Retracing The Footsteps

As a casual student of history, there is one thing that I have found rather disturbing with regards to black America's history: We seem to have fallen into a dangerous and suicidal state of intellectual lassitude in which we delegate our responsibilities to teach our children -- and dare I say ourselves --- our own history to others who might and should not have any vested interest in its proper teaching and understanding. This history of the Civil Rights Movement is an example.

Yearly, we watch all the pomp and splash on Martin Luther King Day, and a genuinely interested student of black history cannot help but feel that something much more fundamental has since been lost and may be lost forever unless we take a concerted effort to be the custodians and disseminators of our own history. There seems to this incomprehensible notion of arduously attempting to distill the history of the black struggle with all its variegated heroes and heroines, recognized and remote, into one image upon which all are expected to pay homage. I may not be well-versed in the history of mankind but, based on the knowledge I have gleaned through my own personal readings and forays into the annals of history, I can safely and confidently say that hero-worshipping has a very deleterious effect towards historical facts and accuracy. It is for this very reason that I am not very fond of lionizing individuals for efforts that would have been virtually unattainable were it not for a long and concerted collective effort by various individuals at various times. As long as an individual is chosen to personify a particular cause, the system has to find the ideal person whose convictions most appropriately represent the basic tenets of that cause. When dealing with a long struggle, picking a single person as a symbol for such an honour will not suffice and, consequently, becomes eerily suicidal since the celebration will almost always obfuscate history.

As far as the history of the black struggle is concerned, we seem to have fallen into that very trap. Firstly, the history of the struggle for the full attainment of human rights for the blacks here is far too complex to be personified by a narrow group of individuals. Secondly, there is a need to understand that the civil rights movement predates the contentious years of the late 1950s and 1960s. For the sake of keeping everything into perspective, it behoves us not only to understand but tirelessly teach our children, as our parents should have taught us, proper and factual history for, unless we do so, we are but doomed to perpetual mental servitude. A brief excursion into history can bear this out.

The history of the black struggle goes way back right to the inception of slavery but you would not know that were you to judge it by the disproportionate attention accorded the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s. This movement did not spring out of nowhere. Nothing ever comes from nothing, so says Ecclesiastes 1:9 and the much-celebrated Civil Rights Era is no exception. The struggle has to be looked at in its entirety not just a snap short in time of a single part of it. I will harken to the fable of the blind men and the elephant to buttress my contention for a thorough look at history. Each blind man was asked to touch the elephant and describe his understanding of an elephant. The description of the elephant depended on what part of the elephant each blind man touched. The blind man who touched the leg of the elephant gave an apt description of the leg of the elephant, as did all the blind men who touched the elephant's tusks, tail, trunk, belly et cetera. Despite the crisp description of the parts of the elephant by the blind men, the conclusions of their experience where not entirely wholesome. There is more to an elephant than its constituent anatomical attributes.

Students of the history of the Civil Rights Movement will admit that there was more to the movement than the marches, singings, speeches, sitting on lunch tables and confrontations with hostile law enforcement agents. Like the fabled elephant, they will also accept, if not offer to anyone willing to listen, the very fact that this movement was but a continuation of a long struggle. Out of posterity, I will categorize the 20th Century civil rights movement activists into a three-tier system comprising of gradualist, pacifists and anarchist, in that chronological order. In this brief treatise, each one will be accorded a perusal concomitant with its significance to the primary gist of my argument.

Gradualists subscribed to the notion that the best way to attain the very basic human rights as granted by the constitution of the United States of America was by systematically dismantling statutes, strictures and clauses in the nation's documents that were always invoked to justify the continued subjugation and disenfranchisement of certain ethnic groups. This was the very foundation of the NAACP. As long as there were clauses in the governing documents that could be used to justify the shackles and menacles, nothing short of war would be needed to undo the injustices of the post-reconstruction era. The founders of the NAACP had that primary goal as they set out on that holy mission.

Most of you, at least those who pay attention to events, will remember the rouse about Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes following the presidential election of 1876. These two gentlemen were virtually locked in a death duel for the presidency since the election had failed to establish a clear winner in the electoral college. At stake were 20 electoral college votes from --- you guessed it --- the blessed state of Florida. After some haggling back and forth, a partisan commission gave the election to Mr Hayes by a margin of one vote: Does that sound familiar? To stave off a potential rebellion by the southern Democrats --- the predecessors of the modern-day southern conservatives not to be mistaken for the FDR democrats we know today --- Hayes agreed to cede control of the former confederate states back into the hands of local control. Gone were federal protection and guarantees for the emancipated slaves. Once free from the fear of instant and full force of federal law, the southern whites who were waxing in consuming bitterness and very resentful over the thorough humiliation the Civil War had dealt them set out on an unholy crusade of vengeance. The opportunity offered itself, the unrepentant and unreconstructed confederate sympathizers unleashed a furious gale and storm of anger at the group of people who they felt had precipitated the calamities of that war upon them, blacks. The appointment of the hero-worshipped and celebrated Fredrick Douglass to Federal Marshall of Washington D.C. by Hayes did absolutely nothing to stop the dark cloud of Jim Crow.

Unruly and murderous mobs rode at night wantonly murdering any black person in their way and thus leaving a trail of carnage in their wake. Terrorized, the blacks could only seek reprieve through congress. However, a more calculated and subtle agenda was slowly and deliberately put into place strictly to undermine and circumvent the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments by instituting local laws that have come to be collectively known as the notorious Jim Crow laws. In connivance with the United Supreme Court, SCOTUS, the same court that had rendered that dreadful Dred Scott Ruling in 1857, local and state legislatures in the south successfully passed laws totally reversing all the labours of the fruits of the Civil War meant to benefit the free black men and women. The culmination of such calculated acts were the Supreme Court Rulings lending legitimacy to segregationists' constructionist interpretation of the 14th and 15th Amendments so pivotal to the very humane survival of black citizens of the south. Notable of all these rulings was the Plessey-vs-Furguson Ruling. Homer Plessey, a black man had been ordered to move to the back of the train car in New Orleans and refused by citing the his 14th Amendment rights. He was apprehended tried and found guilty with Judge Ferguson presiding over the procedure. Upon appealing to the SCOTUS, Plessey lost his appeal when the SCOTUS affirmed Judge Ferguson's contention that there is necessarily such a thing as equal but separate. So the post-reconstruction era witnessed the rebirth of state control and the reinstitution of the inequality of men, enforced with more fierce and unrelenting wickedness than had been witnessed in the antebellum era. It was back to square one. States now had the unfettered legislative and judiciary latitude to enact laws to bar blacks from participating in the electoral process by coming up with laughable laws like the Grandfather Clause et cetera. By the turn of the 20th century, the unrepentant southern malcontents had successfully beaten back any efforts to guarantee blacks of any say by inserting and enforcing the appropriate laws. If blacks were to recover their short-lived freedom, it was imperative to undo all these laws and thus was the premise upon which the NAACP was founded.

The NAACP engaged in a whole range of legal cases to overturn the Jim Crow laws. It founders and supporters felt that for the organization to be fully effective, people intimately close and knowledgeable to the black struggles had to have the ultimate say in the implementation of the Herculean agenda the organization had set forth. One man came to symbolize the unwavering and determined desire to take the Jim Crow laws apart even if it meant doing it brick by brick. That man was Thurgood Marshall but his supporters would be the first to point out the significance of others towards the successes of the organization. The crowning moment of the NAACP efforts came in 1957 with the unanimous ruling by the SCOTUS of Brown-vs-Board case. This was the case that dealt a severe and mortal blow to the Jim Crow laws. Without this, all the hue and cry about civil disobedience would have come to naught. Civil disobedience would have been moot if within the rubrics of law there were no precepts upon which the causative points of discontent were predicated. In passing the historic Brown-vs-Board, Chief Justice Earl Warren's court basically said that the notion of equal and separate was untenable and impractical and thus an abrogation of the 14th Amendment.

The gradualists had carried the day, leberating blacks, from a judiciary point of view and, that is when the next phase of the civil rights movement came into being. Simply because the Jim Crow laws had been deemed illegal did not entail a strict adherence to and the enforcement of the SCOTUS rulings by the local and state apparati. It was the unwillingness to abide by these laws that precipitated the celebrated civil rights phase of pacifism. As a matter of fact this phase was not planned by any stretch of imagination but was rather fortuitous; which would prove to be fatal and very self-defeating. Spontaneity will never adequately substitute for clinical planning.

When a certain lady simply refused to give up her front seat in the bus in Montgomery --- another case of deja vu, circa Mr Homer Plessey's refusal to give up his seat in New Orleans --- it was the spark that was needed to detonate the powder keg. Inculcated within the constitution were the statutes that supported Ms Rosa Parks' right to refuse to be moved to the back of the bus. Whereas Mr Plessy had failed in his attempts to invoke his 14th Amendment rights and the absence of a ground-swell to rally behind his cause had conspired against him, Ms Parks had had her rights recently reaffirmed by the SCOTUS.

In addition to that, the cold and hard-heartedness of southern institutions inflamed the ire of the nation and the world thus lending critical impetus to the Civil Rights Movement as we know it today. The long disenfranchised blacks simply rose up enmasse like a tidal wave and wanted the laws of the land to be obeyed. What seemed to have been lost sight of is the minute but important fact that there was no leadership without which there would be no clearly articulated agenda. This overlooked flaw would rear its ugly head right from the word go. The proponents of civil disobedience, who were politically driven, should have worked in tandem with those who had worked to effect change through judiciary channels. There was no such understanding and if there was, it quickly got consumed in the subsequent political firestorms.

Unlike the carefully planned agenda of the gradualist group, the pacifists found themselves with an ever-growing movement bereft of strategy and a core of leaders armed with nothing but the ability to give speeches. It is without surprise that an ad hoc assemblage of church leaders, gullible and vulnerable to manipulation, was the quickest way to fix the leadership vacuum the unplanned yet ever-growing storm had created. Almost by default, church ministers became the political voice of the mass movement. One finds it rather difficult not to sympathize with the ministers, hitherto only trained in the ecumenical but not the political, who now found themselves thrust onto the fore with nothing but the prototypical platitudes of Sunday-morning sermons. These men of laity made fundamental mistakes be they by design or default. Whether egos or sheer political naivete? clouded their thinking, we will never know but costly and tragic mistakes were made nonetheless.

First amongst the mistakes was the apparent failure to realize the source of public sympathy. Like was alluded to earlier, the belligerence of southern institutes was important. An additional lode of sympathy was a result of WWII and the subsequent economic boom. Most whites came back home and a grateful nation had the GI Bill to help educate the patriotic young men and women. The economy was doing very well and, with the happy times of the 1950s, the nation was awash in revelry. However, the same could not be said of the black soldiers and the communities they had come from. They had left the tyranny of their southern homes to fight and defeat the despotism of Europe and Asia only to come back to chaff under the yoke of southern tyranny. This most certainly gnawed at the moral marrow of their white counterparts alongside whom they had fought, bled and suffered as they battled and defeated the dark forces of Hitler's Nazism and Mussolini's Fascism. It was only proper through the spirit of comradeship that they join hands to fight the hegemony of southern despotism.

Time is a capricious lady and memories quickly fade away and with it, all sentiments of sympathy. The sympathy that had been so important to the spontaneity of civil disobedience quickly wore itself into insignificant thinness. There were good reasons for that. The good times of the 1950s were no more and most significantly, the nation was engaged in a game of political chess with the Soviet Union and nervously bracing for an apocalyptic collision with the Soviet Communist Party and its band of Kremlin madmen. There was insecurity and fear all over the place. The wars in Korea and Vietnam only made the erosion of that sympathy erode even faster. This is where the ministers-turned-politicians were found wanting. The chips were down and continued protests and fruitless marches only served to irk the erstwhile band-wagon riders while emboldening the southern segregationists to peek their heads above the parapets of their forts within which they had hastily retreated for cover. If nobody understands where Barry Goldwater got his political momentum from, look no further than the poorly co-ordinated Civil Rights Movement. The inadvertent strategic and visionary heedlessness of the movement may have solidified the ground for the Southern Political Strategy or, properly speaking, the death and burial of the Lincoln Republican Party.

Possibly because they were political novices, the pacifists failed to understand that the primary goal of the civil rights movement was not acceptance by society at large. Fighting to use the same bathroom or eat in the same place was not the point of the struggle. These restrictions were but the visible symptoms of a deeper and more dangerous disease lurking just underneath the surface. It was a mistaken notion to think and have people believe that they were fighting for acceptance instead of exercising their inalienable rights to life, liberty and property. People wanted to have the independence of owning their own means of production, attain higher education et cetera without being impeded by legislatively mandated and racially motivated restrictions. All what people wanted was the ability to work as hard as they could and enjoy the fruits of their labours in lieu of ravenously thrusting open palms waiting for hand-me-downs like beggars at a street corner.

Sadly, most people seem to have been left with the erroneous notion that the struggle was about making token gains here and there and, when denied, raise Cain from the dead. There should have been a persistent and consistent emphasis for not waiting for others to do for blacks what blacks could do for themselves, a stronger sense of community and good neighborliness. Since they were preachers, they should have preached the virtues of blacks being their brothers' keepers and why it as imperative to shun the gods of greed and the tragic consequences of worshipping at Beelzebub's altar of materialism. The culpability of the lack of vision by the ministers is self-evident. To their credit, the ministers were pivotal in helping Lyndon B. Johnson put together his Great Society Program to help undo the injustices of the Jim Crow era. These necessary measures were meant to be short-term remedies rather than permanent fixtures. Visionary leaders would have put a lot of emphasis on a whole range of economic, political and cultural self-empowerment programs instead of leaving a whole group of people beholden to the benevolence of an unpredictable government.

When the church leaders started to plan more diligently and with vision, they were eliminated one by one. Before they had put anything in place, they were gone and the throngs that had pinned their ever-dwindling hopes in the hands of mortal men were left dazed and confused. Man is made of blood, flesh and bones and thus perishes. Ideas, though they come from men, are immortal. The pacifists failed to grasp that. Had they fashioned a strategy, their deaths would have been painful but their lives would not have been lost in vain. They left no ideas but disarray and all people can do is lionize individuals. That does not solve anything. If they had left tangible ideas, it would have been easier for people to immortalize them by energetically working for the realization of those very same ideas.

Where there is disarray and confusion, anarchists will quickly assemble like hounds smelling blood. The civil rights movement that had taken so long suddenly was at the mercy of an even less organized wave of political activists, particularly the Black Panther movement. This is exactly what the ever hostile government yearned for: a confrontational lot that could be used to crush the long struggle under the pretense of keeping law and order.

The civil rights movement of ideas and strong convictions such as had been put into place by Nat Turner, William L. Garrison, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Fredrick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Thurgood Marshall et cetera, died a violent death along with the militant anarchists of the 1970s.

Lastly, I will conclude by saying that I am not averse to honouring efforts of certain individuals but the inherent dangers of doing so cannot be overemphasized. When we honour a handful of individuals we unintentionally relegate others into pale insignificance and, more tragically, rewrite a history that is pivotal to our perpetuation as a group. We lull ourselves into a false sense of security. This was pretty evident after the Civil War. The subsequent ambivalence on our part gave ample time for the forces of hate to gather force and strip blacks off their rights earned through blood, sweat and tears. Those rights should have been guarded jealously and with unwavering vigilance and within a short amount of time, everything can come apart if not watched carefully. History tends to repeat itself and only if we know our own can we anticipate impending doom and have ample time to put together counter measures.





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