaders.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A group of Black teenagers carry American flags as they protest against the murder of a civil rights leader." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/550946/original/file-20230928-25-f7cw8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/550946/original/file-20230928-25-f7cw8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/550946/original/file-20230928-25-f7cw8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/550946/original/file-20230928-25-f7cw8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/550946/original/file-20230928-25-f7cw8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1041&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/550946/original/file-20230928-25-f7cw8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1041&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/550946/original/file-20230928-25-f7cw8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1041&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Black teenagers in Mississippi carry American flags on Jun. 13, 1963, to protest the murder of a civil rights leader.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/african-american-teenagers-carrying-american-flags-protest-news-photo/1211547094?adppopup=true">Archive Photos/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Going to jail, protesting, risking one’s life and making sacrifices to help the Civil Rights Movement were all realities young people faced and were willing to endure if it meant securing equal rights. </p>
<p>A third lesson is the importance of building coalitions across racial lines. </p>
<p>Groups such as the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/black-power/sncc">Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee</a>, the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/naacp/the-civil-rights-era.html">NAACP</a> and the <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/congress-racial-equality-core">Congress of Racial Equity</a> worked with <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/for-educators/religion-and-the-civil-rights-movement-background/">religious organizations</a> and <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-freedom-riders-then-and-now-45351758/">white students from colleges</a> during the 1960s <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/sit-ins">lunch counter sit-ins</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Freedom-Rides">the freedom rides</a>, as well as <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/march-washington-jobs-and-freedom">the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom</a>. </p>
<p>But not all coalitions were effective. During a 1967 meeting of the National Council of Negro Women, civil rights activist <a href="https://iucat.iu.edu/iub/9589559">Fannie Lou Hamer</a> criticized the educated middle-class Black alliances in Mississippi with Black ministers and white power brokers. But even still, <a href="https://academic.oup.com/mississippi-scholarship-online/book/29348/chapter-abstract/244098725?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false">she explained</a>, “the only thing we can do is to work together.”</p>
<p>Of the many lessons from the past, one handed down from my grandmother still rings true today. </p>
<p>She knew then that education was intended to be the great equalizer in America and the key to upward mobility – and she worked her entire career making sure that became a reality in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. </p>
<p>At the school where my grandmother taught, for instance, she used <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9505395/">creativity</a> to solve a critical problem: DePriest did not have a library. </p>
<p>Instead, my grandmother started her own by bringing in books from her personal collection and letting students borrow them one at a time.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213811/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marlee Bunch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>During the civil rights era, Black teachers were valued members of the community and often taught generations of family members.Marlee Bunch, Staff K-12 Initiatives, Office of the Chancellor, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2038832023-05-16T12:39:47Z2023-05-16T12:39:47ZUS has a long history of state lawmakers silencing elected Black officials and taking power from their constituents<p>Some Republican lawmakers in Georgia are targeting Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Black Democrat representing a majority Black district, for removal from office. </p>
<p>These efforts come in the midst of Willis’ investigation and prosecution of former President Donald Trump and 18 others for their alleged conspiracy to overturn results of the state’s 2020 presidential election. </p>
<p>Before a Fulton County grand jury indicted Trump and his co-defendants, Georgia Republican lawmakers pushed through legislation to set up a Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission, which has the power to discipline or remove from office elected district attorneys whom commission members believe are not adequately enforcing Georgia law. Governor Brian Kemp, also a Republican, <a href="https://gov.georgia.gov/press-releases/2023-05-05/gov-kemp-signs-legislation-creating-prosecuting-attorneys-qualifications">signed the legislation</a> on May 5, 2023. </p>
<p>Steve Gooch, Georgia Senate majority leader, and state Senator Clint Dixon, have said they will use the newly created commission – which will be up and running Oct. 1, 2023 – <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/01/georgia-republicans-fani-willis-unseat">to investigate Willis</a>. </p>
<p>Kemp, who objects, said on Aug. 31, 2023, that he “<a href="https://www.ajc.com/politics/kemp-rejects-talk-of-special-session-warns-of-risks-of-punishing-fani-willis/I4JZYJIORNACFKY2COSFE3VCSI/">hasn’t seen any evidence</a>” Willis violated her oath of office. </p>
<p>These efforts to undercut prosecutors’ authority in Georgia are not happening in a silo. </p>
<p>On Aug. 9, 2023, Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/09/desantis-suspends-state-attorney-worrell-0011044">suspended elected State Attorney Monique Worrell</a>, whom he said was too lenient with criminals. Worrell was Florida’s only Black woman state attorney. DeSantis <a href="https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2023/08/09/ron-desantis-andrew-bain-monique-worrell/">replaced her with Black conservative Andrew Bain</a>. </p>
<p>In Mississippi, legislators have enacted a law that would <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/08/jackson-mississippi-republicans-unelected-court-system">create a new judicial system</a> covering the state’s capital city, Jackson, in place of the current county court system. </p>
<p>In effect since July 1, 2023, the move by a Republican-dominated legislature has been criticized by opponents as creating a “<a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/04/24/separate-and-unequal-policing-naacp-sues-mississippi-over-new-laws/11728899002/">separate and unequal</a>” court system that is not answerable to the majority-Black community it would seek to govern.</p>
<p>The law was justified by supporters as an effort to curb the <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/naacp-sues-mississippi-over-state-takeover-of-jacksons-policing-and-courts/ar-AA1ahuKA">city’s crime level</a>, which includes <a href="https://www.wlbt.com/2023/01/07/analysis-second-straight-year-jacksons-homicide-rate-ranks-highest-us-among-major-cities/">one of the highest murder rates in the nation</a>. </p>
<p>But the move was the third time in recent months that state legislatures have taken highly visible actions to effectively disenfranchise Black voters: On April 6, 2023, the Tennessee House of Representatives <a href="https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2023/04/07/tennessee-house-expulsion-vote-why-were-lawmakers-expelled/70092066007/">expelled two Black members</a> who represented mostly Black districts. </p>
<p>As a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=566DVVQAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">sociologist who studies historical issues related to race, gender and social justice</a>, I have closely followed these moves by the states. Throughout U.S. history, I see three main periods of legislative disenfranchisement in which legislative bodies have voted to expel members. These events have been shown to be a form of “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5816/blackscholar.44.2.0103">white backlash</a>” working to keep <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.2.551">Black officeholders out of power and their constituents powerless without representation</a>.</p>
<h2>Reconstruction and legislative disenfranchisement</h2>
<p>After the Civil War, the United States engaged in a brief period known as <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/reconstruction">Reconstruction</a>, which lasted from 1865 to 1877. It was a deliberate attempt to reverse the negative effects and legacies of slavery by enacting economic, political and social policies that directly benefited the formerly enslaved Black people of the South. </p>
<p>The efforts included formally <a href="https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/">abolishing slavery nationwide</a>, guaranteeing <a href="https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/">equal protection of the laws</a> to everyone regardless of race, and <a href="https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-15/">allowing formerly enslaved people to vote</a>. In addition, formerly Confederate <a href="https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/shermans-field-order-no-15/">land was set aside</a> for newly freed Black families, and former Confederate soldiers were not allowed to vote.</p>
<p>But after Tennessee politician Andrew Johnson, who had been Abraham Lincoln’s running mate in 1864, took office upon Lincoln’s assassination, many of those provisions of Reconstruction <a href="https://www.nps.gov/anjo/andrew-johnson-and-reconstruction.htm">were reversed</a>. Former Confederate combatants were allowed to vote, and confiscated Confederate property was returned to its prewar owners.</p>
<p>In addition, Johnson and Congress made it easier for defeated Confederate states to <a href="https://www.nps.gov/anjo/andrew-johnson-and-reconstruction.htm">rejoin the Union</a>, which allowed former Confederate leaders to regain their previous positions of power in local and national governments. </p>
<p>Georgia was originally readmitted to the Union in <a href="https://www.marshallnewsmessenger.com/opinion/columns/georgias-readmission-to-the-union/article_afb9fc3e-886c-5b5d-ac2f-0e975f68b32e.html">July 1868</a>. But just two months later, in September, the Democratically controlled Georgia Assembly, with a total of 196 members, voted to expel all 33 of its Black elected officials.</p>
<p>Immediately upon making themselves into an all-white legislature, the remaining assembly members enacted the infamous <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black-codes">Black Codes</a>. These codes created a unique set of laws specific to the newly freed Blacks, including limiting the types of work they could do.</p>
<p>Collectively, the legislative expulsion of the Black officials and the imposition of the Black Codes served to <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/rule-by-violence-rule-by-law-lynching-jim-crow-and-the-continuing-evolution-of-voter-suppression-in-the-us/CBC6AD86B557A093D7E832F8D821978B">effectively disenfranchise</a> the Black voters of Georgia. Senator Henry McNeal Turner, one of those expelled, defiantly <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/georgia-unique-bloody-history-voter-disenfranchisement">asked</a>: “Am I a man? If I am such, I claim the rights of a man.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526293/original/file-20230515-24710-e5v3f4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A drawing of a Black man standing on a porch with people surrounding him." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526293/original/file-20230515-24710-e5v3f4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526293/original/file-20230515-24710-e5v3f4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526293/original/file-20230515-24710-e5v3f4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526293/original/file-20230515-24710-e5v3f4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526293/original/file-20230515-24710-e5v3f4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=626&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526293/original/file-20230515-24710-e5v3f4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=626&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526293/original/file-20230515-24710-e5v3f4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=626&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Under the Black Codes, which were restrictive laws in the post-Reconstruction South, a Black person could be sold into what was effectively a new version of slavery if they could not repay fines or debts.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/copy-of-an-illustration-showing-a-free-black-man-being-sold-news-photo/134341296">Interim Archives/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The civil rights era</h2>
<p>Another major effort to disenfranchise Black Americans came during their next major push to achieve political, social and economic equality: the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-movement">Civil Rights Movement</a> of the 1950s and 1960s. Opponents targeted two prominent civil rights activists who had been elected to represent their communities: Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Julian Bond.</p>
<p>Bond was elected as a Democrat to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965, but on Jan. 10, 1966, the Democratically controlled House voted not to seat him, citing his criticism of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/08997225.1974.10555931">U.S. involvement in Vietnam and support of students who were protesting the war</a>. A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Bond’s <a href="https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/182/bond-v-floyd">First Amendment rights</a> had been violated and ordered that he be seated. But for that intervening year, his constituents had no voice in their state legislature. Bond ultimately served in the Georgia Legislature for <a href="https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/julian-bond-1940-2015/">another two decades</a>, before turning to teaching and activism.</p>
<p>Powell’s situation was different. He was the first African American to be elected to Congress from New York and from any state in the Northeast. Starting in 1945, he represented the district that included the majority-Black Harlem neighborhood of New York City. He became <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2783891?seq=12">one of the most important Democrats</a> in the House, but in the mid-1960s, he found himself <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Adam-Clayton-Powell-Jr">embroiled in personal and financial scandals</a>. </p>
<p>After the election of 1966, the House created a committee to investigate Powell’s actions and <a href="https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/P/POWELL,-Adam-Clayton,-Jr--(P000477)/">refused to seat him</a> until the committee’s report was complete. The report found fault, but committee members were split on the proper discipline for Powell. Ultimately the whole House voted to keep him out.</p>
<p>Powell <a href="https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/P/POWELL,-Adam-Clayton,-Jr--(P000477)/">sued to reclaim his seat</a>, saying the House had excluded him unconstitutionally. He also won the special election in April 1967 created by the vacancy but didn’t take his seat because of the lawsuit. The removal of Powell meant that Harlem was <a href="https://archive.org/details/kingofcatsli00hayg">the only congressional district in the nation</a> without a representative from 1967 to 1969.</p>
<p>In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the <a href="https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/395/486.html">House had acted unconstitutionally</a> by refusing to seat Powell. By then, Powell had also won the 1968 regularly scheduled election and had been seated, though without the seniority and committee positions that would normally have been given to someone who had continuously been a House member. </p>
<h2>Black Lives Matter movement</h2>
<p>In the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, a <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/blacklivesmatter-hashtag-first-appears-facebook-sparking-a-movement">new social movement</a> emerged across the United States. With this new activism came another “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055421000460">white backlash</a>” in the form of legislative disenfranchisement.</p>
<p>In May 2022, Tiara Young Hudson, a long-serving Black public defender, <a href="https://www.cbs42.com/alabama-news/last-month-jefferson-county-voters-elected-a-new-judge-now-she-may-never-take-the-bench/">won the Democratic primary</a> for a judgeship in Jefferson County, Alabama. <a href="https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/jeffersoncountyalabama">More than half of the county’s population</a> is nonwhite. Facing no opposition in the general election, she was expected to win and take office. </p>
<p>But two weeks after the primary, a state judicial commission, divided along racial lines, <a href="https://www.al.com/news/2022/06/alabama-commission-moves-vacant-jefferson-county-judgeship-to-understaffed-madison-county-courts.html">eliminated the position she was a candidate for</a> and created a new judgeship in the majority-white Madison County. </p>
<p>Hudson immediately <a href="https://www.al.com/news/2022/07/candidate-who-won-jefferson-county-judicial-seat-sues-to-block-transfer-of-seat-to-madison-county.html">sued to block the shift</a>, saying it violated the Alabama Constitution and only the state Legislature had the authority to reallocate judgeships. In March 2023, the state Supreme Court <a href="https://www.al.com/news/2023/03/alabama-supreme-court-allows-jefferson-county-judgeship-transfer-to-madison-county.html">dismissed Hudson’s complaint</a>, effectively stripping the Black people of Jefferson County of a representative they had elected to be their voice on the state’s roster of judges.</p>
<p>And on April 6, 2023, the Republican majority of the Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel two Black legislators – Justin Pearson and Justin Jones – for participating in a protest calling for gun legislation following yet another mass shooting. </p>
<p>Within days, both Pearson and Jones had been temporarily reinstated by processes for filling vacant seats, and subsequently <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/tennessee-democrats-expelled-gop-protests-special-election-rcna97374">reclaimed their seats in special elections</a>. Their alleged violation was participating in a protest against legislature rules – but their real violation, I believe, was that they are Black. I believe that is the reason Willis is being targeted too.</p>
<p><em>This is an updated version of an article originally published on May 16, 2023.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203883/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rodney Coates does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Throughout US history, a ‘white backlash’ has worked to keep Black officeholders and their constituents out of power. Atlanta DA Fani Willis is just the latest.Rodney Coates, Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Miami UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2046632023-04-28T12:46:25Z2023-04-28T12:46:25ZEmmett Till’s accuser, Carolyn Bryant Donham, has died – here’s how the 1955 murder case helped define civil rights history<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523323/original/file-20230427-2476-sdo2si.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Carolyn Bryant Donham, left, reads newspaper accounts of the Emmett Till murder trial in 1955. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1387675173/photo/emmett-till-murder-trial.jpg?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=6AHNEtCZd-n8SzB4KlwtTrW6VqogGwjiZZGJQP187mk=">Bettmann Archive/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman <a href="https://apnews.com/article/emmett-till-carolyn-bryant-donham-1bcfff1c5a29484270d66b224422f112">who accused Black teenager</a> Emmett Till of making inappropriate advances toward her in 1955, has died at the age of 88 in Louisiana, according to a coroner’s report.</p>
<p>Nearly 68 years after Till was kidnapped, brutally tortured, murdered and then dumped into the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi, the case continues to resonate with audiences around the world because it represents an egregious example of justice denied. </p>
<p>As a historian of the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=fLC2Ei-VvuoC&lpg=PR7&ots=97G2d6B94B&dq=davis%20houck%20till&lr&pg=PR7#v=onepage&q=davis%20houck%20till&f=false">Mississippi civil rights movements</a>, I quickly learned that most Mississippi civil rights history leads back to the widespread outrage over the Till case in the summer of 1955.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523324/original/file-20230427-961-uvz7nc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A young Black boy leans against his arm and reclines on a bed in a black and white photo." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523324/original/file-20230427-961-uvz7nc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523324/original/file-20230427-961-uvz7nc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523324/original/file-20230427-961-uvz7nc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523324/original/file-20230427-961-uvz7nc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523324/original/file-20230427-961-uvz7nc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523324/original/file-20230427-961-uvz7nc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523324/original/file-20230427-961-uvz7nc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Emmett Till is shown lying on his bed in 1954, one year before his murder.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/514974304/photo/emmett-till.jpg?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=H_59CkJeGX1ESuR52wL2c8X9aDnSxek6F17MCsU0L_E=">Bettmann/Contributor</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Emmett in Money, Mississippi</h2>
<p>Fourteen-year-old Emmett arrived in Mississippi on Aug. 20, 1955, from Chicago to visit his mother’s family, who sharecropped cotton in the tiny Delta community of Money. </p>
<p>On the evening of Aug. 24, Emmett and several cousins and neighbors drove the 2.8 miles into Money to buy candy at the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market. </p>
<p>Emmett entered the store alone. He bought 2 cents’ worth of bubble gum and left. At the door Emmett let out a loud, two-note wolf whistle directed at white 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant. His cousins were terrified: Emmett had just hit the trip wire of Southern racial fears by flirting with a white woman.</p>
<p>Early on Aug. 28, several men – white and Black – took Emmett from his family’s house. Emmett’s badly decomposed and battered body was discovered three days later in the Tallahatchie River. Emmett’s uncle could identify Emmett only by a ring he was wearing that once belonged to Emmett’s father, Louis Till.</p>
<p>Two white men, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, were quickly arrested and later charged with murder. During a five-day trial in September, the two men were found not guilty after a 67-minute deliberation by an all-white, all-male jury. </p>
<p>Several years later, members of the jury confessed to a Florida State University graduate student, <a href="https://fsu.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fsu%3A277427">Hugh Stephen Whitaker</a>, that they knew the men were guilty but simply wouldn’t convict a white man of crimes against a Black child.</p>
<p>In 1956, Milam and Bryant <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/till-killers-confession/">sold their</a> “shocking true story” of what happened to Till for US$3,150 to Look magazine. For nearly 50 years, celebrity journalist William Bradford Huie’s “confession” story in Look functioned as the final word on the case. </p>
<h2>Continued interest and coverage</h2>
<p>Southern newspapers wanted immediately to forget the Till story, ashamed of the backlash caused by Milam and Bryant’s “confession.” Many Northern and Western newspapers editorialized on the case long after its conclusion. America’s Black press never quit writing about the case; it was their work, after all, helping to track down Black eyewitnesses in September 1955 that helped us understand the truth of what actually happened to Emmett Till on Aug. 28, 1955.</p>
<p>Thanks to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvijYSJtkQk&t=10s">investigative work</a> by documentary filmmaker Keith Beauchamp and others, the public has since learned that Milam and Bryant were part of a much larger lynching party, none of whom were ever punished.</p>
<p>Today, all of the people directly involved in Till’s murder are dead. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523359/original/file-20230428-30-kdf4gf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman stands with two young boys on the steps of a dilapidated looking wooden building." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523359/original/file-20230428-30-kdf4gf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523359/original/file-20230428-30-kdf4gf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523359/original/file-20230428-30-kdf4gf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523359/original/file-20230428-30-kdf4gf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523359/original/file-20230428-30-kdf4gf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523359/original/file-20230428-30-kdf4gf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523359/original/file-20230428-30-kdf4gf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Carolyn Byant Donham stands with her sons outside the store where she first encountered Emmett Till.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/515021604/photo/mrs-roy-bryant-leaving-building-with-sons.jpg?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=jxt9tRKAN3XqOxRFUF8GovCOblOFyeY6Xw0_Z3PoVhE=">Bettmann/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A case that aged with Carolyn Bryant Donham</h2>
<p>The last <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/us/carolyn-bryant-donham-dead.html">20 years of Bryant Donham’s life</a> were characterized by the attempt of private citizens and law enforcement to bring her to justice for the part she played in Till’s kidnapping and murder.</p>
<p>When Bryant Donham was in her 80s and living with family in Raleigh, North Carolina, FBI investigators and federal prosecutors revisited her case and the potential for prosecuting her for Till’s kidnapping and death. One question was whether Bryant Donham recanted her previous testimony about Till’s advances and said that it was false.</p>
<p>A historian said in 2017 that Bryant Donham told him in a rare interview that the most egregious parts of the story she and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/us/carolyn-bryant-donham-dead.html">others told about Emmett Till were false</a>.</p>
<p>The Justice Department said in 2021, though, that it <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/emmett-till-carolyn-bryant-investigation/2021/12/06/8f5e8490-56d1-11ec-9a18-a506cf3aa31d_story.html">was unable to confirm</a> whether Bryant Donham actually went back on her previous testimony, and it closed the case. </p>
<p>Then, in 2022, a team of researchers – including two of Till’s relatives – <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/29/emmett-till-warrant-carolyn-bryant-donham-family-arrest">discovered an unserved arrest warrant</a> for Bryant Donham in a courthouse basement. This led some legal experts to say that the 1955 document could support probable cause to prosecute Bryant Donham for her involvement in Till’s death. </p>
<p>Mississippi’s attorney general said in 2022 that the office <a href="https://apnews.com/article/arrests-mississippi-emmett-till-19176fe64ec8054188601d000ba569f2">did not plan to prosecute</a> Bryant Donham – though that didn’t stop activists from protesting outside her home that same year.</p>
<p>Recently unearthed documents also showed that <a href="https://www.mississippicir.org/perspective/carolyn-bryant-lied-about-emmett-till-did-author-tim-tyson-lie-too">Till did not put his hands</a> on her nor talk lewdly to her in the store. That was all fabricated as part of the defense’s strategy to argue that the lynching amounted to justifiable homicide. When the presiding judge, Curtis Swango, did not allow the jury to hear <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/us/carolyn-bryant-donham-dead.html">Bryant Donham’s testimony</a>, the defense pivoted to <a href="https://famous-trials.com/emmetttill/1763-nottills">the absurd claim that the body taken</a> from the Tallahatchie River wasn’t Till’s. </p>
<p>Over the past several decades, the Till case has continued to resonate, especially for a nation that still experiences the all-too-frequent and seemingly unprovoked deaths of young Black men. The Till family has had to live with an open wound for 68 years. As Devery Anderson, author of “Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement,” has noted, that <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/emmett-tills-accuser-carolyn-bryant-donham-dies-along-with-any-last-chance-of-justice">wound won’t suddenly go away</a> with Bryant Donham’s passing.</p>
<p><em>This is an updated version of an <a href="https://theconversation.com/emmett-tills-life-matters-99923">article originally published on July 13, 2018</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204663/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Davis W. Houck does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>While Bryant Donham was never charged for her involvement in Till’s death, the Justice Department continued to investigate the case and consider the potential for an arrest as recently as 2021.Davis W. Houck, Professor, Florida State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2045092023-04-27T12:31:02Z2023-04-27T12:31:02ZSaving broadcasting’s past for the future – archivists are working to capture not just tapes of TV and radio but the experience of tuning in together<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522861/original/file-20230425-18-ro9r4q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C6%2C4479%2C2984&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">How will we preserve technologies so deeply embedded in daily life? </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/retro-old-tv-receiver-and-outdated-broadcast-radio-royalty-free-image/1141288438?phrase=radio%20and%20television%20old%20fashioned&adppopup=true">BrAt_PiKaChU/Istock via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>We’ve lived with broadcasting <a href="https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/history-of-commercial-radio">for more than a century</a>. Starting with <a href="https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-history-of-the-radio-industry-in-the-united-states-to-1940/">radio in the 1920s</a>, then <a href="https://dp.la/exhibitions/radio-golden-age/radio-tv">television in the 1950s</a>, Americans by the millions began purchasing boxes designed to receive electromagnetic signals transmitted from nearby towers. Upon arrival, those signals were amplified and their messages were “aired” into our lives.</p>
<p>Those invisible signals provided our kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms with access to jazz clubs, baseball stadiums and symphony halls. For a century, they have been transporting us instantly to London, Cairo or Tokyo, or back in time to the old West or deep into the imagined future of interplanetary travel. </p>
<p>The reception of those radio, then television, signals didn’t just inform us, they shaped us. Everyone experienced broadcasting individually and collectively, both intimately and as members of dispersed crowds. </p>
<p>Radio and television fostered an ephemeral and invisible public arena that expanded our understanding of the world – and ourselves. Whether it was the final episodes of <a href="https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/GangBusters.pdf">radio serials like “Gangbusters”</a>, or <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/M-A-S-H">television’s “M*A*S*H</a>” or “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Seinfeld">Seinfeld</a>,” Americans often marked the passage of time by shared broadcast experiences. </p>
<p>Even today, more <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/13/for-world-radio-day-key-facts-about-radio-listeners-and-the-radio-industry-in-the-u-s/">Americans use standard AM/FM radio broadcasting</a> <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/tiktok-now-150-million-active-users-us-ceo-tell-congress-rcna75607">than TikTok</a>. At a time when most Americans get their <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/local-tv-news/">news from local TV stations and broadcast television</a> networks, and radio remains pervasive, it might seem frivolous to express concern about preserving technologies so deeply embedded in daily life. </p>
<p>Yet a media evolution is occurring, as paid subscription video streaming and audio services climb in popularity, and fewer Americans are <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-television-use-per-person-in-the-us-since-2002/">consistently tuning in to broadcast media</a>. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite reports on the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Demise of shared moments</h2>
<p>The broadcasting era is becoming eclipsed by new media technologies. In the era of TV and radio dominance, “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/mass-media">mass media</a>” was defined by shared experiences. </p>
<p>But now, new media technologies – cable TV, the web and social media – are changing that definition, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01616.x">segmenting what was once</a> a huge, undifferentiated mass audience. All those new media fragmented what were once huge collectives. Bottom line: We’re not all watching or hearing the same thing anymore.</p>
<p>With fewer Americans simultaneously sharing media experiences, the ramifications of this evolution stretch beyond the media industries and into our culture, politics and society. </p>
<p>The shared moments that electrified and unified the nation – from <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-fireside-chat-provided-a-model-for-calming-the-nation-that-president-trump-failed-to-follow-133473">President Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats</a> to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-jfk-media/how-the-jfk-assassination-transformed-media-coverage-idUSBRE9AK11N20131121">TV news coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination</a> and up through the <a href="https://archive.org/details/911/day/20010911">Sept. 11, 2001, attacks</a> – have become more rare. Even national events, such as a presidential election, are different today in that our collective experiences now seem more individualized and less communal. People get their news about presidential elections from sources with radically different perspectives on what used to be shared facts.</p>
<p>The very idea of collectively tuning in to history as it happens has been altered, as the profusion of channels and platforms now funnels audience members into self-segregated affinity groups where messages are shaped more for confirmation than enlightenment.</p>
<h2>How to remember</h2>
<p>As we move into this new media world, broadcasting risks being relegated to the rustic past like other old media such as the rotary telephone, the nickelodeon, the 78-rpm phonograph and the DVD. </p>
<p>That’s why, from April 27-30, 2023, the Library of Congress is hosting a conference, titled “<a href="https://radiopreservation.org/2023-conference/">A Century of Broadcasting</a>,” that invites scholars, preservationists, archivists, museum educators and curators, fans and the public to discuss the most effective ways to preserve broadcasting’s history.</p>
<p>The goal of the conference, convened by the Library of Congress’ <a href="https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-recording-preservation-plan/about-this-program/radio-preservation-task-force/">Radio Preservation Task Force</a>, is to begin envisioning the future of this technology’s past. As a <a href="https://cmj.umaine.edu/faculty-staff/michael-j-socolow/">radio historian</a> and member of the Radio Preservation Task Force, I was invited to serve on the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-plan/documents/23-LOC-conference-program.pdf">conference organizing team</a>. <a href="https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-plan/documents/23-LOC-conference-program.pdf">Panels, papers and presentations</a> will look at how broadcasting is currently being archived, and how we, as a society, can think more systematically and formally about how we’ll remember broadcasting. While the task force is primarily concerned with broadcasting’s inception as radio, aspects of television’s past will be included as well. </p>
<p>Preserving radio – and TV – is not as simple as storing machines or tapes. To understand broadcasting history, preservationists must try to describe an experience. It isn’t enough to show somebody the printed script from a 1934 Jack Benny radio program, or <a href="https://www.si.edu/object/archie-bunkers-chair-all-family%3Anmah_670097">the theatrical stage set</a> used when “All in the Family” was taped before a live studio audience in 1973. To comprehend what Jack Benny, Gracie Allen or Jackie Gleason meant to the people of the United States involves trying to imagine, and almost feel, an experience.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A recording of the Jack Benny radio show of Jan. 1, 1955, titled “Jack Doesn’t Have a Script.”</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘Essential’ first step</h2>
<p>The Radio Preservation Task Force seeks to go beyond the big corporate commercial collections that already exist. <a href="https://www.loc.gov/rr/record/recnbc.html">NBC’s radio and TV archives</a>, as well as the <a href="https://invention.si.edu/rca-corporation-records-1887-1983-bulk-1914-1968">Radio Corporation of America’s</a> and others, are already well-preserved and housed at repositories like the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution. </p>
<p>The Radio Preservation Task Force is concerned with the diverse universe of broadcasting, including the many types of stations and networks that defined American broadcasting. </p>
<p>“Millions of Americans listened to college, community and educational radio stations that were less famous than CBS and NBC but still played an important role in daily life,” notes University of Colorado <a href="https://www.colorado.edu/cmci/people/media-studies/josh-shepperd">scholar Josh Shepperd</a>, chair of the Radio Preservation Task Force. “<a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/idx/j/jcms/18261332.0062.701/--presencing-through-preserving-sound-history-at-historical?rgn=main;view=fulltext">Preservation projects associated</a> with the Radio Preservation Task Force have revealed to us that <a href="https://www.wyso.org/hbcuradioproject">African American radio stations</a> played an important role in helping catalyze the Civil Rights Movement by fostering and inspiring community.” </p>
<p>Shepperd added that “those are just two examples of often-overlooked but essential components of our nation’s broadcast history.” </p>
<p>At the “<a href="https://radiopreservation.org/full-conference-schedule/">Century of Broadcasting” Conference</a>, scholars will examine such varied topics as how gender roles were performed on the air and how Spanish-language radio maintained listener identity with the community while broadening outreach. The conference also includes discussion of international and global radio communities, with scholars presenting on broadcasting history from France, Germany and Latin America. </p>
<p>“There’s even a panel on preserving the history of unlicensed and illegal ‘pirate’ radio,” says Shepperd. </p>
<p>Our media remains so atmospheric – it’s everywhere, all the time – that we too rarely pause to concentrate on how it evolves and how those transformations ultimately influence us. </p>
<p>Radio and TV might not technically be “endangered” right now; after all, we all still use telephones even if they look completely different and serve functions largely unimaginable 40 years ago. </p>
<p>Yet moving beyond the broadcast era holds important ramifications for all of us, even if we cannot precisely discern them in this moment. Recognizing the need to preserve radio and TV’s past marks an essential first step, so that the future will be properly informed about how we lived and communicated for over a century of American history.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204509/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael J. Socolow is a member of the Library of Congress Radio Preservation Task Force, and was on the conference organizing team for the "Century of Broadcasting" conference. </span></em></p>Scholars, preservationists, archivists, museum educators and curators, fans and the public are meeting in late April in the nation’s capital to figure out how to preserve broadcasting’s history.Michael J. Socolow, Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism, University of MaineLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2029072023-04-21T12:42:02Z2023-04-21T12:42:02ZBlack students in Washington state played key role in the Civil Rights Movement, new book states<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522174/original/file-20230420-29-ne9bdl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=40%2C102%2C6692%2C4444&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A protest led by the Black Student Union at the University of Washington at Seattle, 1968. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://depts.washington.edu/labpics/zenPhoto/uw_bsu/pitre/photo12.jpg">Emile Pitre Collection</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>When it comes to civil rights history, the focus is often on the marches, boycotts, sit-ins and other protests that took place in the South. In “<a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479810406/washington-state-rising/">Washington State Rising</a>,” Marc Arsell Robinson, assistant professor of African American history at California State University, San Bernardino, takes a look at the civil rights protests that occurred in a lesser-examined region of the United States: the Pacific Northwest. The following Q&A is about what Robinson found for his forthcoming book, which is set to be published in August 2023.</em></p>
<h2>Why write a book on Black student activism in the Pacific Northwest?</h2>
<p>As an African American born and raised in Seattle, I was curious to learn if and how my hometown was connected to the protests of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. I was pleased to learn the city, and region, was deeply connected to these larger movements. I felt a responsibility to share what I had learned. </p>
<p>Also, studies of Black protests from the 1960s tend to focus on the South. And even studies of civil rights events and groups outside the South position the Pacific Northwest as marginal. This pattern holds true of research on 1960s Black student activism, such as the studies of nationwide protest by <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/black-campus-movement-black-students-and-the-racial-reconstitution-of-higher-education-1965-1972/oclc/744287241">Ibram X. Kendi</a> and <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520282186/the-black-revolution-on-campus">Matha Biondi</a>. </p>
<p>My book shines light on Black Power’s reach beyond major cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. It shows Black Power’s impact on higher education, and it details how some Black student activists used community organizing and interracial alliances to create change.</p>
<h2>What was one of your most interesting discoveries?</h2>
<p>The Black Student Union, or BSU, at the University of Washington helped connect the Black Panther Party to Seattle. The group formed in fall 1967, and later several of its members helped co-found the Seattle Panthers in April 1968. This includes Aaron Dixon, who <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/421-my-people-are-rising">confirms in his memoir</a> that he was in the Black Student Union at UW before being appointed by Bobby Seale as Captain, or leader, of the Seattle Panthers.</p>
<p>Moreover, as detailed in “Washington State Rising,” Dixon and other Seattle activists were introduced to the Panthers through BSU activities, including a trip to Oakland and San Francisco in April 1968 for a Black political conference, and the BSU’s network of local campus chapters and allied groups.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A book cover featuring a black and white photo of two Black men and one Black woman sitting at a table." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521726/original/file-20230418-20-tb6yny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521726/original/file-20230418-20-tb6yny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521726/original/file-20230418-20-tb6yny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521726/original/file-20230418-20-tb6yny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521726/original/file-20230418-20-tb6yny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521726/original/file-20230418-20-tb6yny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521726/original/file-20230418-20-tb6yny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Washington State Rising’ tells the little-known story of the civil rights struggle in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://nyupress.org/9781479810406/washington-state-rising/">Marc Arsell Robinson/NYU Press</a></span>
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<h2>What is the legacy of the Black Student Union in Washington state?</h2>
<p>Examples of the Black Student Union’s legacy are the Black studies courses and programs that were established in the 1960s. Prior to this, very few, if any, classes or assigned materials included the perspectives and experiences of Black people. Today, students and faculty continue to study Black history, even if names of programs or departments have changed to <a href="https://theconversation.com/california-vetoed-ethnic-studies-requirements-for-public-high-school-students-but-the-movement-grows-148486">ethnic studies and so forth</a>.</p>
<p>Similarly, ongoing efforts to recruit and retain diverse students, faculty and staff are part of the Black Student Union’s legacy. The most prominent example is the <a href="https://www.washington.edu/omad/">Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity</a>, known as OMAD, at UW. This initiative was a direct outcome of the Black Student Union’s <a href="https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/BSU_beginnings.htm">1968 sit-in</a> of the UW president’s office and negotiations with campus officials. The BSU was protesting UW’s small population of nonwhite students and faculty, along with related concerns. Today, the OMAD continues to offer African American and other minority students academic advising, cultural support, tutoring, leadership development and more.</p>
<h2>What does Black student activism in Washington state look like today?</h2>
<p>Black Student Unions are active at numerous colleges and universities in Washington, including the two schools featured in my book, the University of Washington and <a href="https://dailyevergreen.com/tag/black-student-union/">Washington State University</a>.</p>
<p>Like their 1960s counterparts, progressive Black students today continue to push their institutions to create, maintain and expand initiatives to graduate Black students, hire Black faculty and fund Black studies and related curricula.</p>
<p>In recent years, Black students across the Pacific Northwest have <a href="https://www.dailyuw.com/news/keep-the-pressure-on-uw-blm-continues-to-protest-for-unmet-demands/article_d1e7828e-ba7f-11ea-a0e5-9735552dd63b.html">organized in support of Black Lives Matter</a> and against the killings of unarmed Black people, often using social media as a tool for communication and public education. Overall, today’s Black student politics and struggles for greater equity continue the legacy of the Black Student Unions of the 1960s.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202907/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marc Arsell Robinson received the 2022 Mellon Emerging Faculty Award. He was also previously a student and employee of the University of Washington and Washington State University.</span></em></p>Washington isn’t a state that typically comes to mind in discussions about student-led protests from the Civil Rights Movement. A Black history professor seeks to change that with a new book.Marc Arsell Robinson, Assistant Professor of History, California State University, San BernardinoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1972622023-03-08T13:39:30Z2023-03-08T13:39:30ZThe women who stood with Martin Luther King Jr. and sustained a movement for social change<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/512749/original/file-20230228-784-bty4l6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C1%2C1020%2C662&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Women listen during the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/view-of-participants-in-the-march-on-washington-some-with-news-photo/1350105902?phrase=%22march%20on%20washington%22&adppopup=true">Bettmann Archive/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Historian <a href="https://morehouse.edu/vicki-crawford/">Vicki Crawford</a> was one of the first scholars to focus on women’s roles in the civil rights movement. Her 1993 book, “<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/women-in-the-civil-rights-movement-trailblazers-and-torchbearers-1941-1965/oclc/21035376">Trailblazers and Torchbearers</a>,” dives into the stories of female leaders whose legacies have often been overshadowed.</em></p>
<p><em>Today she is the director of the Morehouse College <a href="https://morehouse.edu/life/campus/martin-luther-king-jr-collection/">Martin Luther King Jr. Collection</a>, where she oversees the archive of his sermons, speeches, writings and other materials. Here, she explains the contributions of women who influenced King and helped to fuel some of the most significant campaigns of the civil rights era, but whose contributions are not nearly as well known.</em> </p>
<h2>An activist in her own right</h2>
<p>Coretta Scott King is often remembered as a devoted wife and mother, yet she was also a committed activist in her own right. She was deeply involved with social justice causes before she met and married Martin Luther King Jr., and long after his death.</p>
<p>Scott King served with civil rights groups throughout her time as a student at Antioch College and the New England Conservatory of Music. Shortly after she and King married in 1953, the couple returned to the South, where they lent their support to local and regional organizations such as the NAACP and the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/rosa-parks-in-her-own-words/about-this-exhibition/the-bus-boycott/the-montgomery-improvement-association/">Montgomery Improvement Association</a>. </p>
<p>They also supported the Women’s Political Council, an organization founded by female African American professors at Alabama State University that facilitated voter education and registration, and also protested discrimination on city buses. These local leadership efforts paved the way for widespread support of <a href="https://theconversation.com/who-was-rosa-parks-and-what-did-she-do-in-the-fight-for-racial-equality-51539">Rosa Parks’ resistance</a> to segregation on public busing. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/512750/original/file-20230228-18-oo5tk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man in a light-colored suit and a woman in short-sleeved dress look at a piece of paper together in a study." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/512750/original/file-20230228-18-oo5tk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/512750/original/file-20230228-18-oo5tk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512750/original/file-20230228-18-oo5tk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512750/original/file-20230228-18-oo5tk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512750/original/file-20230228-18-oo5tk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512750/original/file-20230228-18-oo5tk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512750/original/file-20230228-18-oo5tk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King work in his office in Atlanta in July 1962.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/american-baptist-minister-and-activist-martin-luther-king-news-photo/1470078983?phrase=coretta%20scott%20king&adppopup=true">TPLP/Archive Photos via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Following her husband’s assassination in 1968, Scott King devoted her life to institutionalizing his philosophy and practice of nonviolence. She established <a href="https://timeline.thekingcenter.org/dear-coretta/">the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change</a>, led a march of sanitation workers in Memphis and joined efforts to organize <a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/start-campaign#:%7E:text=On%20May%2012%2C%201968%2C%20two,Organization%20was%20the%20principal%20organizer.">the Poor People’s Campaign</a>. A longtime advocate of workers rights, she also supported a 1969 <a href="https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/charleston_hospital_workers_mo/coretta_scott_king_visits_char">hospital workers’ strike</a> in South Carolina, delivering stirring speeches against the treatment of African American staff.</p>
<p>Scott King’s commitment to nonviolence went beyond civil rights at home. During the 1960s, she became involved in peace and anti-war efforts such as <a href="https://digitalcollections.briscoecenter.org/item/451490">the Women’s Strike for Peace</a> and opposed the escalating war in Vietnam. By the 1980s, she had <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-06-27-mn-10768-story.html">joined protests</a> against South African apartheid, and before her death in 2006, she spoke out <a href="https://www.lambdalegal.org/news/il_19980305_prominent-chicagoans-join-coretta-king-for-lambda-celebration">in favor of LGBT rights</a> – capping a lifetime of activism against injustice and inequalities.</p>
<h2>Women and the March</h2>
<p>While Scott King’s support and ideas were particularly influential, many other women played essential roles in the success of the civil rights movement.</p>
<p>Take the most iconic moment of the civil rights struggle, in many Americans’ minds: the Aug. 28, 1963, <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/march-washington-jobs-and-freedom">March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom</a>, at which King delivered his landmark “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UV1fs8lAbg">I Have a Dream</a>” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.</p>
<p>60 years after the march, it is critical to recognize <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/freedom-black-women-speak-march-washington-jobs-and-freedom">the activism of women</a> from all walks of life who helped to strategize and organize one of the country’s most massive <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/largest-marches-us-history-2017-1#the-march-on-washington-for-jobs-and-freedom-was-to-protest-the-systemic-disenfranchisement-of-black-americans-and-happened-on-august-28-1963-1">political demonstrations</a> of the 20th century. Yet historical accounts overwhelmingly highlight the march’s male leadership. With the exception of <a href="https://facingtoday.facinghistory.org/celebrating-daisy-bates-black-female-orator-at-the-march-on-washington">Daisy Bates</a>, an activist who read a short tribute, no women were invited to deliver formal speeches.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513015/original/file-20230301-16-wu85ab.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white photo shows several formally dressed women putting money in a church collection plate." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513015/original/file-20230301-16-wu85ab.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513015/original/file-20230301-16-wu85ab.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513015/original/file-20230301-16-wu85ab.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513015/original/file-20230301-16-wu85ab.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513015/original/file-20230301-16-wu85ab.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513015/original/file-20230301-16-wu85ab.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513015/original/file-20230301-16-wu85ab.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Members of Carmel Presbyterian Church donating money for the March on Washington.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/members-of-congregation-of-carmel-presbyterian-church-news-photo/50701804?phrase=%22carmel%20presbyterian%20church%22&adppopup=true">Carl Iwasaki/The Chronicle Collection via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Women were among the key organizers of the march, however, and helped recruit thousands of participants. <a href="https://www.nps.gov/people/dorothy-i-height.htm">Dorothy Height</a>, president of the National Council of Negro Women, was often the lone woman at the table of leaders representing national organizations. <a href="https://www.hamline.edu/about/offices-services/hedgeman-center/namesake">Anna Arnold Hedgeman</a>, who also served on the planning committee, was another strong advocate for labor issues, anti-poverty efforts and women’s rights.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513017/original/file-20230301-1837-8euyef.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman in an evening dress with a corsage stands next to a man in a suit, both smiling and chatting." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513017/original/file-20230301-1837-8euyef.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513017/original/file-20230301-1837-8euyef.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513017/original/file-20230301-1837-8euyef.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513017/original/file-20230301-1837-8euyef.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513017/original/file-20230301-1837-8euyef.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513017/original/file-20230301-1837-8euyef.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513017/original/file-20230301-1837-8euyef.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Dorothy Height stands with Martin Luther King Jr. in November 1957.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/photograph-of-dorothy-i-height-civil-rights-activist-and-news-photo/469356243?phrase=dorothy%20height&adppopup=true">Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Photographs of the march show women attended in large numbers, yet few historical accounts adequately credit women for their leadership and support. Civil rights activist, lawyer and Episcopalian priest <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-episcopal-saint-whose-journey-for-social-justice-took-many-forms-from-sit-ins-to-priesthood-179449">Pauli Murray</a>, among others, called for a gathering of women <a href="https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1347">to address this</a> and other instances of discrimination a few days later.</p>
<h2>Hidden in plain view</h2>
<p>African American women <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/women-in-the-civil-rights-movement-trailblazers-and-torchbearers-1941-1965/oclc/21035376">led and served</a> in all the major campaigns, working as field secretaries, attorneys, plaintiffs, organizers and educators, to name just a few roles. So why did early historical accounts of the movement neglect their stories?</p>
<p>There were women propelling national civil rights organizations and among King’s closest advisers. <a href="https://www.nps.gov/people/septimapoinsetteclark.htm">Septima Clark</a>, for example, was a seasoned educator whose strong organizing skills played a consequential role in voter registration, literacy training and citizenship education. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/obituaries/dorothy-cotton-rights-champion-and-close-aide-to-king-dies-at-88.html">Dorothy Cotton</a> was a member of the inner circle of <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/southern-christian-leadership-conference-sclc">the Southern Christian Leadership Conference</a>, of which King was president, and was involved in literacy training and teaching nonviolent resistance.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513254/original/file-20230302-17-bpnft1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man crouching on the pavement cradles an injured woman." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513254/original/file-20230302-17-bpnft1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513254/original/file-20230302-17-bpnft1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513254/original/file-20230302-17-bpnft1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513254/original/file-20230302-17-bpnft1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513254/original/file-20230302-17-bpnft1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1086&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513254/original/file-20230302-17-bpnft1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1086&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513254/original/file-20230302-17-bpnft1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1086&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A civil rights marcher exposed to tear gas holds an unconscious Amelia Boynton Robinson after mounted police officers attacked marchers in Selma.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/civil-rights-marcher-suffering-from-exposure-to-tear-gas-news-photo/514682280?phrase=%22amelia%20robinson%22&adppopup=true">Bettmann/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Yet women’s organizing during the 1950s and 1960s is most evident at local and regional levels, particularly in some of the most perilous communities across the deep South. Since the 1930s, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/25/fight-to-vote-newsletter-voting-rights-act#:%7E:text=But%20until%20recently%2C%20one%20of,in%20the%20now%20historic%20city.">Amelia Boynton Robinson</a> of Dallas County, Alabama, and her family had been fighting for voting rights, laying the groundwork for the struggle to end voter suppression that continues to the present. She was also key in planning the 50-mile <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/selma-montgomery-march">Selma-to-Montgomery march</a> in 1965. Images of the violence that marchers endured – particularly on the day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday – <a href="https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/Civil-Rights/VRA-Documentary/#:%7E:text=On%20March%207%2C%201965%2C%20peaceful,landmark%201965%20Voting%20Rights%20Act.">shocked the nation</a> and eventually contributed to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513256/original/file-20230302-29-k9yz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A sitting woman with gray hair in a gold-colored dress and jewelry." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513256/original/file-20230302-29-k9yz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513256/original/file-20230302-29-k9yz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513256/original/file-20230302-29-k9yz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513256/original/file-20230302-29-k9yz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513256/original/file-20230302-29-k9yz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513256/original/file-20230302-29-k9yz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513256/original/file-20230302-29-k9yz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Civil rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson attends an awards ceremony in New York in 2011.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/amelia-boynton-attends-the-2011-national-academy-of-news-photo/109454610?phrase=%22amelia%20robinson%22&adppopup=true">Marc Bryan-Brown/WireImage via Getty News</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Or take Mississippi, where there would not have been a sustained movement without women’s activism. Some names have become well known, like <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-hamer/">Fannie Lou Hamer</a>, but others deserve to be. </p>
<p>Two rural activists, Victoria Gray and Annie Devine, joined Hamer as representatives to the <a href="https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/alliances-relationships/mfdp/">Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party</a>, a parallel political party that challenged the state’s all-white representatives at the 1964 Democratic Convention. A year later, the three women represented the party <a href="https://snccdigital.org/events/mfdp-congressional-challenge/">in a challenge</a> to block the state’s congressmen from taking their seats, given ongoing disenfranchisement of Black voters. Though the congressional challenge failed, the activism was a symbolic victory, serving note to the nation that Black Mississippians were no longer willing to accept centuries-old oppression.</p>
<p>Many African American women were out-front organizers for civil rights. But it is no less important to remember those who assumed less visible, but indispensable, roles behind the scenes, sustaining the movement over time.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197262/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vicki Crawford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From family to grassroots activists, these are some of the women who shaped MLK’s vision and campaigns.Vicki Crawford, Professor of Africana Studies, Morehouse CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1974752023-02-03T13:30:25Z2023-02-03T13:30:25ZCivil rights legislation sparked powerful backlash that’s still shaping American politics<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506449/original/file-20230125-16-70s0sb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3868%2C2598&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A group of voters lining up outside the polling station, a small Sugar Shack store, on May 3, 1966, in Peachtree, Ala., after the Voting Rights Act was passed the previous year. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/group-of-voters-lining-up-outside-the-polling-station-a-news-photo/3088626?phrase=Voting%20Rights%20Act&adppopup=true">MPI/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For nearly 60 years, conservatives have been trying to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/voting-rights-act-democracy/617792/">gut the Voting Rights Act</a> of 1965, the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. <a href="https://jepson.richmond.edu/faculty/bios/jhayter/">As a scholar of</a> American voting rights, I believe their long game is finally bearing fruit.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96">The 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision</a> in <a href="https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/1027">Shelby County v. Holder</a> seemed to be the death knell for the Voting Rights Act.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/08/15/the-court-right-to-vote-dissent/">In that case</a>, the court struck down a portion of the Voting Rights Act that supervised elections in areas with a history of disenfranchisement.</p>
<p>The Supreme Court is currently considering a case, <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/merrill-v-milligan-2/">Merrill v. Milligan</a>, that might gut what remains of the act after Shelby.</p>
<p>Conservative legal strategists want the court to say that Alabama – <a href="https://www.naacpldf.org/merrill-v-milligan-supreme-court/">where African Americans</a> make up approximately one-quarter of the population, still live in concentrated and segregated communities and yet have only one majority-Black voting district out of seven state districts – should not consider race when drawing district boundaries. </p>
<p>These challenges to minority voting rights didn’t emerge overnight. The Shelby and Merrill cases are the culmination of a decadeslong conservative legal strategy designed <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/10/john-roberts-supreme-court-voting-rights-act/671239/">to roll back</a> the political gains of the civil rights movement itself.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506451/original/file-20230125-22-zpgh30.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A receipt for a $1.50 poll tax paid in 1957 by Rosa Parks." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506451/original/file-20230125-22-zpgh30.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506451/original/file-20230125-22-zpgh30.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=246&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506451/original/file-20230125-22-zpgh30.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=246&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506451/original/file-20230125-22-zpgh30.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=246&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506451/original/file-20230125-22-zpgh30.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=309&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506451/original/file-20230125-22-zpgh30.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=309&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506451/original/file-20230125-22-zpgh30.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=309&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A number of Southern states had a poll tax that was aimed at preventing by Black people, many of whom couldn’t afford to pay it. This is a receipt for a $1.50 poll tax paid in 1957 by Rosa Parks.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss85943.002605/?sp=2&r=0.026,-0.021,1.01,0.419,0">Library of Congress, Rosa Parks Papers</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Victory – and more bigotry</h2>
<p>The realization of civil and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/07/02/the-civil-rights-act-was-a-victory-against-racism-but-racists-also-won/">voting rights laws</a> during the 1960s is often portrayed as a victory over racism. The rights revolution actually gave rise to more bigotry.</p>
<p>The Voting Rights Act criminalized the use of discriminatory tests and devices, including literacy tests and <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586/the-racial-history-of-the-grandfather-clause">grandfather clauses</a> that exempted white people from the same tests that stopped Black people from voting. It also required federal supervision of certain local Southern elections and barred these jurisdictions from making electoral changes without <a href="https://www.justice.gov/crt/about-section-5-voting-rights-act">explicit approval from Washington</a>.</p>
<p>These provisions worked. </p>
<p>After 1965, <a href="https://www.crmvet.org/docs/ccr_voting_south_6805.pdf">Black voters instigated a complexion revolution</a> in Southern politics, as African Americans voted in record numbers and elected an unprecedented number of Black officials. </p>
<p>In fact, the VRA worked so well that it gave rise to another seismic political shift: White voters left the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/emerging-republican-majority/595504/">Democratic Party</a> in record numbers.</p>
<p>As Washington protected Black voting rights, this <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/158320/western-origins-southern-strategy">emerging Republican majority</a> capitalized on fears of an interracial democracy. Conservatives resolved to turn the South Republican by associating minority rights with white oppression. </p>
<p>In 1981, conservative political consultant and GOP strategist Lee Atwater recognized that Republicans might exploit these fears. <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/">He argued</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.“</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>‘Retard civil rights enforcement’</h2>
<p>It wasn’t just Southerners who aimed to undo the revolution enabled by the Voting Rights Act. </p>
<p>President Richard Nixon helped begin this process by promising Southerners that he wouldn’t enforce civil rights. In fact, in a secret meeting with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/27/us/strom-thurmond-foe-of-integration-dies-at-100.html">segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond</a>, Nixon promised to ”<a href="https://www.amacad.org/publication/past-future-american-civil-rights">retard civil rights enforcement</a>.“ </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506474/original/file-20230125-11748-j7xsu2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Three men in suits at a large gathering smoking cigars, clapping and looking happy." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506474/original/file-20230125-11748-j7xsu2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506474/original/file-20230125-11748-j7xsu2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506474/original/file-20230125-11748-j7xsu2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506474/original/file-20230125-11748-j7xsu2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506474/original/file-20230125-11748-j7xsu2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506474/original/file-20230125-11748-j7xsu2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506474/original/file-20230125-11748-j7xsu2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Conservative political consultant and GOP strategist Lee Atwater, center, at the GOP National Convention in Dallas, Aug. 23, 1984, recognized that Republicans might capitalize on white people’s fears of rising Black political power.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/RNCCigars/b716a9e732ca4ea39fd610b1faa0171f/photo?Query=Lee%20Atwater&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=51&currentItemNo=11">AP Photo/Ed Kolenovsky</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan also used white people’s <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/">growing fear of African American political clout</a> to his advantage. </p>
<p>Reagan’s administration, according to voting rights expert <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26493">Jesse Rhodes</a>, used executive and congressional control to reorganize the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and the Supreme Court.</p>
<p>The objective?</p>
<p>To undermine how Washington enforced the Voting Rights Act – without appearing explicitly racist.</p>
<p>One of the Reagan administration’s strategies was to associate minority voting rights with so-called reverse discrimination. They argued that laws privileging minorities discriminated against white voters. </p>
<h2>Undoing progress</h2>
<p>Here’s the background to that strategy:</p>
<p>The years following 1965 were characterized by the <a href="https://jointcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/VRA-report-3.5.15-1130-amupdated.pdf">dilution of Black Southerners’ voting power</a>. Realizing that they couldn’t keep African Americans from voting, Southerners and segregationists resolved to weaken votes once they’d been cast. They gerrymandered districts and used other means that would dilute minority voting power. </p>
<p>African Americans took the fight to the courts. In fact, nearly 50 cases involving vote dilution <a href="https://www2.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/documents/cr12v943a.pdf">flooded the court system after 1965</a>.</p>
<p>Over the course of the 1970s, the Supreme Court met the challenge of <a href="https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt14-S1-8-6-6/ALDE_00013453/">vote dilution</a> by mandating the <a href="https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2905&context=law_lawreview">implementation of majority-minority districts</a>. </p>
<p>Conservatives during the early 1980s had become increasingly alarmed by the Supreme Court’s and Department of Justice’s preference for drawing racial district boundaries to give minorities more influence in elections in such ”<a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Majority-minority_districts">majority-minority districts</a>.“ <a href="https://www.democratic-erosion.com/2021/10/24/unpacking-redistricting-are-majority-minority-districts-really-what-theyre-cracked-up-to-be/">These districts</a> aimed to guarantee that minorities could elect candidates of their choice free from machinations such as vote dilution. </p>
<p>With little regard for vote dilution itself, conservative politicians and their strategists argued that majority-minority districts discriminated against whites because they privileged, like affirmative action policies, equality of outcomes in elections <a href="https://edeq.stanford.edu/sections/section-1-equality-opportunity-and-alternatives/equality-outcome">rather than equal opportunity to participate</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506475/original/file-20230125-3412-tih2e4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A gray-haired man in a suit walking in front of a lot of marble steps." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506475/original/file-20230125-3412-tih2e4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506475/original/file-20230125-3412-tih2e4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506475/original/file-20230125-3412-tih2e4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506475/original/file-20230125-3412-tih2e4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506475/original/file-20230125-3412-tih2e4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506475/original/file-20230125-3412-tih2e4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506475/original/file-20230125-3412-tih2e4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Edward Blum, a longtime conservative legal activist, has brought and won many cases at the Supreme Court rolling back civil rights gains.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/edward-blum-a-long-time-opponent-of-affirmative-action-in-news-photo/1437982045?phrase=Edward%20Blum&adppopup=true">Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Tidal wave</h2>
<p>This strategy paid off. </p>
<p>During the 1980s, Republicans used congressional control, a Republican White House and judicial appointments to turn the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/magazine/voting-rights-act-dream-undone.html">federal court system and the Department of Justice even further right</a>. </p>
<p>By the 1990s, conservatives replaced federal officials who might <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2006/01/09/proving-his-mettle-in-the-reagan-justice-dept/416680ce-9ee7-485f-86f8-df6570cab56f/">protect the Voting Rights Act</a>. In time, these developments, and growing conservatism within the courts, prompted conservative litigation that continues to shape civil rights laws.</p>
<p>A tidal wave of anti-civil rights litigation, led by <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/10/supreme-court-edward-blum-unc-harvard-myth.html">a well-funded man</a>, Edward Blum, flooded the court system. Blum sought to undermine the Voting Rights Act’s supervision of local elections and undo racial quotas in higher education and employment. </p>
<p>Blum, <a href="https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Captured%20Courts%20Equal%20Justice%20report.pdf">a legal strategist</a> affiliated with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, helped engineer these now-famous test cases – <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-casemaker-cases/cases-edward-blum-has-taken-to-the-supreme-court-idUKBRE8B30Z120121204">Bush v. Vera (1996), Fisher v. University of Texas (2013) and Shelby v. Holder (2015)</a>. He also orchestrated <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/edward-blum-supreme-court-harvard-unc/">two pending cases</a> at the court that could reshape the consideration of race in college admissions, <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2022/20-1199">Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College</a> and <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2022/21-707">Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. University of North Carolina</a>. </p>
<p>These cases, at their core, attacked the rights revolution of the 1960s – or rights that privilege minorities. The argument? </p>
<p>These protections are obsolete because Jim Crow segregation, especially its overt violence and sanctioned segregation, is dead.</p>
<h2>New claim, old game</h2>
<p>Nearly 30 years of Republican or divided control of Congress and, to a lesser degree, the executive office gave rise to increasingly conservative <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/156855/republican-party-took-supreme-court">Supreme Court nominations</a> that have not just turned the court red; they all but ensured favorable outcomes for conservative litigation.</p>
<p>These include the Shelby and Merrill cases and, more recently, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/edward-blum-supreme-court-harvard-unc/">litigation</a> that seeks to remove racial considerations from college admissions.</p>
<p>In the Shelby case, the court held that the unprecedented number of African Americans in <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/fifty-years-after-march-selma-everything-and-nothing-has-changed/">Alabama</a> – and national – politics meant not merely that racism was gone, it meant that the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/how-shelby-county-broke-america/564707/">Voting Rights Act is no longer relevant</a>. </p>
<p>These cases, however, have all but ignored <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/165283/suppress-black-vote-jim-crow">the uptick</a> in conservatives’ claims of <a href="https://www.retroreport.org/video/poll-watchers-and-the-long-history-of-voter-intimidation/">voter fraud and political machinations</a> at polling stations in predominantly minority voting districts. </p>
<p>In fact, the rise of voter fraud allegations and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/11/19/true-danger-trump-his-media-allies-denying-election-results/">contested election results</a> is a new iteration of old, and ostensibly less violent, racism.</p>
<p>The Voting Rights Act was not only effective; Washington was also, initially, committed to its implementation. The political will to maintain minority voting rights has struggled to keep pace with the continuity of racist trends in American politics.</p>
<p>The work of protecting minority voting rights remains <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/05/democracy-january-6-coup-constitution-526512">unfinished</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197475/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Maxwell Hayter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Conservatives and the GOP have mounted a decadeslong legal fight to turn the clock back on the political gains of the civil rights movement.Julian Maxwell Hayter, Associate Professor of Leadership Studies, University of RichmondLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1985742023-02-01T13:19:30Z2023-02-01T13:19:30ZA Black history primer on African Americans’ fight for equality – 5 essential reads<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507391/original/file-20230131-14-13dugc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">President Barack Obama presents NBA champion and human rights advocate Bill Russell the Medal of Freedom on Feb. 15, 2011.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-barack-obama-presents-basetball-hall-of-fame-news-photo/109136617?phrase=bill%20Russell&adppopup=true">Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As the father of Black history, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carter-G-Woodson">Carter G. Woodson</a> had a simple goal – to legitimize the study of African American history and culture.</p>
<p>To that end, in 1912, shortly after becoming the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/cawo/learn/carter-g-woodson-biography.htm">second African American</a> after <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/collection.php?cpk=1011">W.E.B. Du Bois</a> to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard, Woodson founded the <a href="https://asalh.org/">Association for the Study of Negro Life and History</a> in 1915.</p>
<p>More than 100 years later, Woodson’s goal and his work detailing the struggle of Black Americans to obtain full citizenship after centuries of systemic racism is still relevant today. </p>
<p>As dozens of <a href="https://theconversation.com/florida-gov-desantis-leads-the-gops-national-charge-against-public-education-that-includes-lessons-on-race-and-sexual-orientation-196369">GOP-controlled state legislatures</a> across the U.S. have either considered or enacted laws restricting how race is taught in public schools, The Conversation U.S. has published numerous stories over the years exploring the rich terrain of Black history – and the never-ending quest to form what the Founding Fathers called <a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution">a more perfect union</a>.</p>
<h2>1. From the Underground Railroad to Civil War battlefields</h2>
<p>Armed with a deep faith, Harriet Tubman is most famous for her successes along the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/hatu/index.htm">Underground Railroad</a>, the interracial network of abolitionists who enabled Black people to escape from slavery along secret routes in the South to freedom in the North and Canada.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A group of black men and women are posing for a portrait." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/458947/original/file-20220420-15105-eot9se.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/458947/original/file-20220420-15105-eot9se.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458947/original/file-20220420-15105-eot9se.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458947/original/file-20220420-15105-eot9se.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458947/original/file-20220420-15105-eot9se.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458947/original/file-20220420-15105-eot9se.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458947/original/file-20220420-15105-eot9se.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Harriet Tubman, far left, poses with her family, friends and neighbors near her barn in Auburn, N.Y., in the mid-to-late 1880s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/portrait-of-american-abolitionist-harriet-tubman-as-she-news-photo/514885176?adppopup=true">Bettmann/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But Tubman’s activities as a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/02/08/harriet-tubman-spy-civil-war-union/">Civil War spy</a> are less well known. </p>
<p>As historian and Tubman biographer <a href="https://www.brandeis.edu/wsrc/scholars/current.html">Kate Clifford Larson</a> wrote, <a href="https://theconversation.com/harriet-tubman-led-military-raids-during-the-civil-war-as-well-as-her-better-known-slave-rescues-179730">Tubman’s devotion</a> to America’s promise of freedom endured, despite suffering decades of enslavement and second-class citizenship.</p>
<p>“I had reasoned this out in my mind,” <a href="https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/harriet/harriet.html">Tubman once said</a>. “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death. If I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/harriet-tubman-led-military-raids-during-the-civil-war-as-well-as-her-better-known-slave-rescues-179730">Harriet Tubman led military raids during the Civil War as well as her better-known slave rescues</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>2. Juneteenth and the myths of emancipation</h2>
<p>As <a href="https://as.tufts.edu/history/people/faculty/kris-manjapra">a scholar</a> of race and colonialism, Kris Manjapra wrote that Emancipation Days – Juneteenth in Texas – are <a href="https://theconversation.com/juneteenth-celebrates-just-one-of-the-united-states-20-emancipation-days-and-the-history-of-how-emancipated-people-were-kept-unfree-needs-to-be-remembered-too-183311">not what many people think</a>. </p>
<p>“Emancipations did not remove all the shackles that prevented Black people from obtaining full citizenship rights,” Manjapra noted. “Nor did emancipations prevent states from enacting their own laws that prohibited Black people from voting or living in white neighborhoods.”</p>
<p>Between the 1780s and 1930s, over 80 emancipations from slavery occurred, from Pennsylvania in 1780 to Sierra Leone in 1936.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="With a blue sky in the background, a Black woman stands over a crowd of people, raising her fist in the air." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467240/original/file-20220606-26-nw9stq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467240/original/file-20220606-26-nw9stq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467240/original/file-20220606-26-nw9stq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467240/original/file-20220606-26-nw9stq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467240/original/file-20220606-26-nw9stq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467240/original/file-20220606-26-nw9stq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467240/original/file-20220606-26-nw9stq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Black woman raises her fist in the air during a Juneteenth reenactment celebration in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 2021.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/prescylia-mae-raises-her-fist-in-the-air-during-a-news-photo/1233550531?adppopup=true">Mark Felix /AFP/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>In fact, there were 20 separate emancipations in the United States alone from 1780 to 1865. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/juneteenth-celebrates-just-one-of-the-united-states-20-emancipation-days-and-the-history-of-how-emancipated-people-were-kept-unfree-needs-to-be-remembered-too-183311">Juneteenth celebrates just one of the United States’ 20 emancipation days – and the history of how emancipated people were kept unfree needs to be remembered, too</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>3. An image of a lynching found in a family photo album</h2>
<p>As director of the Lynching in Texas project, historian <a href="https://www.shsu.edu/academics/history/faculty/jeffrey-l-littlejohn-phd">Jeffrey L. Littlejohn</a>
provided the <a href="https://theconversation.com/one-familys-photo-album-includes-images-of-a-vacation-a-wedding-anniversary-and-the-lynching-of-a-black-man-in-texas-183704">very kind of analysis</a> that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Republican legislators in Texas want to ban from public schools. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Dozens of men wearing hats have their heads down as they look at the site where three black men were burned at the stake." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/465119/original/file-20220524-26-dcg4yn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/465119/original/file-20220524-26-dcg4yn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/465119/original/file-20220524-26-dcg4yn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/465119/original/file-20220524-26-dcg4yn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/465119/original/file-20220524-26-dcg4yn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/465119/original/file-20220524-26-dcg4yn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/465119/original/file-20220524-26-dcg4yn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Scene of the burnings of Johnny Cornish, Mose Jones and Snap Curry in Kirvin, Texas, on May 6, 1922.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063130335364">Jeff Littlejohn</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Among the many documents and relics Littlejohn has received, one package stood out. Inside was a family album of photographs filled with the usual images of memories – a vacation, a wedding anniversary dinner – but also, one of the lynching of a Black man.</p>
<p>During the Jim Crow era, <a href="https://lynchingintexas.org/tours/show/4">lynchings occurred regularly</a> in Texas – with 16 in 1922 alone.</p>
<p>But in 2021, the GOP-controlled state Legislature in Texas <a href="https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=871&Bill=SB3">enacted a law</a> prohibiting K-12 educators from teaching that “slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from … the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.” </p>
<p>In other words, as Littlejohn wrote, “this interpretation holds that slavery, racism and racism’s deadly manifestation, lynching, did not serve as systemic forces that shaped Texas history but were instead aberrations.”</p>
<p>The photo album serves as a direct challenge to that interpretation. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/one-familys-photo-album-includes-images-of-a-vacation-a-wedding-anniversary-and-the-lynching-of-a-black-man-in-texas-183704">One family's photo album includes images of a vacation, a wedding anniversary and the lynching of a Black man in Texas</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>4. Black soldiers fight racism and Nazis during World War II</h2>
<p>In <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624655/half-american-by-matthew-f-delmont/">his book</a> “Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad,” historian <a href="https://history.dartmouth.edu/people/matthew-f-delmont">Matthew Delmont</a> explored <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-forgotten-story-of-black-soldiers-and-the-red-ball-express-during-world-war-ii-179743">the idea of Black patriotism</a> and how many Black soldiers saw their service as a way to demonstrate the capabilities of their race. </p>
<p>Prompted by the <a href="https://newpittsburghcourier.com/">Pittsburgh Courier</a>, an influential Black newspaper during the 1940s, Delmont wrote that Black Americans rallied behind the Double V campaign during the war – victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Black soldiers are seen filling up gasoline tanks for dozens of trucks used to transport military supplies." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455085/original/file-20220329-13-5bfjqa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455085/original/file-20220329-13-5bfjqa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455085/original/file-20220329-13-5bfjqa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455085/original/file-20220329-13-5bfjqa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455085/original/file-20220329-13-5bfjqa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=587&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455085/original/file-20220329-13-5bfjqa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=587&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455085/original/file-20220329-13-5bfjqa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=587&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In this October 1944 photograph, Black soldiers are filling up gasoline tanks for the Red Ball Express.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/picture-taken-in-france-in-october-1944-showing-a-supply-news-photo/1172719702?adppopup=true">AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During the war, the Red Ball Express, the Allied forces’ transportation unit that delivered supplies to the front lines, was one example of such exceptional performance.</p>
<p>From August through November 1944, the mostly Black force moved more than 400,000 tons of ammunition, gasoline, medical supplies and rations to battlefronts in France, Belgium and Germany.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-forgotten-story-of-black-soldiers-and-the-red-ball-express-during-world-war-ii-179743">The forgotten story of Black soldiers and the Red Ball Express during World War II</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>5. An NBA champion’s cerebral fight for equal rights</h2>
<p>In his biography of Bill Russell, “King of the Court,” <a href="https://www.memphis.edu/history/faculty/faculty/aram-goudsouzian.php">Aram Goudsouzian</a> wrote that the NBA champion <a href="https://theconversation.com/bill-russells-legacy-of-nba-championships-and-cerebral-fight-for-equal-rights-188032">sought to find worth</a> in basketball amid the racial tumult of the civil rights movement.</p>
<p>He emerged from that crucible by crafting a persona that one teammate called “a kingly arrogance.”</p>
<p>Russell, who died July, 31, 2022, was the NBA’s first Black superstar, its first Black champion and its first Black coach.</p>
<p>As a civil rights activist, Russell questioned the nonviolence philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. and defended the militant ideas of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. He refused to accept segregated accommodations in the Deep South and recalled instances of police brutality during his childhood in Oakland, California.<br>
“It’s a thing you want to scream,” Russell wrote. “I MUST HAVE MY MANHOOD.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/bill-russells-legacy-of-nba-championships-and-cerebral-fight-for-equal-rights-188032">Bill Russell's legacy of NBA championships and cerebral fight for equal rights</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198574/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
America’s complicated history with race can be told through the lives and times of Black Americans, a view that some GOP-controlled state legislatures want to restrict, if not outright ban.Howard Manly, Race + Equity Editor, The Conversation USLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1972502023-01-30T13:13:56Z2023-01-30T13:13:56ZMeet Bayard Rustin, often-forgotten civil rights activist, gay rights advocate, union organizer, pacifist and man of compassion for all in trouble<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505703/original/file-20230121-31574-irg6sz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=95%2C106%2C3647%2C5044&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"> In this Feb. 2, 1964, image, Bayard Rustin talks on a telephone from a church in Brooklyn, New York.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/civil-rights-activist-bayard-rustin-spokesman-for-the-news-photo/3248636?phrase=bayard%20rustin&adppopup=true">Patrick A. Burns/New York Times Co./Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As I began writing “Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer,” <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780742545137/Bayard-Rustin-American-Dreamer">my biography</a> of the 20th-century radical leader and activist, one of my colleagues cautioned me not to “fall in love.” </p>
<p>This, of course, is good advice for any biographer, and I tried to follow it.</p>
<p>But it wasn’t easy, because <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bayard-Rustin">Bayard Rustin</a> was America’s signature radical voice during the 20th century, and yes, I believe those voices includes that of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom Rustin trained and mentored. </p>
<p>His <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/03/08/974941349/bayard-rustin-an-architect-of-the-civil-rights-movement-you-may-have-never-heard">vision</a> of nonviolence was breathtakingly broad.</p>
<p>He was a civil rights activist, a labor unionist, a socialist, a pacifist and, later in life, a gay rights advocate. </p>
<p>Today, scholars would call Rustin an <a href="https://www.intersectionaljustice.org/what-is-intersectionality">intersectionalist</a>, a man who understood the complex effects of multiple forms of discrimination, including racism, sexism and classism. </p>
<h2>Early days and activism</h2>
<p>Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on March 17, 1912, Rustin was one of 12 children raised by their grandparents. It is believed that his devotion to civil rights was formed by his grandmother, whose <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/rustin-bayard">work with the NAACP</a> resulted in leaders of the Black community, such as <a href="https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/civil-rights-leaders/web-du-bois">W.E.B. Du Bois</a> and <a href="https://www.cookman.edu/history/our-founder.html">Mary McLeod Bethune</a>, visiting the Rustin home during his Quaker upbringing.</p>
<p>Rustin was present at the creation of a host of pivotal American liberation movements. He helped found the <a href="https://www.thecongressofracialequality.org/bayard-rustin.html">Congress of Racial Equality</a> and the <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/southern-christian-leadership-conference-sclc">Southern Christian Leadership Conference</a>, two civil rights organizations that were focused on ending the Jim Crow era of racial segregation. </p>
<p>He worked with Black trade unionist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/A-Philip-Randolph">A. Philip Randolph</a> on the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt6wr5b1">1941 March on Washington Movement</a>, which bore fruit in <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-8802">an executive order</a> by President Franklin Roosevelt banning racial discrimination in the nation’s defense industries.</p>
<p>Rustin and Randolph worked again in 1948 on a successful campaign <a href="https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/precursor-desegregating-armed-forces">to end segregation</a> in the U.S. military under President Harry Truman. </p>
<p>A pacifist, Rustin protested World War II by resisting the draft and, as a result, was imprisoned in 1944 as a conscientious objector.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Two head shots of the same black man -- a side view and a head-on view -- are seen in these photographs taken in federal prison." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505701/original/file-20230121-20-h81yrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505701/original/file-20230121-20-h81yrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505701/original/file-20230121-20-h81yrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505701/original/file-20230121-20-h81yrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505701/original/file-20230121-20-h81yrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505701/original/file-20230121-20-h81yrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505701/original/file-20230121-20-h81yrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In these Aug. 3, 1945, images, Bayard Rustin is seen in federal prison after his conviction on draft evasion charges.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/bayard-rustin-one-of-the-organizers-of-the-1963-march-on-news-photo/644663420?phrase=bayard%20rustin&adppopup=true">Bureau of Prisons/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After his release in 1946, Rustin became a major figure for the next two decades in two prominent pacifist organizations, the <a href="https://forusa.org/the-fellowship-of-reconciliation-and-bayard-rustin-an-amends/">Fellowship of Reconciliation</a> and the <a href="https://www.warresisters.org/resources/remembering-bayard-rustin-100">War Resisters League</a>, both of which opposed the use of violence to settle disputes between individuals or nations. </p>
<p>In 1947, he and members of the Congress of Racial Equality planned the <a href="https://snccdigital.org/events/cores-journey-of-reconciliation/">Journey of Reconciliation</a>, the first organized effort to desegregate interstate bus transportation in the South. </p>
<h2>Role in Montgomery bus boycott</h2>
<p>Because of that work to integrate public transportation, Randolph suggested in 1956 that <a href="https://www.history.com/news/bayard-rustin-march-on-washington-openly-gay-mlk">Rustin meet with a young preacher</a> in Alabama who was organizing a bus boycott there.</p>
<p>That meeting with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/rustin-bayard">Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956</a> changed both men forever.</p>
<p>From then on Rustin advised King on the principles of Gandhi and nonviolent direct action that – when combined with lawsuits, voter registration drives and lobbying efforts – ultimately led to passage of both the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/civil-rights-act">Civil Rights Act of 1964</a> and the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/voting-rights-act">Voting Rights Act of 1965</a>. </p>
<p>For Rustin, Black progress depended on politics and economics. To that end, in 1966 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5bgmFTJ1FQ">Rustin proposed</a> the “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qg4r6">Freedom Budget for All Americans</a>” that promised every American employment, an income and access to health care. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A group of men are sitting around a large table with sheets of paper in front of them." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505694/original/file-20230121-23029-ifczsc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505694/original/file-20230121-23029-ifczsc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505694/original/file-20230121-23029-ifczsc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505694/original/file-20230121-23029-ifczsc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505694/original/file-20230121-23029-ifczsc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505694/original/file-20230121-23029-ifczsc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505694/original/file-20230121-23029-ifczsc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Civil rights leaders, from left, Bayard Rustin, Jack Greenberg, Whitney M. Young Jr., James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, A. Philip Randolph and Courtland Cox attend NAACP meeting on July 29, 1964.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/new-york-ny-at-a-meeting-here-in-n-a-a-c-p-headquarters-news-photo/517350918?phrase=bayard%20rustin&adppopup=true">Bettmann/GettyImages</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>His proposal became the template for progressive political activists in the 21st century.</p>
<h2>Jobs and freedom</h2>
<p>Rustin is best remembered as <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/100-amazing-facts/who-designed-the-march-on-washington/">the organizer and orchestrator</a> of arguably the seminal event in American civil rights history – <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/15/212338844/bayard-rustin-the-man-who-organized-the-march-on-washington">the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom</a>.</p>
<p>But it almost did not happen. </p>
<p>Rustin’s homosexuality had always been an issue, and not just to his opponents on the American right or to <a href="https://vault.fbi.gov/bayard-rustin/bayard-rustin-part-01-of-07">J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI</a>. </p>
<p>Many progressive activists who were open-minded on matters relating to civil and labor rights were much less so when it came to Rustin’s sexuality. </p>
<p>Rustin had been fired by the Fellowship of Reconciliation after <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bayard-rustin-civil-rights-icon-tarnished-arrest-homosexual-encounter-pardoned-california-180974143/">his 1953 conviction in Pasadena, California</a>, on what was then known as a “public indecency” offense, involving sex with two other men in a parked car.</p>
<p>A few years later, <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/rustin-bayard">King forced him out</a> of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, fearful of the damage the issue of Rustin’s homosexuality could do to his organization.</p>
<p>It took the direct intervention of Randolph, Rustin’s lifelong friend and champion, to get King and other major civil rights leaders to agree to his selection as the organizer and orchestrator of the March on Washington in 1963. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Two Black men are standing next to a sign that says March on Washington for jobs and freedom." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505702/original/file-20230121-15446-oomhc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505702/original/file-20230121-15446-oomhc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505702/original/file-20230121-15446-oomhc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505702/original/file-20230121-15446-oomhc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505702/original/file-20230121-15446-oomhc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505702/original/file-20230121-15446-oomhc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505702/original/file-20230121-15446-oomhc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bayard Rustin, left, is seen on Aug. 7, 1963, talking with Cleveland Robinson during the March on Washington.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/bayard-rustin-left-and-cleveland-robinson-shown-during-the-news-photo/639609323?phrase=bayard%20rustin&adppopup=true">Orlando Fernandez/Library of Congress via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rustin then had to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/bayard-rustin-march-on-washington">survive a denunciation</a> by segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond on the floor of Congress shortly before the march, during which the South Carolina lawmaker read from FBI reports on Rustin’s <a href="https://www.nps.gov/subjects/civilrights/bayard-rustin.htm">flirtation with communism</a> – he had belonged to the Communist Party briefly as a young man – and his homosexuality and <a href="https://www.pasadenanow.com/main/king-confidante-arrested-in-pasadena-receives-posthumous-pardon">arrest in Pasadena</a>. </p>
<p>But Rustin’s ability to organize was now too valuable to lose, and this time King stood by him. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780742545137/Bayard-Rustin-American-Dreamer">my research shows</a>, King knew that only Rustin, who had spent the previous two decades leading demonstrations and walking picket lines, had the knowledge and experience to move 250,000 people in and out of Washington, D.C., on a hot summer day. </p>
<p>King also knew that Rustin could manage everything in between, including the order of the speakers.</p>
<p>By insisting that King be placed last on the program, Rustin ensured that King would have the final word and maximum dramatic effect. Though Rustin didn’t know it at the time, King’s “<a href="https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety">I Have a Dream</a>” remarks eventually constituted one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in American history. </p>
<h2>Rustin’s internal conflicts</h2>
<p>The constituent parts of Rustin’s radical vision were often at odds and difficult to achieve, forcing Rustin into wrenching choices, as I learned during my research. </p>
<p>During World War II, for instance, he chose pacifism over the cause of civil rights when he refused to bear arms against a racist Nazi regime.</p>
<p>During the Vietnam War, he chose socialism over pacifism when he muted his criticism of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s policies in the hope of enacting his <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/a-freedom-budget-for-all-americans-annotated/557024/">Freedom Budget for All Americans</a>.</p>
<p>And in 1968, as a white-led teachers union and Black activists struggled for control of New York City’s public education system during the bitter <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/opinion/teachers-strike-liberals-ocean-hill-brownsville.html">Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis</a>, Rustin chose labor rights over civil rights and class over race as he lent his support to the union.</p>
<p>These choices <a href="https://jacobin.com/2018/05/the-tragedy-of-bayard-rustin">cost Rustin allies and friendships</a>, as former colleagues who afforded themselves the luxury of one-issue purity denounced him as an apostate, a hypocrite, a turncoat or worse.</p>
<p>But Rustin was none of those. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A Black man wearing sunglasses is sitting next to another Black man who is taking notes on a pad of paper." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505707/original/file-20230121-8930-3w8ef2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505707/original/file-20230121-8930-3w8ef2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505707/original/file-20230121-8930-3w8ef2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505707/original/file-20230121-8930-3w8ef2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505707/original/file-20230121-8930-3w8ef2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505707/original/file-20230121-8930-3w8ef2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505707/original/file-20230121-8930-3w8ef2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bayard Rustin, at right, sits next to acclaimed writer James Baldwin on the speakers’ platform in Montgomery, Ala., during the 1965 civil rights march from Selma.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/speakers-platform-1965-selma-to-montgomery-alabama-civil-news-photo/459534210?phrase=bayard%20rustin%20randolph&adppopup=true">Stephen F. Somerstein/Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>He dedicated his life to helping, as he put it, “people in trouble,” whomever and wherever they might be. </p>
<p>Accordingly, he put himself on the line for democracy advocates all over the world. They included African Americans, Latinos, working men and women, union members, the poor, war critics, anti-nuclear protesters, gays and lesbians, students, leftists, Soviet Jews, and Haitian, Hmong and Afghan refugees.</p>
<p>If those allegiances appear to be contradictions, in my view they were of the best kind. </p>
<h2>Love for Rustin?</h2>
<p>Above all else, Rustin chose to help people in trouble based on their condition, not their identity. </p>
<p>For that he has, if not my love, then my profound respect. </p>
<p>Of all the voices I’ve heard on my journeys through America’s 20th-century history, it is his that resonates most with me.</p>
<p>Rustin died in 1987, his radical vision unwavering until the end.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197250/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jerald Podair does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Bayard Rustin led a long and complicated life dedicated to the fight for equal rights. Targeted by the FBI, Rustin became a close adviser to Martin Luther King Jr.Jerald Podair, Professor of History, Lawrence UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1978642023-01-13T23:23:25Z2023-01-13T23:23:25Z‘The most dangerous Negro’: 3 essential reads on the FBI’s assessment of MLK’s radical views and allies<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504509/original/file-20230113-24-t3h2p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=407%2C113%2C2609%2C2121&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. relaxes at home in May 1956 in Montgomery, Alabama.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/civil-rights-leader-reverend-martin-luther-king-jr-relaxes-news-photo/74279047?phrase=martin%20luther%20king%20home&adppopup=true">Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Left out of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/us/politics/house-republican-committee-weaponization-government.html">GOP debates</a> about “the weaponization” of the federal government is the use of the FBI to spy on civil rights leaders for most of the 20th century.</p>
<p>Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the targets.</p>
<p>As secret FBI documents became declassified, The Conversation U.S. published several articles looking at the details that emerged about King’s personal life and how he was considered in 1963 by the FBI as “the most dangerous Negro.”</p>
<h2>1. The radicalism of MLK</h2>
<p>As a historian of religion and civil rights, University of Colorado Colorado Springs Professor <a href="https://paulharvey.org/about/">Paul Harvey</a> writes that while King has come to be revered as a hero who led a nonviolent struggle to build a color blind society, the true radicalism of MLK’s beliefs remain underappreciated. </p>
<p>“The civil saint portrayed nowadays was,” <a href="https://theconversation.com/martin-luther-king-jr-had-a-much-more-radical-message-than-a-dream-of-racial-brotherhood-92795">Harvey writes</a>, “by the end of his life, a social and economic radical, who argued forcefully for the necessity of economic justice in the pursuit of racial equality.”</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/martin-luther-king-jr-had-a-much-more-radical-message-than-a-dream-of-racial-brotherhood-92795">Martin Luther King Jr. had a much more radical message than a dream of racial brotherhood</a>
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<h2>2. The threat of being called a communist</h2>
<p><a href="https://chass.ncsu.edu/people/wjmille3/">Jason Miller</a>, a North Carolina State University English professor, details the delicate balance that King was forced to strike between some of his radical allies and the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.</p>
<p>As the leading figure in the civil rights movement, Miller explains, King could not be perceived as a communist in order to maintain his national popularity.</p>
<p>As a result, King did not overtly invoke the name of one of the Harlem Renaissance’s leading poets, <a href="https://vault.fbi.gov/langston-hughes">Langston Hughes</a>, a man the FBI suspected of being a communist sympathizer. </p>
<p>But <a href="https://theconversation.com/langston-hughes-hidden-influence-on-mlk-91736">Miller’s research</a> reveals the shrewdness with which King still managed to use Hughes’ poetry in his speeches and sermons, most notably in King’s “I Have a Dream” speech which echoes Hughes’ poem “<a href="https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/i-dream-a-world-2/">I Dream a World</a>.”</p>
<p>“By channeling Hughes’ voice, King was able to elevate the subversive words of a poet that the powerful thought they had silenced,” Miller writes.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/langston-hughes-hidden-influence-on-mlk-91736">Langston Hughes' hidden influence on MLK</a>
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</p>
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<h2>3. ‘We must mark him now’</h2>
<p>As <a href="https://independentresearcher.academia.edu/TrevorGriffey">a historian</a> who has done substantial research regarding FBI files on the Black freedom movement, UCLA labor studies lecturer Trevor Griffey <a href="https://theconversation.com/j-edgar-hoovers-revenge-information-the-fbi-once-hoped-could-destroy-rev-martin-luther-king-jr-has-been-declassified-118026">points out</a> that from 1910 to the 1970s, the FBI treated civil rights activists as either disloyal “subversives” or “dupes” of foreign agents. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277279/original/file-20190530-69087-q5gp5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277279/original/file-20190530-69087-q5gp5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277279/original/file-20190530-69087-q5gp5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277279/original/file-20190530-69087-q5gp5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277279/original/file-20190530-69087-q5gp5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277279/original/file-20190530-69087-q5gp5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277279/original/file-20190530-69087-q5gp5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277279/original/file-20190530-69087-q5gp5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Screenshot from a 1966 FBI memo regarding the surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/613/2820.pdf?1559244493">National Archives via Trevor Griffey photo</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>As King ascended in prominence in the late 1950s and 1960s, it was inevitable that the FBI would investigate him. </p>
<p>In fact, two days after King delivered his famous “<a href="https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety">I Have a Dream</a>” speech at the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/march-on-washington.htm">1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mlks-speech-attracted-fbis-intense-attention/2013/08/27/31c8ebd4-0f60-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html">William Sullivan</a>, the FBI’s director of intelligence, wrote: “We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/j-edgar-hoovers-revenge-information-the-fbi-once-hoped-could-destroy-rev-martin-luther-king-jr-has-been-declassified-118026">J. Edgar Hoover’s revenge: Information the FBI once hoped could destroy Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has been declassified</a>
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<p><em>Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197864/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
As Martin Luther King Jr. gained national prominence, the FBI launched several investigations to prove that King and his radical allies were communist sympathizers and a danger to America.Howard Manly, Race + Equity Editor, The Conversation USLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1938082022-11-14T20:21:47Z2022-11-14T20:21:47ZVoter intimidation in 2022 follows a long history of illegal, and racist, bullying<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494758/original/file-20221110-22-d61eam.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C462%2C5511%2C3258&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Despite intimidation both current and historical, American voters turned out in near-record numbers on Nov. 8, 2022.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/people-vote-as-poll-workers-assist-at-a-polling-place-at-news-photo/1440122451">Mario Tama/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In Travis County, Texas, home to Austin, a local Republican Party official allegedly knocked on people’s doors in November 2022 to accuse people who cast ballots by mail of <a href="https://www.tpr.org/government-politics/2022-11-04/texas-civil-rights-project-reports-multiple-instances-of-harassment-and-intimidation-at-the-polls">having been ineligible to vote</a>. </p>
<p>In Beaumont, Texas, 300 miles east, white poll workers allegedly <a href="https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/midterm-election-results-livestream-voting-11-08-2022/h_f8b4d5887430f3bf7b0f22328cffa342">followed Black voters to voting machines</a> and stood close enough behind them to see how they voted. </p>
<p>In Arizona, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/cases-alleged-intimidation-arizona-ballot-boxes-continue-rise/story?id=92811526">armed citizens had stationed themselves near ballot drop boxes</a>, but a federal judge ordered them to stay away and forbade them from photographing or taking videos of people dropping off ballots, or speaking to them.</p>
<p>In North Carolina, several people allegedly <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/16-incidents-suspected-voter-intimidation-reported-nc-ahead/story?id=92822354">photographed or video-recorded voters</a>.</p>
<p>Those are just some of the cases of voter intimidation marring the generally orderly conduct of the 2022 midterm elections. And with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/08/us/politics/florida-federal-voting-monitors.html">Florida and Missouri blocking federal monitors</a> from polling places, any intimidation in those states may have gone unreported. Those states said most outsiders – people who are not voters or poll workers – are not allowed in polling places.</p>
<p>Intimidation doesn’t always include demanding a person vote for or against a specific candidate or ballot issue, or involve making specific threats. As a scholar of <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=zj3sJcwAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">election law and voter suppression</a>, I know that any behavior reasonably calculated to dissuade a person from participating in an election counts as intimidation. This can include deceiving people about voting rules, questioning the legitimacy of their votes or accusing a person of a voting crime. </p>
<p>These problems may be getting more attention now, but voter intimidation has existed throughout American history, and it has almost always been directed at people of color. Yet the law provides opportunities for voters to respond to these illegal acts.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A street scene shows people standing in a parking lot talking to each other." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494757/original/file-20221110-5951-qemcvy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C59%2C5000%2C3263&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494757/original/file-20221110-5951-qemcvy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494757/original/file-20221110-5951-qemcvy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494757/original/file-20221110-5951-qemcvy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494757/original/file-20221110-5951-qemcvy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494757/original/file-20221110-5951-qemcvy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494757/original/file-20221110-5951-qemcvy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A Black activist group encourages people to vote – one of many efforts to counter racist voter intimidation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/attendees-walk-through-a-soul-to-the-polls-event-put-on-by-news-photo/1244573009">Scott McIntyre/for The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Hundreds of years of voter intimidation</h2>
<p>Voter intimidation has marred elections throughout American history. As early as 1832, French writer Alexis de Tocqueville in “Democracy in America” documented how the white majority in the free state of Pennsylvania had <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/815/pg815-images.html#link2HCH0037">intimidated African Americans from participating in elections</a>. That was just years before Pennsylvania, along with most other states with free Blacks, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/partisan-polarization-on-black-suffrage-17851868/D6FDE92281DC07500564FABBA5A82569#">banned or suppressed</a> the African American vote.</p>
<p>After the Civil War, white supremacist groups that wanted to restore the political order of slavery engaged in racially motivated voter intimidation. Probably the most famous example was the <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1873-colfax-massacre-crippled-reconstruction-180958746/">Colfax Massacre in 1873</a>, where white Louisianians killed approximately 150 African Americans in an attack precipitated by the disputed Louisiana gubernatorial election of 1872. Massacres like this sent the message to African Americans that voting was at their own risk. </p>
<p>Congress responded to the ongoing voter intimidation against African Americans by passing the <a href="https://history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlight/Detail/15032451486">Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871</a>, which included provisions explicitly outlawing conspiracies to deprive citizens of their voting rights. Those provisions <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1985">remain in law</a> today.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, violent voter intimidation persisted during the Jim Crow era. White supremacists continued attacking and killing African Americans in lynchings and race riots across the United States between the 1890s and the 1950s. In 1898, a mob of approximately 2,000 white men <a href="https://www.ncdcr.gov/1898-wilmington-coup">overthrew the Wilmington, North Carolina, local government</a> and massacred the city’s African American population for exercising their political and speech rights. Historians have estimated as many as <a href="https://www.history.com/news/wilmington-massacre-1898-coup">250 African Americans were killed</a>. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Give Us The Ballot’ speech in 1957.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The civil rights response</h2>
<p>In the mid-century civil rights era, white supremacist forces <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-martyrs">repeatedly murdered voting activists</a> to intimidate activists and African American voters from exercising their voting rights.</p>
<p>The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s made it a primary goal to obtain voting rights for African Americans. In 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., spoke about this in a speech in Washington entitled “<a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/give-us-ballot-address-delivered-prayer-pilgrimage-freedom">Give Us The Ballot</a>.” He spoke of the “conniving methods” used to intimidate African American voters, such as lynching and mob violence. He demanded federal protection and new laws to codify African Americans’ right to vote.</p>
<p>After some false starts, Congress did respond again to the voter intimidation problem through the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/voting-rights-act">Voting Rights Act of 1965</a>. Though not often discussed or used as a basis for lawsuits, Section 11(b) of the act contains a <a href="https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:52%20section:10307%20edition:prelim)">broad prohibition</a> against voter intimidation: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“No person, whether acting under color of law or otherwise, shall intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for voting or attempting to vote, or intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for urging or aiding any person to vote or attempt to vote.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This law does not require proof that the person intended to intimidate a voter – just that their behavior can be reasonably seen as threatening, coercive or intimidating.</p>
<p>But voter intimidation did not simply go away because of these laws. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, voter intimidation activities turned from overt terrorism to aggressive vigilance and challenging motivated by claims of fraud in voting. “Voting vigilante” groups, as many refer to them, continued to police voting by <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/31/politics/arizona-voter-intimidation-doj">following, photographing and otherwise menacing and threatening voters</a>. These groups claimed this was to protect “election integrity,” but they were in fact acts to intimidate Black and Hispanic voters.</p>
<p>For example, in 1981, the Republican National Committee <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/the-gop-just-received-another-tool-for-suppressing-votes/550052/">hired off-duty police officers</a> to carry weapons and patrol majority-minority neighborhoods in New Jersey, wearing armbands declaring them part of a “National Ballot Security Task Force” that had no governmental sanction. That was one of several actions that resulted in a <a href="https://theconversation.com/trumps-encouragement-of-gop-poll-watchers-echoes-an-old-tactic-of-voter-intimidation-147234">federal judge’s order that the Republican Party stop intimidating voters</a>. That order was extended several times, but <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/09/rnc-ballot-security-consent-decree-328995">expired in 2017</a>.</p>
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<h2>21st-century voter intimidation</h2>
<p>But these activities extend beyond the GOP. Since around 2010, grassroots groups emerged in the name of protecting election integrity. These groups <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/retiree-latino-organizations-sue-group-alleged-voter-intimidation-ariz-rcna53887">alleged that there was rampant voter fraud</a> in American elections and took it on themselves to aggressively monitor elections.</p>
<p>Probably the most prominent of these groups is “True The Vote.” It and other groups like it claim they seek to root out voter fraud and protect American elections. Yet these groups have, as recently as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/06/us-far-right-groups-drop-box-voting-legal-issues">the 2022 midterms</a>, engaged in surveilling voters, made aggressive inquiries about voters’ practices and openly carried weapons while doing so. All of that is, arguably, voter intimidation. </p>
<p>Their motivation – unsupported by evidence, and in fact <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/truth-about-voter-fraud">comprehensively</a> <a href="https://scholars.org/sites/scholars/files/ssn_key_findings_minnite_on_the_myth_of_voter_fraud.pdf">contradicted</a> by it – is that massive voter fraud has affected the results of recent elections.</p>
<p>I argue that these claims serve to spread what I call the “<a href="https://scholarship.law.edu/lawreview/vol63/iss4/2/">meme of voter fraud</a>.” One of the consequences of this dangerous meme is to justify voter intimidation against minority communities. And I have <a href="https://digitalcommons.law.mercer.edu/jour_mlr/vol71/iss3/7/">analyzed</a> how this myth-making has increased with the voter fraud claims of former president Donald Trump. </p>
<p>Voter intimidation is still illegal and still damages American elections today. Protections <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1985">codified in the Ku Klux Klan Act</a> and the Voting Rights Act still allow citizens to <a href="https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wlr/vol97/iss1/10">file civil lawsuits</a> against people who intimidate voters. These statutes, however, remain underused, probably because they have been overshadowed by larger provisions of the laws.</p>
<p>Yet, if more voters and civil rights organizations used these laws, they could confront aggressive voter intimidation and unmask its false claims of policing election integrity. These activities threaten to make American democracy inaccessible for millions of citizens whose voices deserve to be heard. And modern voter intimidation continues the ugliest racist trend of vote suppression from America’s past. </p>
<p>This history shouldn’t repeat itself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/193808/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Atiba Ellis is a consultant and expert witness in an ongoing voter intimidation lawsuit.</span></em></p>Any behavior reasonably calculated to dissuade a person from participating in an election is intimidation.Atiba Ellis, Professor of Law, Marquette UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1908962022-09-20T12:35:23Z2022-09-20T12:35:23ZRon DeSantis and Greg Abbott pull from segregationists’ playbook with their anti-immigration stunts<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485309/original/file-20220919-26-xhndoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=31%2C6%2C4162%2C2684&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An undocumented immigrant from Venezuela kisses the forehead of another immigrant on the island of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/edgartown-ma-september-15th-2022-rafael-eduardo-an-news-photo/1243270878?adppopup=true">Dominic Chavez for The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As a <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jsh/article-abstract/52/2/535/4034676">historian of racism and white supremacy</a> in the United States, I’ve become accustomed to callous actions like those of Republican governors who <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/15/marthas-vineyard-desantis-migrants-venezuela/">organized transportation for Latin American migrants</a> to states run by their political opponents. </p>
<p>Governors Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida are following the playbook of segregationists <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/09/16/reverse-freedom-rides-marthas-vineyard-desantis/">who provided one-way bus tickets</a> to Northern cities for Black Southerners in the 1960s. At that time, the fight for racial equality was attracting national attention and support from many white Americans, inspiring some to join interracial Freedom Rides organized by civil rights groups to challenge segregation on interstate bus lines. </p>
<p>Then, as now, the message Southern racists aimed to send with their “reverse freedom rides” was, “Here, you love them so much, you take care of them.”</p>
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<p>But these acts were more than just political stunts designed to embarrass Northern political leaders who sympathized with the civil rights movement. They were part of a broader effort by white supremacists to remove Black Americans from their communities and avoid dealing with the social consequences of centuries of racial discrimination.</p>
<h2>Slavery, sharecropping and displacement</h2>
<p>In the slavery and Jim Crow eras, <a href="https://www.lawcha.org/wp-content/uploads/8-5-Murder-of-Frank-Hanes-1939-FINAL.pdf">racist policies backed by extreme violence</a> limited access to education and economic opportunities for Black people to ensure that they had few options other than working for white employers. </p>
<p>Black sharecropping families in the early 20th century depended on their landlords to provide food, clothing and housing throughout the year until harvest time, when the costs of these goods were deducted from their share of the money made from sales of the crop. Plantation owners controlled the process, frequently using it <a href="https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p061462">to cheat workers out of their earnings</a> and keep them perpetually in debt.</p>
<p>By the 1960s, however, most of these workers were no longer needed. Mechanization eliminated millions of agricultural jobs and <a href="https://www.proquest.com/docview/117559999/F481917AAA0C42AEPQ/10">generated massive unemployment</a> in rural Southern communities. Rather than invest in job training programs or other initiatives to help displaced farm laborers, political leaders enacted policies designed to drive poor people out. </p>
<p>Strict eligibility requirements and arbitrary administration of state public assistance programs excluded many Black families from receiving aid. State legislators <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1966/01/02/archives/south-is-lagging-in-requests-for-federal-antipoverty-money.html">were slow to take advantage of federal funds</a> that were available to expand anti-poverty programs, arguing that these were ploys to force integration on the South. </p>
<p>Government inaction <a href="https://www.proquest.com/docview/118035743/DC4572A31BC449F6PQ/1">left thousands of people</a> without homes or income and exacerbated the suffering of the unemployed.</p>
<h2>Segregationists’ ‘final solution’</h2>
<p>Civil rights workers who came to the South to help local Black activists with desegregation and voter registration efforts <a href="https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll2/id/9602/rec/9">were shocked by the economic deprivation</a> that existed in the communities they visited. They reported seeing widespread hunger, dilapidated housing, unsanitary conditions, high infant mortality rates and other adverse health effects. </p>
<p>Raymond Wheeler, a doctor who visited Mississippi in 1967, <a href="https://twitter.com/gretaprofessor/status/1566256712792739840">described the state</a> as “a vast concentration camp, in which live a great group of poor uneducated, semi-starving people, from whom all but token public support has been withdrawn.” </p>
<p>Others took the analogy to Nazi Germany further, <a href="https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll2/id/10713/rec/1">arguing that</a> this was white supremacists’ “final solution to the race question.” By denying Black Americans access to the basic means of survival, they left them with no options but to migrate away. </p>
<h2>Political and economic motivations</h2>
<p>The motivations behind these policies <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469654799/you-cant-eat-freedom/">were both political and economic</a>. White racists understood that providing assistance to displaced workers would encourage Black people to stay in the South. That posed a threat to their power, especially after passage of <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/voting-rights-act">the Voting Rights Act</a> in 1965 enabled more Black people to register to vote, participate in elections and run for office. </p>
<p>Moreover, the candidates Black Southerners supported <a href="https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll2/id/49401/rec/32">ran on platforms</a> that advocated policies to ensure racial and economic justice: investment in schools and other public services, enhanced assistance for unemployed people, more affordable health care and a stronger social safety net for those who were unable to work.</p>
<p>These proposals were anathema to wealthy white people who would face higher tax rates to pay for them. Warning of the consequences should Black Southerners be allowed to vote, Mississippi Citizens’ Council leader Ellett Lawrence asserted that property owners <a href="https://egrove.olemiss.edu/citizens_corresp/7/">could see tax increases</a> of “100%, 200% or more” if Black people were elected to office. </p>
<p>In a study of Wilcox County, Alabama, the National Education Association <a href="https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED018874">found that</a> many landowners were afraid “the Negro majority will obtain control and raise land taxes to finance education and other services.” It concluded that this group showed “little taste for the anti-poverty programs of the sixties because it is more anxious to solve its problems through outmigration than it is to improve all of its people.”</p>
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<img alt="Black and white photograph of people standing and sitting outside of a burning bus." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485310/original/file-20220919-22-d0uchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485310/original/file-20220919-22-d0uchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485310/original/file-20220919-22-d0uchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485310/original/file-20220919-22-d0uchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485310/original/file-20220919-22-d0uchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485310/original/file-20220919-22-d0uchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485310/original/file-20220919-22-d0uchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A group of Freedom Riders outside a bus that was set aflame by a group of white people in Alabama.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/freedom-riders-on-a-greyhound-bus-sponsored-by-the-congress-news-photo/154784547?adppopup=true">Underwood Archives/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>White supremacy then and now</h2>
<p>In many ways, Republicans like Abbott and DeSantis are the political descendants of Southern segregationists whose cruelty horrified other Americans in the 1960s.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/30/how-business-first-foreign-policy-triggered-migration-caravans/">Immigration scholars have noted</a> how U.S. foreign policies contributed to the poverty and violence in Central and South America that migrants are fleeing. Yet rather than acknowledge this – along with assuming the moral responsibilities it entails – some GOP leaders denigrate and dehumanize refugees to win support from voters drawn to xenophobic messaging.</p>
<p>Watching this resurgent nativism, racism and disregard for human rights gaining strength in the 21st century is an ominous sight for anyone familiar with where these ideas have led in the past.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/190896/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Greta de Jong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In the civil rights era, ‘Reverse Freedom Rides’ were more than just a political stunt. They were part of a systematic effort to deprive Black Americans of their livelihoods and force them out.Greta de Jong, Professor of History, University of Nevada, RenoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1816622022-04-25T12:12:24Z2022-04-25T12:12:24ZThe Cleveland Indians changed their team name – what’s holding back the Atlanta Braves?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/459145/original/file-20220421-24-ondbdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C8%2C2977%2C1854&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Atlanta Braves fans perform the 'tomahawk chop' during a playoff game in 2004.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/fans-of-the-atlanta-braves-do-the-tomahawk-chop-during-news-photo/51433584?adppopup=true"> Streeter Lecka/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In October 1995, as the Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves prepared to <a href="https://www.baseball-reference.com/postseason/1995_WS.shtml">face off in the World Series</a>, a group of Native Americans rallied outside Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium to protest what they called both teams’ racist names and mascots. Some protesters carried signs, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/sports/1995/10/22/protesters-single-out-nicknames/5ca89d46-0ecb-46b3-a979-fbe6fa497af6/">including one that said</a>, “Human beings as mascots is not politically incorrect. It is morally wrong.”</p>
<p>They marched outside the ballpark, where some vendors were selling the foam tomahawks that Braves fans wave during the “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGuChxSvuh8">tomahawk chop</a>” – a cheer in which they mimic a Native American war chant while making a hammering motion with their arms. </p>
<p>It wasn’t until 2018 that the Indians <a href="https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/22255143/cleveland-indians-removing-chief-wahoo-logo-uniforms">officially removed their logo</a>, a cartoonish Native American named Chief Wahoo, from their merchandise, banners and ballpark. In 2020 the owners agreed to change the Indians name itself. For the 2022 season, <a href="https://www.nbc15.com/2021/07/23/meet-guardians-cleveland-indians-announce-new-nickname/">they would begin using the new name</a>, the Guardians.</p>
<p>The Atlanta Braves’ owners, however, have dug in their heels, refusing to replace a name that many Americans – including Native Americans – find offensive and derogatory.</p>
<p>In July 2020 – in the midst of the nationwide protests around racism, sparked by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police – <a href="https://wamu.org/story/20/07/11/the-racial-justice-reckoning-over-sports-team-names-is-spreading/">some Atlanta fans again urged the team to change its name</a>. In response, the Braves’ brass <a href="https://twitter.com/uniwatch/status/1282360397195075585?lang=en">sent a letter</a> to season ticket holders, insisting, “We will always be the Atlanta Braves.”</p>
<p>The insistence on preserving the team name – along with fan traditions like the tomahawk chop – is even more glaring given the city’s links to the civil rights movement.</p>
<h2>The road to Atlanta</h2>
<p>For many years, NFL football team owner Dan Snyder refused to change the name of his Washington Redskins – perhaps one of the more egregiously racist team names in any sport. But in 2020 <a href="https://www.nbcsports.com/washington/football-team/timeline-washington-football-teams-name-change-saga">he finally relented</a>, yielding to pressure from investors and corporate sponsors. The team played as the Washington Football Team for two seasons <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/02/06/1078571919/washington-commanders-name-change-native-americans">before becoming the Commanders</a> this year.</p>
<p>However, when professional sports teams do change their names, <a href="https://www.nbcsports.com/washington/football-team/pro-sports-teams-changed-their-name-without-changing-cities">it’s usually done for marketing reasons</a> rather than social ones. </p>
<p>The NFL’s Tennessee Oilers rebranded themselves the Tennessee Titans in 1999, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays became the Tampa Bay Rays in 2008 and the New Orleans Hornets turned into the Pelicans in 2013.</p>
<p>The Braves have had their own merry-go-round with team names.</p>
<p>The story begins in 1876, when Boston’s professional baseball team was known as the Red Stockings. In 1883, they became the Beaneaters and kept that name until 1907, when new owner <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1909/06/20/archives/baseball-president-dead-george-dovey-of-boston-passes-away-on-a.html">George Dovey</a> changed it to the Doves, a tribute to himself. In 1911, William Russell bought the team and renamed it <a href="https://www.baseball-almanac.com/mgrtmab7.shtml">the Rustlers</a>, also after himself. But a year later, James Gaffney, a New York City alderman, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1993/06/26/opinion/l-what-atlanta-braves-share-with-boss-tweed-980393.html">purchased the team</a>. </p>
<p>Gaffney was part of Tammany Hall, a New York City political club named after <a href="https://www.ustwp.org/government/boards-commissions/historical-advisory-board/chief-tamanend/">Tamanend</a>, a Delaware Indian chief. Tammany Hall used a Native American wearing a headdress <a href="https://bkskarch.com/2020/11/17/go-inside-the-new-glass-dome-atop-union-squares-tammany-hall/">as its emblem</a> and <a href="https://www.mlb.com/news/atlanta-braves-team-name-origin">referred to its members</a> as “braves.” So Gaffney gave his team a new moniker. From thenceforth they would be known as the Boston Braves. </p>
<p>In 1935, <a href="https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/bob-quinn/">Bob Quinn</a> purchased the Braves after a season in which they sported the worst record in baseball: <a href="https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/BSN/1935.shtml">38 wins and 115 losses</a>. Hoping to give the team a fresh start, he renamed it the <a href="https://massachusettsbaseballhistory.com/2021/04/08/bostons-original-blue-and-yellow-team/">Boston Bees</a>, but the team continued to perform poorly. In 1940, construction magnate <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/17/archives/lou-perini-owner-who-took-braves-to-milwaukee-is-dead.html">Lou Perini</a> bought the team and changed the name back to the Braves. </p>
<p>In 1953, Perini moved the Braves to Milwaukee – the first team relocation since 1903. Nine years later, he sold the Braves to some Chicago investors led by <a href="https://www.ajc.com/sports/baseball/former-braves-owner-bill-bartholomay-who-moved-team-atlanta-dies/B43tnVnOAgQbjNhi3ptEGN/">William Bartholomay</a>, who quickly began looking to move the team to a larger television market. </p>
<h2>A commitment to improving race relations</h2>
<p>Atlanta Mayor <a href="https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-politics/ivan-allen-jr-1911-2003/">Ivan Allen Jr.</a> courted Bartholomay. To lure the team, he persuaded Fulton County to build Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium <a href="https://www.todayingeorgiahistory.org/tih-georgia-day/atlanta-fulton-county-stadium">for US$18 million</a> – equal to $161 million today.</p>
<p>But Hank Aaron, the Braves’ biggest star, was reluctant to move to Atlanta. </p>
<p>Although it promoted itself as an enlightened place – the city had recently rebranded itself as “<a href="https://www.nps.gov/features/malu/feat0002/wof/ivan_allen.htm">The City Too Busy to Hate</a>” – Atlanta <a href="https://www.facingsouth.org/2015/05/the-most-racially-segregated-cities-in-the-south.html">was still highly segregated</a>. It was the capital of a state represented by segregationist politicians such as long-serving Sens. <a href="https://faculty1.coloradocollege.edu/%7Ebloevy/toEndAllSegregation/ToEndAllSegregation-008.pdf">Richard Russell</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/22/us/herman-talmadge-georgia-senator-and-governor-dies-at-88.html">Herman Talmadge</a>. Aaron, a native of Mobile, Alabama, had no interest in returning to the Deep South racism of his birthplace. </p>
<p>The NAACP and Urban League asked Aaron to give the South a second chance. <a href="https://www.espn.com/espn/commentary/news/story?id=6015125">Aaron met with Martin Luther King Jr.</a>, who convinced him that bringing the Braves to Atlanta would help the civil rights cause.</p>
<p>Before he would agree to join the Braves in Atlanta, however, Aaron insisted that Fulton County Stadium seating and facilities be desegregated. Mayor Allen shared that view. <a href="https://www.espn.com/espn/commentary/news/story?id=6015125">The city and the Braves complied</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Man wearing blue baseball jersey sits in a dugout bench." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/459137/original/file-20220421-12-x61miq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/459137/original/file-20220421-12-x61miq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459137/original/file-20220421-12-x61miq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459137/original/file-20220421-12-x61miq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459137/original/file-20220421-12-x61miq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459137/original/file-20220421-12-x61miq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459137/original/file-20220421-12-x61miq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Slugger Hank Aaron went along with the team to Atlanta only after some lobbying from Martin Luther King Jr.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/outfielder-hank-aaron-of-the-atlanta-braves-relaxes-in-the-news-photo/51455615?adppopup=true">Focus on Sport via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Jimmy Carter, who served as Georgia’s governor from 1971 to 1975 before being elected president, <a href="https://www.espn.com/espn/commentary/news/story?id=6015125">recalled that</a> having a major league team in Atlanta “gave us the opportunity to be known for something that wasn’t going to be a national embarrassment.” Carter said that Aaron “was the first Black man that white fans in the South cheered for.” </p>
<h2>The chief and the chop</h2>
<p>As the Braves worked to mend relations with the city’s Black community, they didn’t seem to consider how their marketing efforts might offend Native Americans. </p>
<p>In 1966, the year the Braves moved to Atlanta, the team adopted a mascot, <a href="https://www.ajc.com/sports/baseball/whatever-happened-chief-noc-homa-levi-walker/ZoBlkrVjEyQbfa85BZbs8H/">Chief Noc-A-Homa</a>, who danced around a teepee behind the left field fence dressed in Native American garb and occasionally performed on the field.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Man in Native American garb spreads his arms." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/459134/original/file-20220421-25-phqaml.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/459134/original/file-20220421-25-phqaml.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459134/original/file-20220421-25-phqaml.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459134/original/file-20220421-25-phqaml.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459134/original/file-20220421-25-phqaml.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459134/original/file-20220421-25-phqaml.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459134/original/file-20220421-25-phqaml.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Atlanta Braves retired mascot Chief Noc-a-Homa in 1985.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/this-1983-file-photo-of-chief-noc-a-homa-the-atlanta-braves-news-photo/838580900?adppopup=true">Denver Post via Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Under public pressure, <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1986/01/19/571286.html?pageNumber=352">the team abandoned</a> Chief Noc-A-Homa in 1985. But a few years later, Braves organist Carolyn King started playing the “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQOs0m3wTBY">tomahawk song</a>”
before Braves batters stepped up to the plate. By 1991, the fans had fully adopted the chop.</p>
<p>Today, many fans – not to mention many Native Americans – cringe at the music and the chop. To them, it reflects a stereotypical image of Native Americans as violent and uncivilized, <a href="https://deadline.com/2020/10/native-american-writers-urge-industry-to-make-amends-for-stereotypical-portrayals-inadequate-representation-1234595944/">similar to those</a> that appeared <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442229624/Native-Americans-on-Network-TV-Stereotypes-Myths-and-the-">on TV</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/481668">in movies</a> for many years. </p>
<p>In 2019, Ryan Helsley, a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and a member of the Cherokee Nation, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/10/05/cardinals-pitcher-calls-braves-tomahawk-chop-disappointing-disrespectful/">took issue with the tomahawk chop</a> after pitching against the Braves.</p>
<p>“I think it’s a misrepresentation of the Cherokee people or Native Americans in general. Just depicts them in this kind of caveman-type people way who aren’t intellectual,” Helsley told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.</p>
<p>“They are a lot more than that,” he said. “It devalues us and how we’re perceived in that way, or used as mascots.” </p>
<h2>A name that honors the region’s history</h2>
<p>The Braves are now owned by Liberty Media Corp., a $17 billion conglomerate controlled by Chair John C. Malone, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/john-malone/?sh=529309001505">who is personally worth $7.5 billion</a>. Only pressure from the Braves’ corporate sponsors, fans, other teams, and even some players will likely push Malone to make a change. </p>
<p>After Aaron died last year, <a href="https://www.11alive.com/article/sports/mlb/atlanta-braves/atlanta-braves-name-change-hammers-hank-aaron/85-bc8ad39e-0199-4729-a024-0ea180929896">some Braves fans urged the owners</a> to change the name to the “Hammers” to honor the slugger who was nicknamed “Hammerin’ Hank” or just “The Hammer.” His boosters pointed out that it would be simple to put a hammer in place of the tomahawk, which now adorns all Braves uniforms and the team logo. Some version of the cheer could even remain, but with hammers, not tomahawks. </p>
<p>But I’d like to suggest a team name that would make an even bigger statement: the Atlanta Kings, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. King grew up in Atlanta, attended Morehouse College, and spent most of his adult life there. His childhood home, the church he served as minister and the King Center, an educational nonprofit, are all located in Atlanta.</p>
<p>[<em>Over 150,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletters to understand the world.</em> <a href="https://memberservices.theconversation.com/newsletters/?source=inline-150ksignup">Sign up today</a>.]</p>
<p>King understood the importance of baseball in American culture. He befriended and <a href="https://theconversation.com/jackie-robinson-was-a-radical-dont-listen-to-the-sanitized-version-of-history-179732">worked closely with Jackie Robinson during the civil rights movement</a>. And he helped bring the team to Atlanta.</p>
<p>I think it would be fitting for the Braves to become the Kings and replace the tomahawk with a crown. Or, in the spirit of inclusion, the team could be rechristened as the Atlanta Hammer Kings. And the team could adopt Pete Seeger’s easy-to-sing “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO39e5Uznu4">If I Had a Hammer</a>” as its theme song.</p>
<p>All it would take is some political courage.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/181662/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Dreier does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The insistence on preserving the team name – along with fan traditions like the ‘tomahawk chop’ – is even more glaring given the city’s links to the civil rights movement.Peter Dreier, E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1797322022-04-14T12:15:48Z2022-04-14T12:15:48ZJackie Robinson was a radical – don’t listen to the sanitized version of history<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457776/original/file-20220412-17-7a6boo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=74%2C31%2C1838%2C1500&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jackie Robinson addresses civil rights supporters protesting outside the 1964 GOP National Convention.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/baseball-star-jackie-robinson-addresses-civil-rights-news-photo/576842774?adppopup=true">Ted Streshinsky/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In our new book, “<a href="https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496217776/">Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America</a>,” Rob Elias and I profile the many iconoclasts, dissenters and mavericks who defied baseball’s and society’s establishment. </p>
<p>But none took as many risks – and had as big an impact – as Jackie Robinson. Though Robinson was a fierce competitor, an outstanding athlete and a deeply <a href="https://sabr.org/journal/article/jackie-robinsons-faith-sustained-him-during-unrelenting-turmoil/">religious man</a>, the aspect of his legacy that often gets glossed over is that he was also a radical.</p>
<p>The sanitized version of the Jackie Robinson story goes something like this: He was a remarkable athlete who, <a href="https://sourcesofinsight.com/jackie-robinson-story-of-self-control/">with his unusual level of self-control</a>, was the perfect person to break baseball’s color line. In the face of jeers and taunts, he was able to put his head down and let his play do the talking, becoming a symbol of the promise of a racially integrated society.</p>
<p>With this April 15 marking the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s breaking baseball’s color line, Major League Baseball will celebrate the occasion with great fanfare – with <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=723832598808868">tributes</a>, movies, <a href="https://www.espnfrontrow.com/2022/03/jackie-to-me-go-inside-espns-10-part-video-series-honoring-jackie-robinsons-legacy/">TV specials</a>, <a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/events/75th-anniversary-and-celebration-jackie-robinson-day">museum exhibits</a> and <a href="https://www.mlb.com/news/jackie-robinson-75th-anniversary-symposium">symposia</a>. </p>
<p>I wonder, however, about the extent to which these celebrations will downplay his activism during and after his playing career. Will they delve into the forces arrayed against Robinson – the players, fans, reporters, politicians and baseball executives who scorned his outspoken views on race? Will any Jackie Robinson Day events mention that, toward the end of his life, he wrote that he had become so disillusioned with the country’s racial progress that he couldn’t stand for the flag and sing the national anthem?</p>
<h2>Laying the groundwork</h2>
<p>Robinson was a rebel before he broke baseball’s color line. </p>
<p>When he was a soldier during World War II, his superiors sought to keep him out of officer candidate school. He persevered and became a second lieutenant. But in 1944, while assigned to a training camp at Fort Hood in Texas, <a href="https://www.americanheritage.com/court-martial-jackie-robinson">he refused to move to the back of an army bus</a> when the white driver ordered him to do so. </p>
<p>Robinson faced trumped-up charges of insubordination, disturbing the peace, drunkenness, conduct unbecoming an officer and refusing to obey the orders of a superior officer. Voting by secret ballot, the nine military judges – only one of them Black – found Robinson not guilty. In November, he was honorably discharged from the Army.</p>
<p>Describing the ordeal, Robinson later wrote, “It was a small victory, for I had learned that I was in two wars, one against the foreign enemy, the other against prejudice at home.”</p>
<p>Three years later, Robinson would suit up for the Dodgers. </p>
<p>His arrival didn’t occur in a vacuum. It marked the culmination of <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-politics-played-a-major-role-in-the-signing-of-jackie-robinson-56890">more than a decade of protests</a> to desegregate the national pastime. It was a political victory brought about by a persistent and progressive movement that confronted powerful business interests that were reluctant – even opposed – to bring about change. </p>
<p>Beginning in the 1930s, the movement mobilized a broad coalition of organizations – the Black press, civil rights groups, the Communist Party, progressive white activists, left-wing unions and radical politicians – that waged a <a href="https://sabr.org/journal/article/before-jackie-robinson-baseballs-civil-rights-movement/">sustained campaign</a> to integrate baseball. </p>
<h2>Biting his tongue, biding his time</h2>
<p>This protest movement set the stage for Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey to sign Robinson to a contract in 1945. Robinson spent the 1946 season with the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ top farm club, where he led the team to the minor league championship. The following season, he was brought up to the big leagues.</p>
<p>Robinson <a href="https://sabr.org/journal/article/jackie-robinsons-faith-sustained-him-during-unrelenting-turmoil/">promised Rickey</a> that – at least during his rookie year – he wouldn’t respond to the verbal barbs from fans, managers and other players he would face on a daily basis. </p>
<p>His first test took place a week after he joined the Dodgers, during a game against the Philadelphia Phillies. Phillies manager <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/sports/baseball/philadelphia-apologizes-to-jackie-robinson.html">Ben Chapman</a> called Robinson the n-word and shouted, “Go back to the cotton field where you belong.” </p>
<p>Though Robinson seethed with anger, he kept his promise to Rickey, enduring the abuse without retaliating. </p>
<p>But after that first year, he increasingly spoke out against racial injustice in speeches, interviews and his regular newspaper columns for The Pittsburgh Courier, New York Post and the New York Amsterdam News.</p>
<p>Many sportswriters and most other players – including some of his fellow Black players – balked at the way Robinson talked about race. They thought he was too angry, too vocal.</p>
<p>Syndicated sports columnist Dick Young of the New York Daily News griped that when he talked to Robinson’s Black teammate Roy Campanella, they stuck to baseball. But when he spoke with Robinson, “sooner or later we get around to social issues.” </p>
<p>A 1953 article in Sport magazine titled “Why They Boo Jackie Robinson” described the second baseman as “combative,” “emotional” and “calculating,” as well as a “pop-off,” a “whiner,” a “showboat” and a “troublemaker.” A Cleveland paper called Robinson a “rabble rouser” who was on a “soap box.” The Sporting News headlined one story “Robinson Should Be a Player, Not a Crusader.” Other writers and players called him a “loudmouth,” a “sorehead” and worse.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, Robinson’s relentless advocacy got the attention of the country’s civil rights leaders.</p>
<p>In 1956, the NAACP gave him its highest honor, <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/naacp-spingarn-medal-1914/">the Spingarn Medal</a>. He was the first athlete to receive that award. In his acceptance speech, he explained that although many people had warned him “not to speak up every time I thought there was an injustice,” he would continue to do so.</p>
<h2>‘A freedom rider before the Freedom Rides’</h2>
<p>After Robinson hung up his cleats in 1957, he stayed true to his word, becoming a constant presence on picket lines and at civil rights rallies.</p>
<p>That same year, he publicly urged President Dwight Eisenhower to send troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black students seeking to desegregate its public schools. In 1960, impressed with the resilience and courage of the college students engaging in sit-ins at Southern lunch counters, <a href="https://andscape.com/features/how-jackie-robinsons-love-of-jazz-helped-civil-rights-movement/">he agreed to raise bail money</a> for the students stuck in jail cells.</p>
<p>Robinson initially supported the 1960 presidential campaign of Sen. Hubert Humphrey, a Minnesota Democrat and staunch ally of the civil rights movement. But when John F. Kennedy won the party’s nomination, Robinson – worried that JFK would be beholden to <a href="https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/CivilRightsAct1964.htm">Southern Democrats who opposed integration</a> – endorsed Republican Richard Nixon. He quickly regretted that decision after Nixon refused to campaign in Harlem or speak out against the arrest of Martin Luther King Jr. in rural Georgia. Three weeks before Election Day, <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538110201/Jackie-Robinson-An-Integrated-Life">Robinson said that</a> “Nixon doesn’t deserve to win.” </p>
<p>In February 1962, Robinson traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to speak at a rally organized by NAACP leader Medgar Evers. Later that year, at King’s request, Robinson traveled to Albany, Georgia, to draw media attention to three Black churches that had been burned to the ground by segregationists. He then led a fundraising campaign <a href="https://georgiahistoryfestival.org/a-legacy-of-leadership-jackie-robinsons-leadership-on-and-off-the-field/">that collected $50,000</a> to rebuild the churches.</p>
<p>In 1963 he devoted considerable time and travel to support King’s voter registration efforts in the South. He also traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, as part of King’s campaign to dismantle segregation in that city. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Group of men in suits gathered around a lectern." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457701/original/file-20220412-37987-ydxqjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457701/original/file-20220412-37987-ydxqjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457701/original/file-20220412-37987-ydxqjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457701/original/file-20220412-37987-ydxqjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457701/original/file-20220412-37987-ydxqjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457701/original/file-20220412-37987-ydxqjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457701/original/file-20220412-37987-ydxqjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jackie Robinson, to the right of Martin Luther King Jr., appeared at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/two-of-the-sporting-worlds-greats-visited-birmingham-to-news-photo/517384458?adppopup=true">Bettmann/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“His presence in the South was very important to us,” <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/137494/jackie-robinson-by-arnold-rampersad/">recalled Wyatt Tee Walker</a>, chief of staff of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/robinson-jackie">King called Robinson</a> “a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before the Freedom Rides.” </p>
<p>Robinson also consistently criticized police brutality. In August 1968, three Black Panthers in New York City were arrested and charged with assaulting a white police officer. At their hearing two weeks later, about 150 white men, including off-duty police officers, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1968/09/05/archives/offduty-police-here-join-in-beating-black-panthers-among-150.html">stormed the courthouse and attacked</a> 10 Panthers and two white supporters. When he learned that the police had made no arrests of the white rioters, Robinson was outraged.</p>
<p>“The Black Panthers seek self-determination, protection of the Black community, decent housing and employment and express opposition to police abuse,” <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Jackie_Robinson_in_Quotes.html?id=Ob2pCgAAQBAJ">Robinson said</a> during a press conference at the Black Panthers’ headquarters.</p>
<p>He challenged banks for discriminating against Black neighborhoods and condemned slumlords who preyed on Black families.</p>
<p>And Robinson wasn’t done holding Major League Baseball to account, either. He refused to participate in a 1969 Old Timers game because he didn’t see “genuine interest in breaking the barriers that deny access to managerial and front office positions.” At his final public appearance, throwing the ceremonial first pitch before Game 2 of the 1972 World Series, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/sports/baseball/24vecsey.html">Robinson observed</a>, “I’m going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third base coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball.”</p>
<p>No major league team had a Black manager until Frank Robinson <a href="https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/25946566/frank-robinson-mvp-first-black-manager-dies-83">was hired by the Cleveland Indians in 1975</a>, three years after Jackie Robinson’s death. The absence of Black managers and front-office executives is an issue that <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/video/dusty-baker-lack-of-african-american-mlb-managers-is-very-dangerous-trend-184238335.html">MLB still grapples with today</a>.</p>
<h2>Athlete activism, then and now</h2>
<p>Athletes still face backlash for speaking out. When NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick protested racism by refusing to stand during the national anthem, then-President <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/05/25/donald-trump-said-protesting-nfl-players-shouldnt-be-in-this-country-we-should-take-him-seriously/">Donald Trump said</a> that athletes who followed Kaepernick’s example “shouldn’t be in the country.” </p>
<p>In 2018, after NBA star LeBron James spoke about a racial slur that had been graffitied on his home and criticized Trump, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham suggested that he “<a href="https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/sports/lebron-james-responds-to-laura-ingrahams-shut-up-and-dribble-with-powerful-post-about-police-brutality/2375333/">shut up and dribble</a>.”</p>
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<p>Even so, in the past decade, athletes have become more outspoken on issues of racism, homophobia, sexism, American militarism, immigrant rights and other issues. They all stand on Robinson’s shoulders.</p>
<p>It was Robinson’s strong patriotism that led him to challenge America to live up to its ideals. He felt an obligation to use his fame to challenge the society’s racial injustice. However, during his last few years – before he died of a heart attack in 1972 at age 53 – he grew increasingly disillusioned with the pace of racial progress. </p>
<p>In his 1972 memoir, “I Never Had It Made,” he wrote: “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a white world.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/179732/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Dreier does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Years before Colin Kaepernick was born, Robinson wrote, ‘I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a white world.’Peter Dreier, E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1782302022-03-02T14:26:29Z2022-03-02T14:26:29ZThe legacy of iconic singer Miriam Makeba and her art of activism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/449553/original/file-20220302-19-vs81hr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by James Andanson/Sygma via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>South Africa’s world famous singer and activist <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/miriam-makeba">Miriam Makeba</a> (1932-2008) would have turned 90 on 4 March 2022. Born Zenzile Miriam Makeba in Johannesburg’s Prospect township, she had a life of remarkable global impact. She contributed to black people’s struggle for liberation and defended the integrity of African identity and artistry while living in a land absent of her ancestry. </p>
<p>Despite being banned from her home country for her outspokenness and resistance to apartheid, Makeba went on to build an illustrious international career, performing on some of the world’s most prestigious stages. She would be celebrated – and persecuted – in the US and invited to perform at the independence celebrations of numerous African countries before eventually returning to South Africa later in life.</p>
<p>In commemorating what would have been Makeba’s 90th birthday, it is fitting to pay tribute to her legacy of activism not only as a black African woman often living in exile in a western society but also as an artist who used her craft to teach and conscientise the world about Africa. </p>
<h2>Early years</h2>
<p>Her musical beginnings in the 1940s were at Kilnerton College, a Methodist elementary school where she sang in the school choir. The school’s alumni include South Africa’s former chief justice <a href="https://www.concourt.org.za/index.php/judges/former-judges/11-former-judges/70-deputy-chief-justice-dikgang-moseneke">Dikgang Moseneke</a>, <a href="http://www.unizulu.ac.za/unizulu-celebrating-the-legendary-musical-icon-professor-khabi-mngoma/">Professor Khabi Mngoma</a>, a hugely influential figure in music education, as well as struggle icon <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/lilian-masediba-ngoyi">Lilian Ngoyi</a>. </p>
<p>Makeba’s break into the professional circuit was with the singing group the Cuban Brothers. She later joined the well-established <a href="https://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/recipient/manhattan-brothers">Manhattan Brothers</a>. They sang vernacular verses over what was a predominantly American swing and ragtime sound. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VDFznqweUTQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for Come Back Africa.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>She was a founding member of the famous all-woman singing group <a href="https://www.allaboutjazz.com/miriam-makeba-and-the-skylarks-vol-1-miriam-makeba-and-the-skylarks-vol-2-miriam-makeba-teal-records-review-by-ed-kopp">the Skylarks</a>. In 1952, she was cast in Alf Herbert’s <a href="https://soulsafari.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/african-jazz-variety-alfred-herbert-1952/">African Jazz and Variety</a> production showcasing black talent. It was presented mainly to white audiences except on Thursdays when black audiences were allowed. This is where film producer Lionel Rogosin spotted Makeba and persuaded her to feature in his controversial documentary film, <em><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049087/">Come Back Africa</a></em>. </p>
<p>This film depicted the harsh conditions under which black South Africans were forced to live by the apartheid government. Makeba’s short appearance attracted attention, including an invitation to attend the film’s premiere in Italy. Naturally, she agreed, never imagining that because of her role in the movie she would be banned by the apartheid state from returning home, not even to bury her own mother. This marked the beginning of her exile.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/449501/original/file-20220302-21-1whx1ff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man and woman hold one another, smiling against a blue backdrop." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/449501/original/file-20220302-21-1whx1ff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/449501/original/file-20220302-21-1whx1ff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449501/original/file-20220302-21-1whx1ff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449501/original/file-20220302-21-1whx1ff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449501/original/file-20220302-21-1whx1ff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449501/original/file-20220302-21-1whx1ff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449501/original/file-20220302-21-1whx1ff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">RCA Victor</span></span>
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<p>Promoting the film in London, Makeba met African American folk singer and activist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harry-Belafonte">Harry Belafonte</a>. He would play a significant role in her career in the US, forming half of the duet on their <a href="https://www.grammy.com/artists/miriam-makeba/4292">Grammy-winning</a> album <em><a href="https://www.miriammakeba.co.za/releases/An-Evening-With-Belafonte-Makeba-1965">An Evening with Belafonte & Makeba</a></em>.</p>
<h2>Art as activism</h2>
<p>Her artistry extended beyond the stage, beyond her impeccable vocals and her sophisticated interpretations of international and South African repertoire. Her very presence in the United States stood as a form of activism against the apartheid government who had attempted to silence her and erase her from the consciousness of her people. </p>
<p>Makeba’s life in the US coincided with the parallel experiences of black people in America and South Africa suffering immense injustice, marginalisation, racism and inequality. Like the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/American-civil-rights-movement">Civil Rights Movement</a> in the US was a vehicle through which black Americans protested. Academic Barber-Sizemore <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2012.715416">describes</a> Makeba’s voice as being “a surface onto which Americans projected their own narratives about Africa and American race relations”. </p>
<p>Her artistry, always informed by the circumstances in South Africa, served as a razor-sharp awareness tool. In journalist Gwen Ansell’s book <a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Soweto-Blues%3A-Jazz%2C-Popular-Music%2C-and-Politics-in-Ansell/55a1e1246a1e98828e11447f7e347f76520cf11f"><em>Soweto Blues</em></a>, the late <a href="https://theconversation.com/remembering-hugh-masekela-the-horn-player-with-a-shrewd-ear-for-music-of-the-day-86414">Hugh Masekela</a> concurs that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There’s nobody in Africa who made the world more aware of what was happening in South Africa than Miriam Makeba. This was because of the way in which she described the songs…unwittingly she educated African American artists.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Makeba would describe life in apartheid South Africa when introducing her songs and would use every opportunity to address inequality. As analysed by academic Louise Bethlehem, Makeba’s work <a href="https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-6917766">resisted</a> the apartheid state’s threat to dismantle the very place of African art and culture in the world.</p>
<p>African Americans saw in Makeba not only what they were but also the possibilities of what they could become, expressed through song, dance, dress, language and ideology. Makeba found commonality with artists such as <a href="https://www.ninasimone.com/biography/">Nina Simone</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/aug/15/abbey-lincoln-obituary">Abbey Lincoln</a>, who historian Ruth Feldstein <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-it-feels-to-be-free-9780195314038?cc=za&lang=en&">referred</a> to as “an emergent collective of black women performers who combined their music with civil rights activism”. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zz-n2cQ2ex8?wmode=transparent&start=136" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Mama Africa the documentary.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Aesthetic as activism</h2>
<p>What I appreciate most about Makeba is the way in which she not only embraced but leaned into her sexuality and sensuality. The way she moved her body on stage was often provocative, drawing the audience into her world. She understood acutely the power of her black body and its curvature. </p>
<p>Her aesthetic of natural hair and minimal make up (if any at all) communicated eloquently her strong sense of self, rooted in her African identity free from the expectations of western notions of beauty and acceptability. </p>
<p>In remembering Makeba, we must guard against confining her activism to the anti-apartheid speeches she delivered at the United Nations in <a href="https://www.unmultimedia.org/avlibrary/asset/2553/2553678/">1963</a> and <a href="https://africanactivist.msu.edu/image.php?objectid=210-809-1981">1976</a>. Her activism was far more nuanced than that. It was interwoven in her music, her delivery of melodies, lyrics and artistic sentiment. Her artistry was a lantern that burnt vigorously through one of the darkest eras in history.</p>
<h2>A legacy spanning generations</h2>
<p>Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, <a href="https://lithub.com/mukoma-wa-ngugi-what-decolonizing-the-mind-means-today/">believes</a> that Africans singing in their native language is an international act of decolonisation and a marker of Pan African identity. Academic Aaron Carter-Enyi <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332734100_Decolonizing_the_Mind_Through_Song_From_Makeba_to_the_Afropolitan_present">acknowledged</a> Makeba’s influence on other African singers to sing in their mother tongues. Like Benin’s <a href="http://www.kidjo.com">Angelique Kidjo</a> who sings in Yoruba, Mali’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oumou-Sangare">Oumou Sangare</a> who sings in Mandinka and Nigeria’s <a href="https://npl.ng/team_members/onyeka-onwenu/">Onyeka Onwenu</a> who sings in Igbo. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/449513/original/file-20220302-15-112ld6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An older woman in an orange and black dress sings into a microphone, smiling, in front of a full orchestra." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/449513/original/file-20220302-15-112ld6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/449513/original/file-20220302-15-112ld6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449513/original/file-20220302-15-112ld6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449513/original/file-20220302-15-112ld6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449513/original/file-20220302-15-112ld6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449513/original/file-20220302-15-112ld6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/449513/original/file-20220302-15-112ld6a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Makeba performing in Johannesburg in 2005.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">LEXANDER JOE/AFP via Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Makeba’s influence transcends generations to reveal itself in contemporary cultural practices. We are because she was. Makeba’s legacy is too often suffocated by the complexity surrounding her <a href="https://www.news24.com/News24/who-owns-miriam-makeba-20180617">intellectual property</a> as well as her relationships with the men in her life. </p>
<p>Makeba was not just the wife of musician Masekela or <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Black-Panther-Party">Black Panther</a> leader <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stokely-Carmichael">Stokely Carmichael</a>. She was not Belafonte’s “discovery from South Africa”. She arrived in America a consummate professional fit for purpose.</p>
<p>The role of these male figures in Makeba’s life may have been meaningful but it is also grossly overstated. Makeba’s legacy is strong enough to stand on its own two feet. Her name needs no co-anchor. She fought more with her “artivism” than many a man did with their armed weaponry. </p>
<p>It’s time to move beyond her widely-adopted nickname “Mama Africa”. Makeba was a stalwart and an icon of African liberation and identity. Her legacy carved the way for future generations to live a life of authenticity, fearlessness and bravery.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/178230/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nomfundo Xaluva does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Makeba, who would have turned 90 on 4 March 2022, was a hugely influential artist and an icon of African liberation and identity.Nomfundo Xaluva, Lecturer, South African College of Music, University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1756562022-01-27T15:13:29Z2022-01-27T15:13:29ZBook review: how Africa was central to the making of the modern world<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/442723/original/file-20220126-21-hadgbf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, approached by a Berber on camelback, from The Catalan Atlas, 1375</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Attributed to Abraham Cresques/Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Journalist, photographer, author and professor Howard W. French’s <em><a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631495823">Born in Blackness</a>: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War</em>, is the most recent in a long career of thoughtful and significant literary and journalistic interventions. It demands an account of modernity that reckons with Africa as central to the making of the modern world.</p>
<p>The book’s main aim, French explains early on, is to restore those key chapters which articulate Africa’s significance to our common narrative of modernity to their proper place of prominence. </p>
<p>French intricately traces, from the early 15th century through the Second World War, the encounters between African and European civilisations. These, he argues, were motivated by Europe’s desire to trade with West Africa’s rich, Black <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/27/medieval-africa-lost-kingdoms/">civilisations</a>. These included the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Ghana-historical-West-African-empire">Ghanaian</a> and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/empire-mali-1230-1600">Malian</a> empires. The ancient West African region was perceived as an <a href="https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/africa_caribbean/west_africa.htm">abundant source</a> of both gold and slaves. French argues that it is the “intertwined background of gold and slavery” which would eventually birth the transatlantic slave trade of the early 16th century. </p>
<h2>A 600 year journey</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/442726/original/file-20220126-17-vg5rdr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A book cover with an illustration that is detail of The Catlan Atlas showing a king greeting a berber on camel back, lines and buildings in the background." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/442726/original/file-20220126-17-vg5rdr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/442726/original/file-20220126-17-vg5rdr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442726/original/file-20220126-17-vg5rdr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442726/original/file-20220126-17-vg5rdr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442726/original/file-20220126-17-vg5rdr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442726/original/file-20220126-17-vg5rdr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442726/original/file-20220126-17-vg5rdr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Liveright/W.W. Norton & Company</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>Born in Blackness</em> sprawls approximately 600 years. It traverses geographies from the edge of Europe, across Africa and the Americas. It follows the long history of the age of European “discovery” beginning with <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/africa-portugal">Portugal’s early ventures</a> into Africa and Asia in the late 1400s and early 1500s, through the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade">Atlantic slave trade</a>’s “modest” start in Barbados in the 1630s to the <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/haitian-revolution-1791-1804/">Haitian Revolution</a>. </p>
<p>Then it moves to London’s <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/tradeindustry/slavetrade/overview/parliament-abolishes-the-slave-trade/">abolishment</a> of the transatlantic trafficking of humans in 1807 and the introduction of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/technology/cotton-harvester">mechanical cotton picker</a>. This invention “could do the work of fifty sharecropping Blacks, a fact not lost on the white planters of the (Mississippi Delta)”. French’s historical tracing of the crafting of the modern world through the oppression and subjugation of Black persons continues on through the Second World War and beyond.</p>
<p>Citing Simeon Booker, a noteworthy African-American journalist whose work concerned the American <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/American-civil-rights-movement">civil rights movement</a> and the murder of <a href="https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/articles-and-essays/murder-of-emmett-till/">Emmett Till</a>, an African-American teenager accused of offending a white woman, French notes that in the early 1960s, “Mississipi could easily rank with South Africa, Angola or Nazi Germany for brutality and hatred”. </p>
<p>His careful weaving together of how gold and slavery became intertwined over centuries and continents makes one thing abundantly clear. Without the trade of persons belonging to African civilisations across the globe, but particularly the Atlantic, the modern world would not have been made.</p>
<h2>A reckoning with slavery</h2>
<p>As the author explains, the boom of the cotton, sugar and tobacco industries of the colonial US simply would not have happened without the trade of slaves from Africa. Without this “capitalist jolt” as French puts it, what we know now as the United States of America would have remained relatively obscure. It would not likely have become the superpower state it is today.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/black-lives-matter-but-slavery-isnt-our-only-narrative-137016">Black Lives Matter but slavery isn't our only narrative</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>In this way <em>Born in Blackness</em> challenges emphatically the deliberate forgetting of European contests over control of African resources. This process of erasure, French explains, began with Europe’s “Age of Discovery” (1400s-1600s). The improperly explained rationale for this era was that European civilisations wanted to form trading ties with Asia. To do so, they reached across continents, including Africa, for territory – and, later, subjects. </p>
<p>But French insists that the real rationale was Europe’s earnest desire to establish economic ties with Africa, and in particular West Africa with its resource-rich civilisations and resource-based economies. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/442730/original/file-20220126-19-om9dcg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A portrait of a man in a blue shirt with a brown jacket, wearing glasses, his beard unshaven." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/442730/original/file-20220126-19-om9dcg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/442730/original/file-20220126-19-om9dcg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442730/original/file-20220126-19-om9dcg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442730/original/file-20220126-19-om9dcg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442730/original/file-20220126-19-om9dcg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442730/original/file-20220126-19-om9dcg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442730/original/file-20220126-19-om9dcg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Howard W. French.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">W.W. Norton & Company</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The intervention of <em>Born in Blackness</em>, then, is to insist on reckoning with the role played by the brutal bond between Europe and Africa. This was forged through slavery. It is what drove the birth of a truly global capitalist economy; it hastened the processes of industrialisation and revolutionised the world’s diets by facilitating the globalisation of the consumption of sugar. </p>
<p>It is also important to mark, as French does, that the centrality of enslaved Africans’ labour extends beyond the mining of plantation crops to the very creation of the plantations themselves. It was the slaves who prepared the land for planting: they removed plants and rocks, but most importantly displaced indigenous peoples from their territories. </p>
<h2>A world born in Blackness</h2>
<p>In marking this, <em>Born in Blackness</em> demonstrates how the displacement to which African persons taken as slaves is mirrored in the making of modern-day America and echoed in the displacement of first nations or indigenous Americans.</p>
<p>What is at stake in the intervention of the book is precisely what is gestured toward by its title: that modernity and the modern world was indeed born in Blackness. The civilisational transformations the author traces – economic, spatial and most importantly cultural in their texture – are a product of Blackness.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/175656/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lauren van der Rede receives funding from the Early Career Academic Development programme of the Division of Research Development, Stellenbosch University.</span></em></p>Born in Blackness by Howard W. French is a towering work. It argues that, because of gold and slavery, Africa is central to creating the modern world.Lauren van der Rede, Lecturer, Stellenbosch UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1748392022-01-15T14:11:31Z2022-01-15T14:11:31ZRemembering Martin Luther King Jr.: 5 things I’ve learned curating the MLK Collection at Morehouse College<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440918/original/file-20220114-21-17fo3og.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=354%2C141%2C3281%2C2538&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Martin Luther King Jr. waves with his children, Yolanda and Martin Luther III, from the 1964 World's Fair in New York City. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/american-civil-rights-leader-martin-luther-king-jr-waves-news-photo/3226480?adppopup=true">Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>For the past 12 years, civil rights historian Vicki Crawford has worked as the director of the Morehouse College <a href="https://www.morehouse.edu/life/campus/martin-luther-king-jr-collection/">Martin Luther King Jr. Collection</a>, where she oversees the archive consisting of iconic sermons, speeches, writings and other materials belonging to King.</em></p>
<p><em>Few archives of historical papers compare with the importance of the Morehouse King Collection. Aside from King’s life, the collection chronicles many of the major events that occurred during the civil rights movement.</em></p>
<p><em>Since joining Morehouse, Crawford says she especially enjoys introducing younger generations to King and helping them understand the powerful lessons of the struggle for social justice, particularly how everyday people organized and worked for social change.</em></p>
<p><em>Of the countless things she has seen, read and learned about King’s theology and civil rights activism, Crawford details five of the countless aspects of his life that stand out.</em></p>
<h2>An avid reader</h2>
<p>King read voraciously across a wide range of topics, everything from the “<a href="https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/diary/">The Diary of Anne Frank</a>” to “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Candide-by-Voltaire">Candide</a>.” Of course, he also read about theology and religion and philosophy and politics. But he especially enjoyed literature and the works of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Tolstoy">Leo Tolstoy</a>. </p>
<p>The Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection includes approximately 1,100 books from King’s personal library, many with his handwritten notes throughout.</p>
<p>Some of the titles: “<a href="https://www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/gandhi-literature/collected-works-of-mahatma-gandhi-volume-1-to-98.php">Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi</a>,” “<a href="https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/collections/1/the-complete-poems-of-paul-laurence-dunbar/">Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar</a>,” “<a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/howard-thurman/deep-river-3/">Deep River: Reflections on the Religious Insight of Certain of the Negro Spirituals</a>” by Howard Thurman, “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Invisible-Man">Invisible Man</a>” by Ralph Ellison, “<a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/pearl-buck/kinfolk/">Kinfolk</a>” by Pearl S. Buck and “<a href="http://media.sabda.org/alkitab-2/Religion-Online.org%20Books/Niebuhr,%20Reinhold%20-%20Moral%20Man%20and%20Immoral%20Society%20-%20Study%20in.pdf">Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics</a>” by Reinhold Niebuhr.</p>
<p>Others include “<a href="https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass55/douglass55.html">Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom</a>,” “<a href="http://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx">Silent Spring</a>” by Rachel Carson, “<a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/barbara-deming/prison-notes/">Prison Notes</a>” by Barbara Deming, “<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/Killers-of-the-Dream/">Killers of the Dream</a>” by Lillian Smith and “<a href="https://nannieburroughs.wordpress.com/">Here and Beyond the Sunset</a>” by Nannie Helen Burroughs. </p>
<h2>A celebrated writer</h2>
<p>Following the 381-day <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/montgomery-bus-boycott">Montgomery bus boycott</a>, which started in 1955, King became a national figure whose ideas and opinions were heavily sought out by book publishers, newspapers and magazines.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Martin Luther King Jr. riding in the front of a bus." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440911/original/file-20220114-15-ltwodp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440911/original/file-20220114-15-ltwodp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440911/original/file-20220114-15-ltwodp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440911/original/file-20220114-15-ltwodp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440911/original/file-20220114-15-ltwodp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440911/original/file-20220114-15-ltwodp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440911/original/file-20220114-15-ltwodp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Martin Luther King Jr. rides a Montgomery bus up front with Glenn Smiley of Texas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/reverend-martin-luther-king-leader-of-the-montgomery-bus-news-photo/874962342?adppopup=true">Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He became a prolific writer and authored countless letters – arguably the most famous being “<a href="https://theconversation.com/martin-luther-king-jr-had-a-much-more-radical-message-than-a-dream-of-racial-brotherhood-92795">Letter from Birmingham Jail</a>” – as well as several books, among the most notable “<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1028827748">Why We Can’t Wait</a>” and “<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/767255335">Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?</a>”</p>
<p>But many Americans may not know that he wrote a regular column in Ebony magazine, the leading black national publication at the time. In his <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/advice-living">“Advice for Living” column</a>, he took questions from readers and addressed a wide range of subjects, including personal questions about marital infidelity, sexual identity, birth control, race relations, capital punishment and atomic weapons.</p>
<h2>A follower of Gandhi</h2>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Martin Luther King and wife Coretta Scott King with former Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440910/original/file-20220114-17-1y61tiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440910/original/file-20220114-17-1y61tiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440910/original/file-20220114-17-1y61tiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440910/original/file-20220114-17-1y61tiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440910/original/file-20220114-17-1y61tiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=588&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440910/original/file-20220114-17-1y61tiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=588&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440910/original/file-20220114-17-1y61tiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=588&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, center, is flanked by guests Martin Luther King and wife Coretta Scott King during a one-month visit to India in 1959.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/indian-prime-minister-jawaharlal-nehru-is-flanked-by-his-news-photo/517323686?adppopup=true">Bettmann</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1959, King and his wife visited India, where King’s commitment to the nonviolent teachings of Gandhi expanded and deepened. King always carried a note with him on a scrap of paper that read “Gandhi Speaks for Us. …” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Gandhi walks in a crowd." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440892/original/file-20220114-23-rsql8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440892/original/file-20220114-23-rsql8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440892/original/file-20220114-23-rsql8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440892/original/file-20220114-23-rsql8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440892/original/file-20220114-23-rsql8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440892/original/file-20220114-23-rsql8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440892/original/file-20220114-23-rsql8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gandhi walks with Sarojini Naidu in 1931.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/gandhi-walks-with-sarojini-naidu-from-the-station-at-news-photo/530728624?adppopup=true">Photo by George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A lover of music</h2>
<p>Music formed an important part of King’s life, beginning with his childhood experiences in Ebenezer Baptist Church, where his mother, Alberta Williams King, was the church organist. Alberta King introduced young M.L., as he was called, to music as a child. He later sang solos and sang with the church choir. While a student at Morehouse College from 1944 to 1948, Martin Luther King Jr. sang in the renowned Morehouse College Glee Club as well as the Atlanta University-Morehouse-Spelman Chorus. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Martin Luther King attends chapel service in the 1940s." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440894/original/file-20220114-23-11xlofe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440894/original/file-20220114-23-11xlofe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440894/original/file-20220114-23-11xlofe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440894/original/file-20220114-23-11xlofe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440894/original/file-20220114-23-11xlofe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=663&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440894/original/file-20220114-23-11xlofe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=663&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440894/original/file-20220114-23-11xlofe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=663&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In this photograph taken between 1944 and 1948, Martin Luther King Jr. attends a weekly chapel service in Sale Hall at Morehouse College.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of Morehouse College.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Following his marriage to Coretta Scott in 1953, King expanded his world of music even more. He met Coretta in Boston, where she was studying to become a concert soprano at the New England Conservatory of Music. Coretta introduced King to classical music. He came to appreciate both sacred and secular music and enjoyed jazz and blues as well. </p>
<p>Some of King’s favorite hymns and gospel songs included “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYUwO6_lysw">Take My Hand, Precious Lord</a>,” “<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=how+i+got+over&oq=how+i+got+over&aqs=chrome..69i57j46i512j0i512j46i512l2j0i512j46i512j0i512j46i512j0i512.4393j1j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">How I Got Over</a>,” “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXu_NLFY9pY">Thank You, Lord</a>” and “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6hTDHgm7Oc">Never Grow Old</a>.” </p>
<p>King was also a friend to Aretha Franklin and her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. King felt that music was a powerful element in activism and nonviolent protest. </p>
<h2>A Nobel Prize winner</h2>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Martin Luther King Jr. receives the Nobel Peace Prize" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440888/original/file-20220114-21-eu7nup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440888/original/file-20220114-21-eu7nup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=385&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440888/original/file-20220114-21-eu7nup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=385&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440888/original/file-20220114-21-eu7nup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=385&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440888/original/file-20220114-21-eu7nup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440888/original/file-20220114-21-eu7nup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440888/original/file-20220114-21-eu7nup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Crown Prince Harald and King Olav of Norway congratulate King after he receives the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1964.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/crown-prince-harald-and-king-olav-of-norway-congratulate-news-photo/517292426?adppopup=true">Bettmann</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At the age of 35, King was the youngest person, the third African American and the 12th American, to win the coveted <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r98tT0j1a0">Nobel Peace Prize</a> for his steadfast belief that nonviolence was an integral part of obtaining full citizenship rights for Black people in America. </p>
<p>On Dec. 10, 1964, King announced that he was donating the<a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/king-wins-nobel-peace-prize"> Nobel Prize money</a> to the civil rights movement.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vicki Crawford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In his brief life, Martin Luther King Jr. had a variety of interests that informed his work as leader of the civil rights movement. His alma mater has collected some objects that tell his story.Vicki Crawford, Professor of Africana Studies, Morehouse CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1744852022-01-12T14:33:51Z2022-01-12T14:33:51ZAfricans and African-Americans would honour Martin Luther King by rekindling their bonds<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440415/original/file-20220112-13-fulvzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bernice A. King, daughter of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, at a recent press conference preview the King Holiday observance in Atlanta, Georgia.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA-EFE/Erik S. Lesser</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>During an official visit to Washington DC in 1962, Cameroon’s founding President Ahmadou Ahidjo informed President John F. Kennedy of his <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/article/abs/equality-noninterference-and-sovereignty-president-ahmadou-ahidjo-and-the-making-of-cameroonus-relations/20C7C112F4588FFA414E0E0572ECFCA7">displeasure over anti-black racism in the US</a>. Ahidjo met and <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/article/abs/equality-noninterference-and-sovereignty-president-ahmadou-ahidjo-and-the-making-of-cameroonus-relations/20C7C112F4588FFA414E0E0572ECFCA7">praised</a> the leadership of the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lift-Every-Voice-Making-Movement/dp/B0096EQTG0">National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)</a>, the oldest African American civil rights organisation, for its willingness to unite with Africa “in a world-wide movement to fight against the evils of racial discrimination, injustice, racial prejudices, and hatred”.</p>
<p>He later <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Contribution-national-construction-African-political/dp/B0007K7TL6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2Q1HLGGZVNUVF&keywords=ahmadou+ahidjo%2C+contributions+to+national+construction&qid=1639875012&sprefix=ahmadou+ahidjo%2C+contributions+to+national+construction%2Caps%2C75&sr=8-1">wrote that</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Each time a black man [and woman] is humiliated anywhere in the world, all Negroes the world over are hurt. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>President Ahidjo called for a united front between Africans and African-Americans to confront anti-black racism. </p>
<p>He was not the first postcolonial African leader to make such a request. Ghana’s founding President Kwame Nkrumah’s <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313574089_Kwame_Nkrumah_and_the_panafrican_vision_Between_acceptance_and_rebuttal">Pan-Africanism</a> was a message about black upliftment and unity, and his close ally, Sekou Touré of Guinea, <a href="https://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/recipient/ahmed-s%C3%A9kou-tour%C3%A9-1922-1984">advocated similar objectives</a>.</p>
<p>Those calls for a crusade against anti-black racism were deeply rooted in the best of African nationalism. </p>
<p>On the other side of the Atlantic, calls for collaboration to end racism were also taking place. A leading proponent of that message was the <a href="https://www.grandcentralpublishing.com/titles/clayborne-carson/a-call-to-conscience/9780759520080/">Rev. Martin Luther King Jr</a>. He and many in his generation rejected the negative proscriptions of Africa, and called for Africans and African Americans to join forces in the anti-racism crusade.</p>
<p>They <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53360.A_Testament_of_Hope">spoke fondly</a> of their roots in Africa: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>we are descendants of the Africans…“our heritage is Africa. We should never seek to break the ties, nor should the Africans.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Africans and African-Americans must rekindle the spirit of collaboration and cooperation which existed among black nationalists over half a century ago to counter the rising tide of anti-black racism in the US. It was a relationship which came with mutual political, economic, and cultural benefits. </p>
<p>I am a scholar of modern African history with particular emphasis on Africa-US relations and have <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498502375/African-Immersion-American-College-Studen">published extensively in the field</a>. My <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/article/abs/equality-noninterference-and-sovereignty-president-ahmadou-ahidjo-and-the-making-of-cameroonus-relations/20C7C112F4588FFA414E0E0572ECFCA7">latest publication</a>, on Cameroon-US relations, among other things, addresses the importance of the collaboration between Africans and African Americans to uplift Black people. </p>
<h2>King’s eyeopening visit to Ghana</h2>
<p>King’s knowledge of Africa evolved slowly, and was initially peppered with the usual beliefs of African backwardness. But a trip to Ghana was transformative. In 1957, President Kwame Nkrumah <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trip-newly-independent-ghana-inspired-074416217.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall">invited him to his country’s independence ceremony</a>. </p>
<p>King honoured the invitation. During the ceremony King ”<a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trip-newly-independent-ghana-inspired-074416217.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall&guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly90aGVjb252ZXJzYXRpb24uY29tLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAIaZb_DR4jGxK6EFPgOGI9NAxQlgNssgDR1Urqw_22DKWDTH4oAwgLKZi3XDKQ8oeNxxG2BJHmkTuYPo5lJS8i79BcdCPlLceLsaiKj6syRmfTPgGwLugTIUkBOO_ABBsxQXXVcgUo4yFnCFViPTo31rBpDUaaZJ0kNuhVwpvVgL">started weeping… crying for joy</a>“ when the British flag was replaced with the Ghanaian flag. He spoke endlessly about the endurance, determination, and courage of the African people. The anti-colonial struggle in Ghana mirrored what was taking place all over Africa.</p>
<p>Later, King <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/birth-new-nation-sermon-delivered-dexter-avenue-baptist-church">noted</a> that Ghana’s independence </p>
<blockquote>
<p>will have worldwide implication and repercussions — not only for Asia and Africa, but also for America. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This gave African Americans new insights about the anti-colonial struggle. </p>
<p>Increasingly, King saw parallels between the anti-colonial movement in Africa and the civil rights struggle in the US. In his sermon, ”<a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/birth-new-nation-sermon-delivered-dexter-avenue-baptist-church">The Birth of a new nation</a>“, he stated that the Ghana example reinforced his belief that an</p>
<blockquote>
<p>oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He added that nonviolence was an effective tactic against oppression.
European colonialism of Africa and segregation in America were both "systems of evil”, he wrote, and <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/birth-new-nation-sermon-delivered-dexter-avenue-baptist-church">summoned all to work to defeat them</a>. </p>
<h2>African nationalism meets US civil rights movement</h2>
<p>While racial segregation remained entrenched in America, the tide of independence was changing quickly in Africa. In 1960, 17 African <a href="https://www.macmillanexplorers.com/national-and-regional-histories/history-of-africa/17078210">nations gained independence</a>. They took their anti-racism message to the United Nations, where they chastised the US for its failure to stop anti-black racism. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Marchers carry a poster demanding justice for George Floyd and another bearing his face." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440420/original/file-20220112-17-nryl1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440420/original/file-20220112-17-nryl1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440420/original/file-20220112-17-nryl1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440420/original/file-20220112-17-nryl1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440420/original/file-20220112-17-nryl1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440420/original/file-20220112-17-nryl1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440420/original/file-20220112-17-nryl1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The murder of George Floyd by policeman Derek Chauvin angered the African Union.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA-EFE/ Craig Lassig</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>African representatives in the US were often victims of American racism. Given the <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/strategies-of-containment-9780195174472?cc=us&lang=en&">Cold War</a>, US Secretary of State Dean Rusk stated that one of America’s major Cold War problems was the continuous anti-black racism in the country.</p>
<p>After Nigeria, King increasingly spoke of a sense of urgency. In his article, “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1961/09/10/archives/the-time-for-freedom-has-come-this-belief-dr-king-asserts.html#:%7E:text=%27The%20Time%20for%20Freedom%20Has%20Come%27%3B%20This%20belief%2C,By%20Martin%20Luther%20King%20Jr.%20Sept.%2010%2C%201961">The Time for Freedom has Come</a>”, he praised the independence movement in Africa while blasting the slow pace of change in the US. He referred to the independence movement in Africa as the </p>
<blockquote>
<p>greatest single international influence on American Negro students.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>African nationalists such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, Tom Mboya, Hastings Banda were “popular heroes on most Negro college campuses”, King stated. He <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53360.A_Testament_of_Hope">urged</a> African governments to do more to support the civil rights struggle of “their brothers [and sisters] in the US”. </p>
<p>In addition, newspapers in several African nations used the treatment of African Americans to question the role of America as the <a href="https://www.kentstateuniversitypress.com/2010/the-peace-corps-in-cameroon/">leader of the “free world”</a>.</p>
<h2>Ebb and flow</h2>
<p>King and his contemporaries took seriously the partnership with Africa. African American leaders, activists, and scholars alike turned to Africa for inspiration. For example, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/W_E_B_Du_Bois.html?id=-KkRAQAAMAAJ">WEB Du Bois</a>, whose credentials included being co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Pan-African movement, relocated to Ghana. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/16/us/stokely-carmichael-rights-leader-who-coined-black-power-dies-at-57.html">Stokely Carmichael</a> (Kwame Ture), who introduced the Black Power concept in the civil rights movement settled in Guinea. Many others immigrated to Africa. </p>
<p>Poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou was transformed by the African experience. <a href="https://www.theafricareport.com/7921/maya-angelous-meeting-with-africa/">She wrote</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>For it is Africa that struts around in our rounded calves, wiggles around in our protruding butts, and crackles in our wide and frank laugh. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The 1960s and 1970s were decades of remarkable collaboration and cooperation between Africans and African-Americans.</p>
<p>American political leaders took note of the collaboration between Africans and African-Americans. President John F. Kennedy, the first American president to treat Africa with respect, created a more informed US foreign policy towards African nations – in part <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cold-War-Black-Liberation-1948-1968/dp/0826204589/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1C1CIDK16G45D&keywords=Thomas+noer&qid=1639886835&sprefix=thomas+noer%2Caps%2C90&sr=8-1">to woo the support of African-Americans in elections</a>.</p>
<p>Kennedy’s policy was later abandoned by his successors – some of whom reverted to referring to Africans as “<a href="https://books.google.co.ke/books?id=WsIIDJlKm6sC&pg=PA147&lpg=PA147&dq=Lyndon+Johnson+Africa+cannibals&source=bl&ots=bQBLUppsTF&sig=yZPq5JA4MdgbQH2LsdCke68rt3M&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Lyndon%20Johnson%20Africa%20cannibals&f=false">cannibals</a>” and “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Enchanting-Darkness-American-Twentieth-Century/dp/0870133217/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3LS3NS1GALRTI&keywords=an+enchanting+darkness%3A+the+american+vision+of+africa+in+the+twentieth+century&qid=1639879403&sprefix=an+enchanting+darkness+the+american+vision+of+africa+in+the+twentieth+century%2Caps%2C81&sr=8-1">genetically inferior</a>”.</p>
<p>Those new policies coincided with a deep level of ignorance about Africans by African-Americans and vice-versa. And little effort was made by each side to bridge the gap. African Americans increasingly saw Africans through a stereotypical lens invented by the western society to justify colonialism and slavery. </p>
<p>In turn, Africans accepted uncritically America’s <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498502375/African-Immersion-American-College-Students-in-Cameroon">mainstream society’s labels of African Americans</a>. The type of relations and advocacy forged by King’s generation had evaporated.</p>
<h2>Looking ahead</h2>
<p>But the tide may be changing. There was renewed interest following the release of the movie Black Panther which showed blacks as capable, determined, and <a href="https://apercu.web.unc.edu/2018/04/the-black-panther-to-african-american-society/">possessed civilisation</a>. Following the murder of <a href="https://theconversation.com/george-floyd-why-the-sight-of-these-brave-exhausted-protesters-gives-me-hope-139804">George Floyd</a> in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the African Union publicly condemned America for its continuous racism against blacks. </p>
<p>The spokesperson Ebba Kalondo <a href="https://au.int/en/pressreleases/20200529/statement-chairperson-following-murder-george-floyd-usa">issued</a> a strong condemnation of</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the continuing discriminatory practices against Black citizens of the United States of America.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Kalondo demanded a full investigation of the killing. </p>
<p>This new position may rekindle the spirit of cooperation and collaboration which characterised the King era. A major part of ending anti-black racism in the US is to learn about the role Africa played in shaping the idea of the west and <a href="https://www.bookdepository.com/Born-Blackness-Howard-W-French/9781631495823">Africa’s contributions to global civilizations</a>. </p>
<p>That knowledge will implode centuries-old myths of Africa’s backwardness and incapability. It is up to African Americans to champion that conversation in university classrooms and many other public spaces. </p>
<p>Finally, what King said about Africa as full of “rich opportunities”, inviting African Americans to “lend their technical assistance” to a rising continent remains as true today as it was when he said it nearly 60 years ago. </p>
<p>The failure to do so has increasingly ceded the ground to other actors <a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/03/07/the-new-scramble-for-africa">who continue to exploit the continent</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/174485/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julius A. Amin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>King saw parallels between the anti-colonial movement in Africa and the civil rights struggle in the US.Julius A. Amin, Professor, Department of History, University of DaytonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1745702022-01-08T00:58:24Z2022-01-08T00:58:24ZSidney Poitier – Hollywood’s first Black leading man reflected the civil rights movement on screen<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/439876/original/file-20220107-33062-1cz5l2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=49%2C49%2C2947%2C2160&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sidney Poitier, seen here in a 1980 photograph.
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/sidney-poitier-the-american-actor-and-film-director-news-photo/3300155?adppopup=true">Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the summer of 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. introduced the keynote speaker for the 10th-anniversary convention banquet of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Southern-Christian-Leadership-Conference">Southern Christian Leadership Conference</a>. Their guest, he said, was his “soul brother.” </p>
<p>“He has carved for himself an imperishable niche in the annals of our nation’s history,” King told the audience of 2,000 delegates. “I consider him a friend. I consider him a great friend of humanity.” </p>
<p>That man was Sidney Poitier.</p>
<p>Poitier, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/07/entertainment/sidney-poitier-death/index.html">who died at 94 on Jan. 7, 2022</a>, broke the mold of what a Black actor could be in Hollywood. Before the 1950s, Black movie characters generally reflected <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/toms-coons-mulattoes-mammies-and-bucks-9780826429537/">racist stereotypes such as lazy servants and beefy mammies</a>. Then came Poitier, the only Black man to consistently win leading roles in major films from the late 1950s through the late 1960s. Like King, Poitier projected ideals of respectability and integrity. He attracted not only the loyalty of African Americans, but also the goodwill of white liberals. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.memphis.edu/history/faculty/faculty/aram-goudsouzian.php">my biography</a> of him, titled “<a href="https://mclinc.polarislibrary.com/polaris/search/title.aspx?pos=1&cn=798836">Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon</a>,” I sought to capture his whole life, including his incredible rags-to-riches arc, his sizzling vitality on screen, his personal triumphs and foibles and his quest to live up to the values set forth by his Bahamian parents. But the most fascinating aspect of Poitier’s career, to me, was his political and racial symbolism. In many ways, his screen life intertwined with that of the civil rights movement – and King himself.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Actor Sidney Poitier marches during a civil rights protest in 1968." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/439871/original/file-20220107-33062-bsj36m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/439871/original/file-20220107-33062-bsj36m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439871/original/file-20220107-33062-bsj36m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439871/original/file-20220107-33062-bsj36m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439871/original/file-20220107-33062-bsj36m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439871/original/file-20220107-33062-bsj36m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439871/original/file-20220107-33062-bsj36m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sidney Poitier, center, marches during the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., in May 1968.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/bahamian-american-actor-and-civil-rights-activist-sidney-news-photo/554919857?adppopup=true">Photo by Chester Sheard/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>An age of protests</h2>
<p>In three separate columns in 1957, 1961 and 1962, a New York Daily News columnist named <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sidney_Poitier/MrXqCQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=dorothy+masters+sidney+poitier&pg=PA178&printsec=frontcover">Dorothy Masters</a> marveled that Poitier had the warmth and charisma of a minister. Poitier lent his name and resources to King’s causes, and he participated in demonstrations such as the <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/prayer-pilgrimage-freedom">1957 Prayer Pilgrimage</a> and the <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/march-washington-jobs-and-freedom">1963 March on Washington</a>. In this era of sit-ins, Freedom Rides and mass marches, activists engaged in nonviolent sacrifice not only to highlight racist oppression, but also to win broader sympathy for the cause of civil rights.</p>
<p>In that same vein, Poitier deliberately chose to portray characters who radiated goodness. They had decent values and helped white characters, and they often sacrificed themselves. He earned his first star billing in 1958, in “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051525/">The Defiant Ones</a>,” in which he played an escaped prisoner handcuffed to a racist played by Tony Curtis. At the end, with the chain unbound, Poitier jumps off a train to stick with his new white friend. Writer James Baldwin <a href="https://www.npr.org/2017/02/02/511860933/james-baldwin-in-his-own-searing-revelatory-words-i-am-not-your-negro">reported seeing the film</a> on Broadway, where white audiences clapped with reassurance, their racial guilt alleviated. When he saw it again in Harlem, members of the predominantly Black audience yelled “Get back on the train, you fool!”</p>
<p>King won the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/summary/">Nobel Peace Prize in 1964</a>. In that same year, Poitier won the Oscar for Best Actor for “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057251/">Lilies of the Field</a>,” in which he played Homer Smith, a traveling handyman who builds a chapel for German nuns out of the goodness of his heart. The sweet, low-budget movie was a surprise hit. In its own way, like the horrifying footage of water hoses and police dogs attacking civil rights activists, it fostered swelling support for racial integration.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Sidney Poitier performs in the film 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/439875/original/file-20220107-17-wc4aft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/439875/original/file-20220107-17-wc4aft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439875/original/file-20220107-17-wc4aft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439875/original/file-20220107-17-wc4aft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439875/original/file-20220107-17-wc4aft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439875/original/file-20220107-17-wc4aft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439875/original/file-20220107-17-wc4aft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sidney Poitier, Katherine Houghton and Spencer Tracy in the 1967 film ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/sidney-poitier-katherine-houghton-spencer-tracy-in-guess-news-photo/1174149274?adppopup=true">Photo by RDB/ullstein bild via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A better man</h2>
<p>By the time of the actor’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference speech, both King and Poitier seemed to have a slipping grip on the American public. <a href="https://www.history.com/news/1967-summer-riots-detroit-newark-kerner-commission">Bloody and destructive riots</a> plagued the nation’s cities, reflecting the enduring discontent of many poor African Americans. The swelling calls for “<a href="https://www.history.com/news/black-power-movement-civil-rights">Black Power</a>” challenged the ideals of nonviolence and racial brotherhood – ideals associated with both King and Poitier. </p>
<p>When Poitier stepped to the lectern that evening, he lamented the “greed, selfishness, indifference to the suffering of others, corruption of our value system, and a moral deterioration that has already scarred our souls irrevocably.” “On my bad days,” he said, “I am guilty of suspecting that there is a national death wish.” </p>
<p>By the late 1960s, both King and Poitier had reached a crossroads. Federal legislation was dismantling <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Jim-Crow-law">Jim Crow</a> in the South, but African Americans still suffered from limited opportunity. King prescribed a “revolution of values,” denounced the Vietnam War, and launched a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/mlk-last-march/555953/">Poor People’s Campaign</a>. Poitier, in his 1967 speech for the SCLC, said that King, by adhering to his convictions for social justice and human dignity, “has made a better man of me.” </p>
<h2>Exceptional characters</h2>
<p>Poitier tried to adhere to his own convictions. As long as he was the only Black leading man, he insisted on playing the same kind of hero. But in the era of Black Power, had Poitier’s saintly hero become another stereotype? His rage was repressed, his sexuality stifled. A Black critic, writing in The New York Times, asked <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1967/09/10/archives/why-does-white-america-love-sidney-poitier-so-why-does-white.html">“Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?”</a></p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Sidney Poitier receives Medal of Freedom in 2009." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/439872/original/file-20220107-48044-1rx7rbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/439872/original/file-20220107-48044-1rx7rbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439872/original/file-20220107-48044-1rx7rbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439872/original/file-20220107-48044-1rx7rbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439872/original/file-20220107-48044-1rx7rbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439872/original/file-20220107-48044-1rx7rbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439872/original/file-20220107-48044-1rx7rbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President Barack Obama presents Academy Award-winning actor Sidney Poitier with the Medal of Freedom in 2009.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-barack-obama-presents-the-medal-of-freedom-to-news-photo/89761025?adppopup=true">Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>That critic had a point: As Poitier himself knew, his films created too-perfect characters. Although the films allowed white audiences to appreciate a Black man, they also implied that racial equality depends on such exceptional characters, stripped of any racial baggage. From late 1967 into early 1968, <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/02/sidney-poitier-remarkable-run-in-hollywood-history">three of Poitier’s movies owned the top spot at the box office</a>, and a poll ranked him the most bankable star in Hollywood. </p>
<p>Each film provided a hero who soothed the liberal center. His mannered schoolteacher in “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062376/">To Sir, With Love</a>” tames a class of teenage ruffians in London’s East End. His razor-sharp detective in “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061811/">In the Heat of the Night</a>” helps a crotchety white Southern sheriff solve a murder. His world-renowned doctor in “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061735/">Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner</a>” marries a white woman, but only after winning the blessing of her parents. </p>
<p>“I try to make movies about the dignity, nobility, the magnificence of human life,” <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469622934/sidney-poitier/">he insisted</a>. Audiences flocked to his films, in part, because he transcended racial division and social despair – even as more African Americans, baby boomers and film critics tired of the old-fashioned do-gooder spirit of these movies.</p>
<h2>Intertwined lives</h2>
<p>And then, the lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sidney Poitier intersected one final time. After King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, Poitier was a stand-in for the ideal that King embodied. When he presented at the <a href="https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/1968">Academy Awards</a>, Poitier won a massive ovation. “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” captured most of the major awards. Hollywood again dealt with the nation’s racial upheaval through Poitier movies.</p>
<p>But after King’s violent murder, the Poitier icon no longer captured the national mood. In the 1970s, a generation of “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/blaxploitation-movie">Blaxploitation</a>” films featured violent, sexually charged heroes. They were a reaction against the image of a Black leading man associated with Poitier. Although his career evolved, Poitier was no longer a superstar, and he no longer bore the burden of representing the Black freedom movement. Yet for a generation, he had served as popular culture’s preeminent expression of the ideals of Martin Luther King.</p>
<p>[<em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://memberservices.theconversation.com/newsletters/?nl=weekly&source=inline-weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/174570/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aram Goudsouzian does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Poitier dazzled Hollywood with on-screen grace and bankability. His dignified roles and respectable values forever changed the image of Blacks, then mostly portrayed as maids, buffoons or criminals.Aram Goudsouzian, Bizot Family Professor of History, University of MemphisLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1723652021-12-02T16:04:53Z2021-12-02T16:04:53ZThe acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse raises questions about white privilege<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/435131/original/file-20211201-16-pexsi8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=86%2C206%2C3748%2C2667&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">People carry out a "die in" to protest the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse in Portland last week. The Rittenhouse case highlights the fluidity of white privilege.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Andrew Selsky)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Recently, two highly publicized trials came to a close. One involved three white men <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/arbery-death-trial-verdict-1.6259674">found guilty of killing Ahmaud Arbery</a>, an unarmed Black man who was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/ahmaud-arbery-shooting-georgia.html">attacked and killed while jogging in Brunswick, Ga.</a></p>
<p>The other case centred around a white 18-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse shot three people during an anti-racism protest. Jurors acquitted him of all charges.</p>
<p>In case you missed the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/27/kyle-rittenhouse-republican-party-trump">details of this highly polarizing case</a>: Rittenhouse shot and killed two men and injured a third during a protest in Kenosha, Wis., in 2020. The protests were in response to the police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake. Rittenhouse claimed his shots were fired in self-defence. </p>
<p>Both trials have brought up questions about race in America, Black lives, whiteness, the future of protest and self-defence. The Rittenhouse case also raises questions about when whiteness protects white people and when it does not.</p>
<p>In the last decade, the American public has witnessed <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/13/trayvon-martin-parents-racism-alive-and-well-in-america">both civilian white men </a> as well as police injuring and killing innocent Black Americans with few consequences. Some extreme cases result in death, but other examples of harassment and violence are abundant. </p>
<p>The harassment of Black people in their daily lives, such as birdwatcher <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/06/us/amy-cooper-central-park-birdwatcher-charges/index.html">Christian Cooper</a> or <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/us/black-man-asked-pool-incident.html">Shayne Holland</a>, who was asked to leave his apartment complex swimming pool, is a more quiet, insidious violence.</p>
<p>In the case of Rittenhouse, however, both the accused and the victims were white. Those who are familiar with the American justice system aren’t surprised by the non-guilty verdict. Rittenhouse is added to a long list of white men who have <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/wajlp18&div=13&id=&page=">everything stacked in their favour in a court of law</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/11/19/metro/kyle-rittenhouse-white-supremacy-privilege-self-defense/">Rittenhouse had his (white) boyhood</a> and a favourable judge who banned anyone in the court from labelling the shooting victims <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/11/04/language-matters-kyle-rittenhouse-trial/">as victims</a>. </p>
<p>While Rittenhouse is not connected to any white supremacy groups, <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/kyle-rittenhouse-bridged-the-divide-between-the-far-right-and-mainstream-conservatives/">his lionization</a> by them has given him social and political clout. Former president <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/24/donald-trump-kyle-rittenhouse-really-a-nice-young-man-after-visit">Donald Trump</a>, FOX News media host Tucker Carlson and <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/kyle-rittenhouse-qcquittal-celebrated-white-supremacists-online-telegram-1651961">other online commentators in far-right chat rooms</a> are applauding Rittenhouse as a “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/11/22/kyle-rittenhouse-tucker-carlson-interview/">sweet kid</a>” and vigilante.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1461767594751500295"}"></div></p>
<h2>Who does ‘whiteness’ save?</h2>
<p>The acquittal of Rittenhouse and his celebrity among right-wing extremists proves that white skin colour alone is not enough to protect white people. If whiteness is not enacted in service to white supremacists, it is considered a threat to them. </p>
<p><a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/8401122/ahmaud-arbery-kyle-rittenhouse-vigilantism/">The white victims, Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber and Gaige Grosskreutz, have been called “race traitors” by the far right</a>, meaning their whiteness stopped shielding them from the violence of other white people.</p>
<p>History is full of examples of this. Abolitionist <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2011/11/pro-slavery-mob-kills-elijah-parish-lovejoy-nov-7-1837-067703">Elijah Parish Lovejoy</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/12/15/a-white-mother-went-to-alabama-to-fight-for-civil-rights-the-klan-killed-her-for-it/">civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2017.1370896">Heather Heyer</a> — who was protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 — and the 168 adults and children who died in the <a href="https://rke.abertay.ac.uk/ws/files/8579772/Aaron%20Winter,%20American%20Terror,%202010.pdf">Oklahoma City bombing</a> are part of a history of white supremacists killing those they deem unfit for their version of whiteness. </p>
<p>After the civil rights movement, as <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/the-history-of-white-supremacy-in-america-205171/">legal and social repercussions</a> against violence against Black Americans were put in place, white supremacist groups felt that they could not be as openly violent as they had historically been. This pattern of violence — failing to protect white people who take the side of racialized communities — <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22792136/kyle-rittenhouse-verdict-militia-violence-self-defense">will likely be exacerbated</a> by the Rittenhouse acquittal.</p>
<p>The betrayal of white supremacy by allies is seen as so egregious that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/white-supremacy-mantra-anti-racism/620832/">any obstacle to the dominance of white people</a> will be removed regardless of the colour of their skin. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1461772252870029312"}"></div></p>
<h2>Fear of being replaced</h2>
<p>We have increasingly seen more <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8022571/">violent counter-reactions</a> to the Black Lives Matter movement. Many of those who attend in opposition to the movement are hyper-vigilant about defending what they see as “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09637494.2018.1483995?casa_token=6yx7AtifvQIAAAAA:qkPCmqv-8mlxbkkfaSFp4stDKUnPSrTQYVQmfBdwgEQoryycePBLw0dCGxnX_lsyYzQjFUPagl8_5jw">American values</a>.” </p>
<p>The idea that white men are <a href="https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-102-issue-3/policing-the-boundaries-of-whiteness-the-tragedy-of-being-out-of-place-from-emmett-till-to-trayvon-martin/">protecting society from Black peple</a>
has been part of the American narrative since the era of slavery. This fear of being <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/13684302211028293">replaced by people of colour</a> persists today and contributes to a sense of fragility. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A woman hugs a man." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/435133/original/file-20211201-19-13jby0r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/435133/original/file-20211201-19-13jby0r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435133/original/file-20211201-19-13jby0r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435133/original/file-20211201-19-13jby0r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435133/original/file-20211201-19-13jby0r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435133/original/file-20211201-19-13jby0r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435133/original/file-20211201-19-13jby0r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, is hugged by a supporter after the jury convicted her son’s killers, Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael and William ‘Roddie’ Bryan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Stephen B. Morton)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The protection of white safety is ingrained in western societies, including within our legal systems. The Rittenhouse trial has likely <a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/11/24/kyle-rittenhouse-ahmaud-arbery-right-wing-vigilantes/">created a sense of safety among right-wing</a> groups as this case <a href="https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/11/25/why-the-kyle-rittenhouse-acquittal-stabs-at-the-heart-of-the-bipoc-community.html">establishes historical precedent for their actions to be labelled as self-defence</a>. </p>
<p>While Ahmaud Arbery was killed due to his Blackness, Rittenhouse’s victims shared an identity with their perpetrator. The praise for Rittenhouse, as well as the denouncement of his victims by white extremists, highlights the question of who is safe under white supremacy and who is not.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172365/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jasmeet Bahia does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The lionization of Rittenhouse by the right proves that even skin colour is not enough to protect white people who support anti-racism movements.Jasmeet Bahia, PhD Candidate, Sociology, Carleton UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1655812021-09-27T12:53:22Z2021-09-27T12:53:22ZHow civil rights activist Howard Fuller became a devout champion of school choice<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417270/original/file-20210820-17-1cgcw33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5193%2C3466&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Education reformer Howard Fuller has worked with GOP leaders in support of school vouchers.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/dr-howard-fuller-author-of-the-new-book-no-struggle-no-news-photo/455118800?adppopup=true">Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As a longtime civil rights activist and education reformer, Howard Fuller has seen his support for school choice spark both <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/howard-fuller-a-civil-rights-warrior-or-billionares-tool/2014/09/09/3aedeff4-37c1-11e4-9c9f-ebb47272e40e_story.html">controversy and confusion</a>. That’s because it aligns him with polarizing Republican figures that include <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/502961-trump-calls-school-choice-the-civil-rights-issue-of-the-decade">Donald Trump</a> and Trump’s former secretary of education, <a href="https://theconversation.com/through-her-divisive-rhetoric-education-secretary-devos-leaves-a-troubled-legacy-of-her-own-152914">Betsy DeVos</a>. </p>
<p>But unlike those figures, Fuller’s support for school choice is not rooted in a conservative agenda to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/05/20/school-privatization-movement-marches-on-during-pandemic/">privatize public schools</a>. Rather, it is grounded in his <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/we-are-an-african-people-9780199861477?cc=us&lang=en&">ongoing quest</a> to provide Black students a quality education by any means necessary. </p>
<p>I write about Fuller in my new book “<a href="http://www.beacon.org/The-Choice-We-Face-P1635.aspx">The Choice We Face</a>,” which traces the history of school choice as well as demands for radical education reform by Black activists. Unlike most other school choice advocates I interviewed, Fuller’s activism predates the current debate and has firm footing in the Black Power movement.</p>
<p>Now 80, Fuller <a href="https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2020/06/19/national-school-choice-advocate-howard-fuller-retire-marquette/3223241001/">retired in June 2020</a> from Marquette University, where he was a longtime education professor and founded the <a href="https://www.marquette.edu/education/centers-and-clinics/institute-for-the-transformation-of-learning.php">Institute for the Transformation of Learning</a> to improve education options for low-income students in Milwaukee. During the 1990s he served as superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools.</p>
<p>Here are five aspects from Fuller’s career that suggest a nuanced lens into the school choice movement. </p>
<h2>1. Advocated for Black Power in the 1960s</h2>
<p>Fuller first became involved in the civil rights movement when he joined the <a href="https://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/Mss/MOM-Oral%20History/Fuller_Howard_oral_transcript%5B1%5D.pdf">Congress of Racial Equality</a> in 1964 as a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. </p>
<p>In Cleveland, Malcolm X delivered a version of the “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-020-09484-5">Ballot or the Bullet</a>” speech <a href="https://www.marquette.edu/mupress/Fuller.shtml">in April 1964</a>. Days later, Rev. Bruce Klunder, a 27-year-old white Presbyterian minister, was accidentally <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/rev-bruce-klunder">crushed to death</a> by a bulldozer as he and several other activists protested the construction of a new, all-Black school. The school was the city’s attempt to avoid <a href="https://case.edu/ech/articles/k/klunder-bruce-w">desegregation</a>. </p>
<p>Fuller later helped establish and lead Malcolm X Liberation University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The independent Black-run school, which operated from 1969 to 1973, offered a unique African and African American studies curriculum as well as technical training for students to work as activists in the freedom struggle. </p>
<p>Controlling and safeguarding a school for one’s own community became a <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/we-are-an-african-people-9780199861477?cc=us&lang=en&">defining principle</a> of the Black Power movement. For Fuller and others, education was liberation for Black communities. As <a href="https://www.marquette.edu/mupress/Fuller.shtml">Fuller described</a> it, the mission of the university was to educate students “totally committed to the liberation of all African people.” </p>
<h2>2. Proposed an all-Black school district in the 1980s</h2>
<p>In 1978, Fuller was embroiled in a struggle in Milwaukee to save his alma mater, North Division High School, <a href="https://dc.uwm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=etd">from closing</a>. That year, Derrick Bell, who is regarded as the “<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-godfather-of-critical-race-theory-11624627522">godfather</a>” of <a href="https://theconversation.com/critical-race-theory-what-it-is-and-what-it-isnt-162752">critical race theory</a>, delivered an address in Milwaukee titled “Desegregation: A New Form of Discrimination.”</p>
<p>In his speech, Bell criticized education reforms that were more concerned with balancing racial demographics in schools than with improving Black education. He argued that building programs that did not always accept local Black students but made space for white students who lived outside the neighborhood <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/1340546">hurt Black students</a>. Much like Fuller’s North Division High School, Black students were not guaranteed admission to the school closest to their home if those schools were designed to attract white students. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A black-and-white photo of a man wearing a suit walking with a group of students, each one carrying a book." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417268/original/file-20210820-13-1dnivi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3067%2C2023&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417268/original/file-20210820-13-1dnivi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417268/original/file-20210820-13-1dnivi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417268/original/file-20210820-13-1dnivi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417268/original/file-20210820-13-1dnivi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417268/original/file-20210820-13-1dnivi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417268/original/file-20210820-13-1dnivi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Civil rights leader Derrick Bell fought for equitable education for Black students.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/harvard-law-school-professor-derrick-bell-walking-w-a-group-news-photo/50591767?adppopup=true">Steve Liss/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Several years later, Howard Fuller drafted the “<a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1987-09-29-8703130605-story.html">Manifesto for New Directions in the Education of Black Children</a>.” The treatise proposed carving out an all-Black school district within the Milwaukee public school district to serve over <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351313841-13/case-separate-black-school-system-derrick-bell">6,000 students</a>. The district was to be controlled by and geared toward families of color. The plan was a response to a call made in 1935 by W.E.B. DuBois, who argued that Black educators and activists should <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/2291871">invest more in building Black schools</a> than integrating hostile white schools. </p>
<h2>3. Supports school vouchers today</h2>
<p>Fuller’s proposal for an all-Black school district <a href="https://www.marquette.edu/mupress/Fuller.shtml">gained traction</a>, but Wisconsin legislators opted instead for a voucher plan in 1989 – the <a href="https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/misc/lfb/informational_papers/january_2003/0029_milwaukee_parental_choice_program_informational_paper_29.pdf">Milwaukee Parental Choice Program</a>. The program covered the tuition of students who wanted to enroll in private schools. </p>
<p>The Republican Party seized on the new voucher plan and pushed it through the state legislature. Ever since the <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/347us483">Brown v. Board of Education</a> decision in 1954, when the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional, the Republican Party has increasingly aligned itself with school privatization efforts through <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/reports/2017/07/12/435629/racist-origins-private-school-vouchers/">vouchers</a> and “<a href="https://southernspaces.org/2019/segregationists-libertarians-and-modern-school-choice-movement/">freedom of choice</a>” plans. </p>
<p>Fuller also supported the Milwaukee voucher plan, as did some other Black activists, despite criticism from academics and organizations, <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/origins-milwaukee-parental-choice-program-no-struggle-no-progress-fuller/">including the NAACP</a>. </p>
<p>“If you’re drowning and a hand is extended to you, you don’t ask if the hand is attached to a Democrat or a Republican,” <a href="https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED531260">noted Wisconsin State Rep. Annette “Polly” Williams</a>, a Black Democrat who worked with Fuller to propose the legislation for a <a href="https://www.the74million.org/article/for-maverick-polly-williams-the-mother-of-school-choice-the-point-was-always-to-empower-parents-and-improve-education-for-black-children/">separate school district</a> and also supported school vouchers.</p>
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<h2>4. Helped build the school choice movement</h2>
<p>Howard Fuller helped build the foundation for civil rights activists who are interested in school choice. As he told me during our interview in 2019, “I’ve always seen school choice from a social justice framework as opposed to a free market framework.”</p>
<p>Many activists saw it the same way.</p>
<p>For example, Wyatt Tee Walker, one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s trusted strategists, <a href="https://www.sisuluwalker.org/history">opened a charter school</a> in New York City in 1999. James Forman Jr., a civil rights lawyer, scholar, author and son of the prominent Black Panther Party organizer, opened a charter school in Washington, D.C. in 1997. Both leaders argued that failed desegregation attempts placed a <a href="https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/3146/">burden on Black families</a> by catering to white families without promising quality education for Black students. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, education activist Geoffrey Canada was <a href="https://www.wreg.com/news/2013-freedom-award-winners-named/">awarded the National Freedom Award</a> in 2013 for his charter school network, the <a href="https://hcz.org/our-purpose/our-history-zone-map/">Harlem Children’s Zone</a>. And in 2016, Martin Luther King III led one of the largest school choice rallies in the nation. “This is about freedom,” King told the crowd gathered in Florida, “the freedom to choose for your family and your child.” </p>
<p>Support for choice is not limited to a small cadre of activists. A <a href="https://www.federationforchildren.org/national-school-choice-poll-shows-67-of-voters-support-school-choice-2019/">2019 poll</a> by the American Federation for Children estimated that 73% of Latinos and 67% of African Americans support school choice. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Mother, father and two small children hold hands while walking down street" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423182/original/file-20210924-24-glshmu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423182/original/file-20210924-24-glshmu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423182/original/file-20210924-24-glshmu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423182/original/file-20210924-24-glshmu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423182/original/file-20210924-24-glshmu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423182/original/file-20210924-24-glshmu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423182/original/file-20210924-24-glshmu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Polling data shows a majority of African Americans support school choice.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-myers-family-takes-a-walk-near-their-home-in-ne-news-photo/1208289093">Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>5. Drew scorn for working with Republicans</h2>
<p>Fuller allied with prominent Republicans on school choice. He <a href="https://archive.jsonline.com/news/opinion/howard-fuller-still-a-warrior-for-children-b99338584z1-273253071.html/">met with George W. Bush</a> in 1999 while Bush was running for president. A year earlier, he debated then-Sen. Barack Obama on the issue of vouchers. His school reform work in New Orleans in the 2000s led him to collaborate with Betsy DeVos, who at that time was a <a href="https://www.nola.com/news/education/article_e8dbd575-e6e4-5b1e-b4c3-02596e539cbb.html">GOP financier and charter school advocate</a>. He also later <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYg7jn1KQo8">supported DeVos’ contested nomination</a> for secretary of education. </p>
<p>Fuller drew <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/howard-fuller-a-civil-rights-warrior-or-billionares-tool/2014/09/09/3aedeff4-37c1-11e4-9c9f-ebb47272e40e_story.html">strong criticism</a> from the press and some education reformers for his connections with the GOP, who earned a tarnished reputation on <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/emerging-republican-majority/595504/">civil rights</a>, and for embracing what many defined as a conservative agenda.</p>
<p>In his own defense, he noted in our interview that while he agrees with some Republicans on school choice, he strongly disagrees with them “on voter ID, on drug testing for people getting public assistance. I support the minimum wage. I support Obamacare.”</p>
<p>Though his position on school choice did not curry favors with <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807863466/more-than-one-struggle/">progressive education reformers</a>, Fuller demonstrated that not all demands for school choice are the same. For instance, he believes <a href="https://hechingerreport.org/segregated-schools-are-still-the-norm-howard-fuller-is-fine-with-that/">“mom and pop” charter schools</a> are more emblematic of the long history of the Black freedom struggle than schools proposed by national charter school networks, as these grassroots schools are more often driven by the demands of historically marginalized communities. </p>
<p>“You’re going to be fighting for something for entirely different reasons than some of the people out there who are your allies,” Fuller said in our interview. I believe this difference is imperative to understanding the nuance of school choice today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/165581/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jon Hale does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Howard Fuller’s support for school choice is connected to the Black Power movement and a pursuit to provide Black students a quality education by any means necessary.Jon Hale, Associate Professor of Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1613342021-07-14T12:23:16Z2021-07-14T12:23:16ZFrom the labor struggles of the 1930s to the racial reckoning of the 2020s, the Highlander school has sought to make America more equitable<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407988/original/file-20210623-19-holujg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=56%2C50%2C3713%2C2255&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Highlander founder Myles Horton (right) with civil rights leader Rosa Parks and labor leader Ralph Helstein in 1957.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.library.nashville.org/research/collections/civil-rights-collection">Nashville Banner Collection, Special Collections Division, Nashville Public Library</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>During this <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/americas-racial-reckoning">period of racial reckoning</a>, many Americans are seeking to make the United States more equitable and just. Many new organizations and coalitions are arising out of a new wave of engagement, but they don’t need to start from scratch. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41674667">Highlander Research and Education Center</a>, a training ground for civil rights activists founded nearly 90 years ago, offers a useful model. As a <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469661445/shelter-in-a-time-of-storm/">social movement historian</a>, I am intimately familiar with how this school and similar engines of grassroots engagement have transformed America’s social and political landscape by inspiring generations of leaders seeking to end institutional racism.</p>
<p>Located outside of Knoxville in the eastern Tennessee mountains, Highlander is among the hundreds of organizations that the billionaire philanthropist and author <a href="https://mackenzie-scott.medium.com/116-organizations-driving-change-67354c6d733d">MacKenzie Scott</a> has funded to combat systemic inequity. It’s also playing a critical role in attracting and distributing philanthropic support to lesser-known Southern grassroots organizations.</p>
<p>Together with <a href="https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/song">Southerners on New Ground</a>, another activist training group, it helped launch the <a href="https://www.laughinggull.org/southern-power-fund">Southern Power Fund</a> in 2020. The initiative had <a href="https://www.philanthropy.com/article/how-a-14-million-fund-for-black-led-grassroots-groups-in-the-south-is-upending-traditional-grant-making">raised US$14 million by mid-2021</a> to make it easier for grassroots organizations to address local needs with <a href="https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/unrestricted-grant">no-strings-attached</a> grants.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dAUCZH-r3KQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Myles Horton created the Highlander school to help poor people find solutions to their ‘common problems.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Myles Horton vs. the color line</h2>
<p>Highlander was the brainchild of <a href="https://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/myles-horton">Myles Horton</a>, a white Southerner who grew up under the crushing weight of poverty in rural Tennessee in the early 20th century. As his parents scratched out a living doing odd jobs, Horton grew increasingly bitter regarding the social and economic system that produced such stark contrasts between the privileged few and the struggling masses. He also became an avid reader.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407981/original/file-20210623-19-1mc2v9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A clean-cut man in a white shirt smiles at the camera" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407981/original/file-20210623-19-1mc2v9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407981/original/file-20210623-19-1mc2v9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407981/original/file-20210623-19-1mc2v9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407981/original/file-20210623-19-1mc2v9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407981/original/file-20210623-19-1mc2v9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407981/original/file-20210623-19-1mc2v9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407981/original/file-20210623-19-1mc2v9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Myles Horton in 1957.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.library.nashville.org/research/collections/civil-rights-collection">Nashville Banner Collection, Special Collections Division, Nashville Public Library</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During the Great Depression, Horton went to graduate school at <a href="https://thesocietypages.org/monte/2014/08/24/remembering-myles-horton-a-man-who-left-academic-sociology-behind-in-order-to-change-society/">Union Theological Seminary in New York and the University of Chicago</a>.</p>
<p>There, he was <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520302051/education-in-black-and-white">mentored by John Dewey</a>, a philosopher who believed in the need for education aimed at “correcting unfair privilege and unfair deprivation.” American social movements at that time, when the nation’s economic and racial divisions were becoming deeper, were intensifying their critiques concerning the wealth gap and the color line that violently threatened and undermined the lives of millions of African Americans.</p>
<p>Subsequently, Horton founded the <a href="https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/alliances-relationships/highlander/">Highlander Folk School</a> in 1932. Nestled in the tiny backwoods town of Monteagle, Tennessee, it aimed “to educate rural and industrial leaders for a new social order.”</p>
<p>For Horton, the economic crisis was the perfect moment to achieve the unthinkable: bridging the color line to create synergy between Black and white Southerners.
Within Highlander’s welcoming walls and in its outdoor classes, segregation or any pretense of hierarchy was nonexistent. </p>
<p>Groups of Southern labor organizers and civil rights activists would gather at Highlander to read and discuss. Its library was stocked with books by progressive intellectuals, including not just Dewey but the theologian <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-comey-learned-from-theologian-reinhold-niebuhr-about-ethical-leadership-95330">Reinhold Niebuhr</a> and the educator and activist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-S-Counts">George S. Counts</a>.</p>
<p>Participants would learn even more from their community-building. Horton sought to create a space where people of all backgrounds could be exposed to history and literature that enlightened them about their common struggles. Highlander also fostered the creation of music and art that built communion and solidarity, while inculcating the radical notion among trainees that they could transcend racial and class divisions.</p>
<p>In sharing a common space for an extended period, participants in Highlander’s training program could begin to build a truly democratic society as a “<a href="https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/996/">circle of learners</a>.” </p>
<h2>Empowering civil rights leaders</h2>
<p>Today’s training center is the successor to Horton’s original civil rights movement incubator. In 1957, <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/highlander-folk-school">Martin Luther King Jr. praised Highlander’s “noble purpose and creative work”</a> with having “given the South some of its most responsible leaders.”</p>
<p>Four months before her historic act of dissent against Montgomery’s segregated buses, for example, <a href="https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/rosa-parks-in-her-own-words/about-this-exhibition/the-bus-boycott/highlander-folk-school/">Rosa Parks</a> attended a Highlander workshop on one of several trips she would make there. </p>
<p>And as student sit-ins rocked America’s social and political foundations in the spring of 1960, it was Highlander that served as a retreat for many of the Nashville students, including <a href="https://theconversation.com/john-lewis-traded-the-typical-college-experience-for-activism-arrests-and-jail-cells-143219">John Lewis</a>, the future congressman. </p>
<p>Because of unrelenting attacks by prejudiced politicians who <a href="https://www.gale.com/c/fbi-file-on-the-highlander-folk-school">alleged that Highlander was spreading communism</a>, Tennessee authorities <a href="https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2018/01/school-for-subversives-and-communists.html">forced the school’s closure and revoked its charter in 1961</a>. The staff then reincorporated as the Highlander Research and Education Center and moved, first to Knoxville and then to New Market, a small town about 25 miles away.</p>
<p>Under its barely changed name, the nonprofit school would keep forging some of the most unlikely coalitions at the height of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/lynching-preachers-how-black-pastors-resisted-jim-crow-and-white-pastors-incited-racial-violence-129963">Jim Crow South</a> and beyond.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407984/original/file-20210623-21-1y3x6u0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A classroom full of adults in the 1950s" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407984/original/file-20210623-21-1y3x6u0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407984/original/file-20210623-21-1y3x6u0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407984/original/file-20210623-21-1y3x6u0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407984/original/file-20210623-21-1y3x6u0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407984/original/file-20210623-21-1y3x6u0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407984/original/file-20210623-21-1y3x6u0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407984/original/file-20210623-21-1y3x6u0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Highlander’s workshops brought Black and white people together, even at the height of U.S. segregation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.library.nashville.org/research/collections/civil-rights-collection">Nashville Banner Collection, Special Collections Division, Nashville Public Library</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Septima Clark</h2>
<p>One of Horton’s most influential hires was a South Carolina schoolteacher named <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/clark-septima-poinsette">Septima Clark</a>. A graduate of two historically Black colleges, she first arrived in 1954 out of curiosity because she wanted to see for herself the one place she had heard of where “<a href="https://africaworldpressbooks.com/ready-from-within-septima-clark-and-the-civil-right-movement-a-first-person-narrative-edited-by-cynthia-stokes-brown/">blacks and whites could meet together and talk over the problems</a>” that defined the Jim Crow South.</p>
<p>She returned a year later after being fired from her teaching job in Charleston for belonging to the NAACP. At Highlander, Clark developed and led workshops on leadership. Parks was among her first students, six months before an <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/montgomery-bus-boycott">eventful act of dissent aboard a bus in Montgomery</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407992/original/file-20210623-13-1opsvsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An elderly woman holds an award" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407992/original/file-20210623-13-1opsvsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407992/original/file-20210623-13-1opsvsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407992/original/file-20210623-13-1opsvsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407992/original/file-20210623-13-1opsvsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407992/original/file-20210623-13-1opsvsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407992/original/file-20210623-13-1opsvsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407992/original/file-20210623-13-1opsvsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Septima Clark in 1974.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/CivilRightsPioneerClark/dea21193332348258743b1133d5dae6a/photo">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Clark became a full-time staffer in 1956. She later implemented her Highlander lesson plans in what she referred to as <a href="https://www.ajc.com/news/septima-clark-was-the-teacher-of-the-civil-rights-movement/CZSM4IT56RC4FFMMLD7L53YLPA/">Citizenship Schools</a> in Johns Island, South Carolina.</p>
<p>Horton’s and Clark’s methods of empowering and training local folks in political literacy became staples of organizations such as the <a href="https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/the-story-of-sncc/">Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee</a>, or SNCC.</p>
<p>SNCC later emulated the concept of Clark’s Citizenship Schools during the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/freedom-summer">Freedom Summer campaign of 1964</a>, which sought to register scores of Black voters who had been barred from registering in Mississippi – under the threat of white terrorism as well as Jim Crow laws.</p>
<p>[<em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>SNCC activists also created Freedom Schools throughout the Mississippi Delta region that exposed <a href="https://www.civilrightsteaching.org/exploring-history-freedom-schools">Black residents to an education that most had been deprived of</a> as <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/sharecropping">impoverished sharecroppers</a>.</p>
<h2>Building new coalitions</h2>
<p>After the school’s organizers relocated, twice under its new name, Highlander redoubled its efforts to address systemic poverty. In recent years, <a href="https://highlandercenter.org/our-story/mission/">while upholding its original mission</a>, Highlander has begun to tackle issues such as environmental racism, xenophobia and human rights abuses while advocating for intergenerational and multicultural coalition-building.</p>
<p>Tragically, there are those who still regard such efforts as a threat.</p>
<p>The Highlander Research and Education Center’s main office building in New Market, Tennessee, burned down in 2019. The subsequent identification of a white power symbol raised <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/highlander-attack-arson-racism/">suspicions of arson</a>, but <a href="https://www.wbir.com/article/news/community/we-are-survivors-one-year-after-the-highlander-center-fire/51-7fdf920b-929f-4ee4-b8e5-da0dba4f308f">the case</a> apparently remains under investigation.</p>
<p>Although the blaze engulfed the building, it didn’t raze the spirit and mission of the center that in my view has served as a citadel for democracy and justice.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/161334/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jelani M. Favors does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The training center, which welcomed Rosa Parks and John Lewis before they became famous, still empowers and inspires marginalized Americans to use their own voices and talents.Jelani M. Favors, Associate Professor of History, Clayton State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1616392021-06-02T12:25:33Z2021-06-02T12:25:33ZShot 55 years ago while marching against racism, James Meredith reminds us that powerful movements can include those with very different ideas<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403830/original/file-20210601-1932-i4xr8c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2995%2C2007&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Civil rights activist James Meredith grimaces in pain as he pulls himself across Highway 51 after being shot in Hernando, Mississippi, during his March Against Fear. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/RacialInjusticeCivilRightsIconss/0d103375632c40299ac0b973953611cb/photo?Query=James%20Meredith%20shot&mediaType=photo&sortBy=creationdatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=67&currentItemNo=3">AP Photo/Jack Thornell, File</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>James Meredith was walking down Highway 51 just south of Hernando, Mississippi. It was June 6, 1966, the second day of his planned 220-mile trek from Memphis to Jackson, which he undertook to encourage Black people to overcome racist intimidation and to register to vote.</p>
<p>As cars filled with newspaper reporters and police officers rolled nearby, he walked a sloping stretch of road lined with pine trees. He heard a shout: “James Meredith! James Meredith!”</p>
<p>A white man in a roadside gully lifted his shotgun, aimed at Meredith and fired. Meredith was hit and crawled across the road, his eyes wide with panic. As he splayed onto the gravel shoulder of Highway 51, blood soaked through the back of his shirt.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.clarionledger.com/story/opinion/columnists/2016/06/04/capturing-history-shooting-james-meredith/85384052/">The attack</a>, which happened 55 years ago, propelled Meredith back into the spotlight. Four years earlier he had integrated the University of Mississippi, which prompted <a href="https://www.npr.org/2012/10/01/161573289/integrating-ole-miss-a-transformative-deadly-riot">bloody rioting and a political crisis</a>. Now, in 1966, <a href="https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/jun/6">photographs of an anguished, injured Meredith</a> splashed across newspapers’ front pages, and the media again admired his stoic fight for racial justice.</p>
<p>Civil rights leaders and thousands of others took up Meredith’s walk, transforming it into a huge demonstration known as <a href="https://exhibits.stanford.edu/fitch/browse/meredith-march-against-fear-june-1966">the “Meredith March” and “March Against Fear.”</a> </p>
<p>But Meredith, who survived his wounds, resisted his assigned political role. While liberals celebrated his sacrifice, he grumbled that he should have carried a gun, and in the ensuing weeks, he complained that the march lacked order, imposed upon Black Mississippians and endangered women and children.</p>
<p>The shooting revealed how James Meredith fits no conventional political category. He is a civil rights hero who does not associate himself with the civil rights movement. He espouses conservative ideas of self-reliance, discipline, morality and manhood, yet he proclaims a radical mission to destroy white supremacy.</p>
<p>Meredith’s historical meaning is slippery, but that very inability to pin him down can teach important lessons – not only for how to remember the 1960s, but for how to think about social change. </p>
<p>As Meredith’s example reinforces, humans are too complicated to assign to one political tribe. Major movements, moreover, need contributions from people with a range of ideologies. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403833/original/file-20210601-663-1fpgafp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A group of marchers on a highway in northern Mississippi, including civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403833/original/file-20210601-663-1fpgafp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403833/original/file-20210601-663-1fpgafp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403833/original/file-20210601-663-1fpgafp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403833/original/file-20210601-663-1fpgafp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403833/original/file-20210601-663-1fpgafp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403833/original/file-20210601-663-1fpgafp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403833/original/file-20210601-663-1fpgafp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">On June 8, 1966, days after Meredith was shot on his march, civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick walk in the front rank of Blacks and whites who took up the march from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/CivilRightsMeredithMarch/b58b335a6c694a3dbebcc88acc996fdf/photo?Query=James%20Meredith%20civil%20rights&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:asc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=212&currentItemNo=58">AP Photo</a></span>
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</figure>
<h2>‘Paradoxical personality’</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-coronavirus-merediths-race/">Meredith</a>, who soon turns 88, remains a familiar figure around Jackson. He is one of the elderly regulars at a supermarket’s coffee klatch. He often dons his <a href="https://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2018/jul/20/civil-rights-legend-meredith-says-hes-mission-god/">trademark white suit</a> and a <a href="https://thenewmiss.com/">“New Miss”</a> ballcap. Prone to grandiose or quirky statements, he still possesses a certain charisma, informed by his mystical sense of his own God-ordained destiny.</p>
<p>I first encountered Meredith’s paradoxical personality in 2009, during an interview for “<a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374535520">Down to the Crossroads</a>,” my narrative history of the Meredith March Against Fear. Since then, I’ve kept wrestling with Meredith’s significance – I wrote the introduction to his reissued memoir “<a href="https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/Three-Years-in-Mississippi">Three Years in Mississippi</a>,” and I’m now collaborating on a graphic history about Meredith and the <a href="http://crdl.usg.edu/events/ole_miss_integration/?Welcome">integration crisis at “Ole Miss.</a>”</p>
<p>Other major figures from the March Against Fear have clear-cut legacies. <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/king/biographical/">Martin Luther King Jr.</a> is the moral beacon of a nonviolent movement. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/16/us/stokely-carmichael-rights-leader-who-coined-black-power-dies-at-57.html">Stokely Carmichael</a>, who called for “Black Power” on the march, is a radical icon. <a href="https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/fannie-lou-hamer">Fannie Lou Hamer</a> represents the central role of Black women in the grassroots freedom struggle.</p>
<p>But Meredith? After the march, he <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3134057?seq=1">faded from view</a>. He did not join any of the major civil rights organizations. His multiple runs for office failed, as did numerous business ventures. By the late 1980s, he seemed to court shock value: He worked for archconservative North Carolina Sen. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/us/politics/00helms.html">Jesse Helms</a>, and then endorsed Louisiana politician <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/david-duke">David Duke</a>, a former grand wizard in the Ku Klux Klan.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403831/original/file-20210601-27-w2vmtj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="James Meredith, dressed in all white and wearing a straw hat, walks surrounded by others in a 50th anniversary march commemorating his earlier march for voting rights." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403831/original/file-20210601-27-w2vmtj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403831/original/file-20210601-27-w2vmtj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403831/original/file-20210601-27-w2vmtj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403831/original/file-20210601-27-w2vmtj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403831/original/file-20210601-27-w2vmtj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403831/original/file-20210601-27-w2vmtj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403831/original/file-20210601-27-w2vmtj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Civil rights pioneer James Meredith, center, and others walk through downtown Jackson, Mississippi, to the state Capitol on June 25, 2016, as part of a commemoration of his 1966 march from Memphis to Jackson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/MarchAgainstFear/5bad85b4e8d343f1a86e80f51ee77794/photo?Query=James%20Meredith%20shot&mediaType=photo&sortBy=creationdatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=67&currentItemNo=5">AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Yet Meredith also remains a symbol of pride: His statue on the University of Mississippi campus is a <a href="https://oxfordstories.net/2015/10/17/james-meredith-statue-still-meaningful-nine-years-after-campus-installation/">rallying symbol</a> for Black students – and also has been a target of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/03/24/former-ole-miss-student-pleads-guilty-to-hanging-noose-around-statue-honoring-the-first-black-student/">racist defacement</a>. <a href="https://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/story/news/local/2021/04/13/james-meredith-first-black-student-ole-miss-charles-pickering-talk-civil-rights-mississippi/7201139002/">Black Mississippians</a> often recognize his heroism.</p>
<p>Meredith is difficult to categorize or claim. </p>
<p>Those on the political right tend to showcase the rare Black conservative, but Meredith is a vocal critic of American racism, which most conservatives seek to downplay. </p>
<p>Liberals love to celebrate civil rights icons, but <a href="https://apnews.com/article/a03de767598b450d9aec9d0a0f10de2b">Meredith sometimes makes provocative, and even outrageous, statements about the civil rights movement</a> and its leaders. </p>
<p>Radicals share his goal of destroying white supremacy, but an old man who preaches old-fashioned morality does not conform to the modern model of an activist. </p>
<h2>Streams into a river</h2>
<p>The Black freedom struggle has long encompassed people of different ideologies and tactics. <a href="https://theconversation.com/2020-uprisings-unprecedented-in-scope-join-a-long-river-of-struggle-in-america-139853">Like streams feeding into a river</a>, these political approaches come from distinct sources, but inevitably move in the same direction. In the 1960s, this movement surged forward, in part thanks to Meredith.</p>
<p>He is a complex person – one who might never be fully understood. That’s an important reminder: A movement depends on individual people making individual choices to act in individually specific ways, all in service of a collective goal.</p>
<p>The United States is again undergoing a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html">racial reckoning</a>, and again the nation is <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/18/majorities-of-americans-see-at-least-some-discrimination-against-black-hispanic-and-asian-people-in-the-u-s/">divided over its direction</a>. It is, moreover, a dangerous moment for democracy. <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/28/politics/poll-qanon-election-conspiracies/index.html">A sizable portion of the electorate</a> believes in conspiracy theories about stolen elections. </p>
<p>In this polarized atmosphere, what can a productive social movement look like? </p>
<p>It has to respect the idealism of the forces demanding change but still speak to broadly shared democratic principles. A powerful movement makes room for contributors who don’t fit neatly into that movement. Sometimes, as in the case of James Meredith, their significance is extraordinary.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/161639/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aram Goudsouzian does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Meredith is a civil rights hero who doesn’t fit neatly into political categories. He espouses conservative ideas, yet he proclaims a radical mission to destroy white supremacy.Aram Goudsouzian, Bizot Family Professor of History, University of MemphisLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.