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What moved you to support the movement for civil rights?




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Selma to Montgomery march – 1965

I was re-reading for the nth time Hamden Rice’s powerful piece “Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did“, yesterday, where he describes what his father told him about the importance of Dr. King and the movement he was an integral part of, in making black people unafraid.

When talking about the resistance to Martin Luther King Day, last Sunday, and in reading and commenting in Meteor Blade’s piece on J. Edgar Hoover’s  assaults on Dr. King and the movement, it struck me that some people-imho mistakenly-believe the civil rights movement was ended with the death of Dr. King. That somehow it was buried with him, and is now solely to be honored and respected as “history”, to be dusted off a few times a year. The wikipedia entry gives dates “1955-68”.  

I realized that those of us who lived during those early days have a very different perspective than those who were born later and perhaps got insights from watching series like “Eyes on the Prize” or reading memorial news coverage.

For me, the movement has never ended…yes it has had an ebb and flow, and yes, we have lost leaders and cadres and supporters over the years-to natural and unnatural death-but the reasons we have struggled haven’t gone away, and the reports of “movement’s end”, from my perspective are greatly exaggerated.

In fact, it’s a lie that we cannot afford to buy.

I recognize that people of all ages, races and ethnicities who continue to fight the battle, were at some point moved, or jettisoned into the struggle, by a moment, or an image, or an incident that had a profound impact and continues to sustain their movement forward. That people who are committed to long term struggle are sustained by memories and moments large and small.

I’ve never asked people to share what memory, or moment, or incident shaped your commitment.

I’d like to do so today.

I know that one of the most profound moments in my childhood sounds simple.  I was in Princess Anne Maryland, with my mom, in the hot summertime. I was 4 or 5 years old. I wanted an ice cream cone. I saw a little boy standing inside an ice cream parlor, licking one with relish. He looked at me, through the glass, and slowly stuck his tongue out at me. My mom was dragging me away. There would be no ice cream that day, because as she explained to me, that little boy was “white”, and that ice cream parlor was segregated, and my mother wasn’t setting foot in a place like that.

I’ve never forgotten that day, that boy, that ice cream cone. That word-segregation.

I was never denied ice cream in NYC.  

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Sure, later as I grew older, I learned about race, and racism, Jim Crow, and voting rights, and racial economic inequality, and was encouraged by my parents to fight back-actively. I joined various wings of “the movement”. I joined young people, and middle aged people and old folks, of all colors, and we marched on. I fought in the North, and I fought in the South. I fought alongside Native Americans, and Asians, and Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, and radical whites.

Inspired-initially-by an ice cream cone I couldn’t have.

What moved you, or inspired you to take that first step into our ongoing movement?

Was it an image? A memory, a book, a song, a film, an incident, or something someone said or did?

I look forward to reading what you share today.

Cross-posted from Black Kos


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 21 Comments

21 comments

  2. JanF

    A terrible period in our history and one that is only somewhat buried … if you scratch the surface of many white southerners, you would find that it is a period they long to return to.

    I read this diary last night and I did not want to toss off a quick response. Partly because I wanted to take time to think about it and partly because I was not quite sure what exactly triggered my support of civil rights.

    I went to Catholic schools from 1st through 11th grades. In the olden days, the Catholic church and Catholics were strong supporters of labor rights and human rights so the nuns, when they taught history, would imbue it with the sense of unfairness about being treated differently for your skin color or other innate quality. So the seeds had been planted.

    I remember a discussion of the book “Black Like Me”, an account of a white guy who “became black” to see how he would be treated.  

    It is, quite literally, not fair to be treated differently because of the pigment of one’s skin and that struck me. Later, I realized that it was not just the skin color but an entire history of ownership and white supremacy. I was too young to be involved in the civil rights movement; by the time I graduated from high school the big civil rights laws had been passed and people’s focus, as least in my white suburbs, were being directed to the Vietnam War and women’s rights.

    I have one more thing to add about blogging and the civil rights movement that needs more time to form.

    Thanks for this diary, Dee. It helps to pause to reflect on how we developed our own connections to a movement or how we decided on the things that we support. And maybe it will help us as we try to get others to feel that same way.    

  3. Portlaw

    it became clear to me  that civil rights had to be at the core of all societies. Certainly the idea of “do unto others as you would others do unto you” was there but it was more complex than that.

    On a somewhat related note, a few years ago, I went to Mobile for a work conference and then a few of us rented a car and visited Civil Rights sites in Alabama and then on to Philadelphia, Mississippi. Incredibly powerful in ways I could not have imagined.

  4. bfitzinAR

    A “colored lady” took care of me and my younger sibs while Momma was at work.  She taught me how to dress myself and eat from a fork.  How could I regard her any differently than anybody else who took care of us?  (Actually she was a whole lot nicer and more dependable than a white woman who took care of us several years later which really reinforced the concept that color makes no difference as to what kind of person a person is.)  By the time I could understand the concept of segregation, I knew better.

  5. anotherdemocrat

    I was a fan of Star Trek during its original run – when I was 2-4 years old, so I heard that “we’re beyond racism” message from before the time I was old enough to even understand. I remember in Sunday School… trying to remember where we were so I can remember how old I was, but I can’t, best I can do is pre-4th grade — being taught equality of all in God’s eyes. Honestly, I was more excited about gender equality, but it was all of a piece. I remember being shocked when I found out about Jim Crow.

    And then we moved to places where there was no freedom of speech — criticizing the royal family in the UAE in 1973 would have been suicidal. Sexism — yeah. UAE, Algeria, Saudi Arabia. And racism. There were (are) literally still slaves — even a child like me was told how to recognize them. They were mostly Sudanese & other Africans, and they had markings on their cheeks. And the American companies my dad worked for almost never hired African-Americans — we were told because they had such a hard time there, they they got mistaken for Sudanese & bad things happened.

    So I remember having a long, long burn of anger about discrimination, inequality, plutocracy…….but I couldn’t really do anything till I came back here for college.

  6. Diana in NoVa

    Having spent time in foreign countries (Japan, Singapore) in my childhood, and being brought up by liberal, atheist parents who despised racism, I soon realized that I was different from my peers in West Side Junior High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

    A couple of years ago I wrote a diary, “Living Through the Little Rock School Integration Crisis,” which was posted at The Other Place. There was some sort of cognitive dissonance going on in the Little Rock of those days–young white girls in St. Mary’s Academy uniforms, like me, would get up and give their seats to tired-looking black women who boarded the bus to travel to their jobs as maids or housekeepers in affluent Pulaski Heights. We thought showing respect to our elders was the thing to do. I must say my fellow students at St. Mary’s did seem to harbor less racial prejudice than the public school students I knew.

    We moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1960. I don’t remember any black students at Thomas Edison High School, but years later in 1964 I remember discussing the possibility of a sit-in at the drugstore lunch counter with my office colleague, a young black woman. When my father learned of our plans he forbade it–possibly he feared we would come to harm. So that idea bit the dust.

    Something I really like about living where I do (Northern Virginia) is that I could go to lunch with my colleagues from the office without having to worry if any in our group would be refused service at a restaurant or if we’d attract stares in the company cafeteria.

    In 1989, on our way to spend Christmas in Texas, my family and I drove into Little Rock for “Mom’s Nostalgia Trip.” We sat in a restaurant with African-American diners and were waited on by white servers. That was when I knew things had changed.

    And about time, too.

  7. blue jersey mom

    I am a native New Yorker, and I watched the attempts to integrate the Little Rock schools on TV as a kid.  

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