Douglas Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize
winning book, Slavery by Another Name
provides a sturdy contention, that the final demise of the system in the 1940’s
was due partly to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse being
used as a weapon against America at the beginning of World War II. Blackmon
writes, “Millions of soldiers – black and white – had witnessed the horror of
racial ideology exalted to its most violent extremes in Nazi Germany. Thousands
of African American men who returned as fighting men, unwilling to capitulate
again to the docile state of helplessness that preceded the war, abandoned the
South altogether or joined in the agitation that would become the civil rights
movement…It was a strange irony that after seventy-four years of hollow
emancipation, the final delivery of African Americans from overt slavery and
from the quiet complicity of the federal government in their servitude was
precipitated only in response to the horrors perpetuated by an enemy country
against its own despised minorities.”
President Obama’s reflections of
9/11 in the 2004 preface of his autobiography Dreams From My Father (aligned with the 50th anniversary of Brown
vs. the Board of Education), asserts the following: “What I do know is that
history returned that day with a vengeance; that, in fact, as Faulkner reminds
us, the past is never dead and buried – it isn’t even past.”
Bearing these thoughts in mind, the
recent movie in theatres, Lee Daniels’ “The Butler”, has caused me reflect on
something that nerves me to my very core. This movie is excellent, historically
superb and praiseworthy, but it makes me inquire a question that only time and
the ‘enemy’ that prowls underground in America can answer. The irony of several
actions in our country today is that they have occurred ‘post-cinema’, if you
will. The Oscar-winning movie Lincoln is
released, and cowardly individuals vandalize the Lincoln Memorial. 42: The Jackie Robinson Story comes to
the screen, and the Jackie Robinson/Pee-Wee Reese Memorial in Brooklyn is
defaced, again by cowardly individuals that hide in the shadows…
This brings my thoughts to
Birmingham, Alabama. The movement in Birmingham, intending to dismantle
institutionalized segregation, seared the nonviolent stand of African American
men, women and children against racial and social injustice into national and
global consciousness. “Foot Soldiers” crowded the streets of Birmingham,
challenging America to live up its promises to them in the U.S. Constitution.
Birmingham ‘63 also inspired the hearts of people nationally and abroad who
were locked in similar struggles for civil and human rights. The Birmingham
Civil Rights Institute opened across the street from the 16th Street
Baptist Church in 1992, which welcomes sightseers to where African Americans
wages a nonviolent civil struggle that removed the chains of segregation
forever.
This year, the city will celebrate
the 50th Anniversary of the 1963 Birmingham Civil Rights Campaign with the
completion of the local Birmingham Civil Rights Heritage Trail, the launching
of a regional Civil Rights Traveling Exhibition, “Taking History to the
Streets”, and the 50th commemoration of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist
Church that killed four young African American girls…
Let me ask you this, Mr. Cowardly
Racist, are you going to deface and attack these facilities, too? Speaking from
a geographic, historiography viewpoint, is this going to be your next stop? Do
you actually believe that this kind of wrathful rhetoric and racial propaganda ‘psycho-babble’
is enlightening for this country?
As I and others wait and see what
your next move will be, I can only hope that we, as a nation, might heed the
timeless words of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy from his Civil Rights
speech of 1963: “This nation was founded by men of many nations and
backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal,
and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are
threatened…But this is not the case today…We are confronted primarily with a
moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American
Constitution…A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to
make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all. Those who
do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are
recognizing right as well as reality.” Not only do we need more John F.
Kennedys, Martin Luther Kings, and Jackie Robinsons in our country today, I
deem that we need more Pee Wee Reese’s and brave souls of the same sort.
I will conclude with these words
from 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Hahn, as he speaks about the Civil
Rights movement: “Relying on the relations and institutions that they had built
and that enabled them over many decades to endure repression and make
themselves as a people, they challenged the nation – as their slave and freed
forebears had done – to confront the meaning of its own democracy. Their
challenge remains with us. And they are still to be thanked.”
-B
Sources:
1.
Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the
Civil War to World War II. (New York, NY): Doubleday, 2008: 381-82.
2.
Obama, Barack Hussein. Dreams from My Father: A
Story of Race and Inheritance. (New York, NY): Crown Publishers, 1995: x.
3.
McWhorter, Diane. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil
Rights Movement. (New York, NY): Simon & Schuster, 2001: 586.
4.
Kennedy’s Civil Rights Speech, June 11,
1963. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKWHCSF-0926-041.aspx
5.
Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political
Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration.
(Cambridge, MA): Harvard University Press, 2003: 476.
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