Saturday, October 31, 2020. 

The Movement’s Origins

I have been thinking lately about the Black Lives Matter movement. When some people see “Black Lives Matters” signs or flags they react by saying that all lives matter. Of course all lives matter. But rejecting the Black Lives Matter movement out of hand reveals at the very least a lack of understanding of well-documented history of racism in America. Sadly, at most it shows an unwillingness to acknowledge that history, a history in which all lives have not mattered equally for most of our history.

Activists Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza founded the Black Lives Matters movement in 2013 in response to the shooting death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman in a gated, largely all white neighborhood in Florida. Seventeen year old Martin was walking through the neighborhood where some of his relatives lived and with whom he was visiting. He had every right to be there. Zimmerman, who called himself a neighborhood watch captain, summoned the police to report Martin as a suspicious person. The police instructed him to remain in his SUV until they could arrive. Zimmerman disregarded those instructions and confronted Martin. A scuffle ensured and a gun went off. Martin was unarmed. Prosecutors charged Zimmerman with murder. At the trial he claimed self-defense. The jury acquitted him, and he went free. The incident sparked protest throughout America. Since then there have been other tragic occasions when policemen killed black men and, in one case, a black woman.

The death of George Floyd in 2020 is notable. In that case Derik Chauvin, a Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer, held his knee on Floyd’s neck for almost eight minutes. Floyd died from strangulation. Prosecutors charged Chauvin with second degree unintentional murder, third degree murder, and second degree manslaughter. A jury found him guilty on all three charges. Ultimately a judge sentenced Chauvin to 22.5 years in prison. Prosecutors charged other involved officers with aiding and abetting murder. They await trial. Each of these tragic incidents has its own complicated story. But in each a common theme is brutal treatment of Black Americans by some police officers.

I hear people say they never held their knee on a Black person’s neck, nobody they know ever did, they never owned a slave, never oppressed anybody, do not consider themselves to be racist and do not owe anyone an apology. They say some among us are trying to rewrite history. Others say, if you do not like America, leave it.

Experts have documented that our criminal justice system is biased against Black Americans, who are five times more likely to be stopped by police and incarcerated than white people. Black Americans and white Americans use drugs at similar rates, but the imprisonment rate of Black Americans for drug charges is almost six times that of whites.

Tell the Truth

Acknowledging that Black Lives Matter is not a rewrite of history. It is a telling of the whole history, not just white history. The founding fathers laid out a lofty goal for America in the preamble to the United States Constitution, “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…” We are not a perfect union yet when it comes to race relations.

The founding fathers presumably wanted an America that recognizes all Americans, regardless of race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, gender, political persuasion, sexual orientation, or socio-economic status, as being equal under the law. We have a long way to go to achieve that end.

In 1871, U S Senator, Carl Schurz said in a speech to Congress, “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” He received a thunderous round of applause from the gallery for that declaration. I am with that guy.

Never having personally held one’s knee on a black person’s neck hardly absolves any American citizen of the duty to look the truth squarely in the eye. White lives have mattered much more than indigenous lives, black lives, brown lives, yellow lives, poor white lives, and women’s lives. In one way or another, these groups have been discriminated against and oppressed for hundreds of years. Some, not all, white people have institutionalized discrimination and oppression into our culture, our laws, our businesses, our recreation, our professional sports, and our government over time. Collectively white people have used their socioeconomic and political power to hold a figurative knee on black people’s necks.

Slavery and the Civil War

English pirates and slave traders brought Africans to North America in 1619. Thus, began two hundred and forty-four years of slavery for most black people in North America. They did hard work for long hours and no wages. White owners denied them basic freedoms and opportunities that white people enjoyed. Some owners beat their slaves regularly. Some masters bought and sold them for economic gain, which often resulted in families being separated. Thankfully, those horrors formally ended with the Civil War. However, the misery for Black Americans was just beginning.

Despite what some say about states’ rights and northern aggression, the reason America fought the Civil War had everything to do with slavery, to protect southern state’s right to own slaves. Not all states explicitly wrote that into their secession documents. Virginia did not. But some states did, like South Carolina. Seceding states feared losing political power and being forced to give up slavery. They wanted to grow the Confederacy, to gain political power, preserve the institution of slavery and expand its establishment.

The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, delivered his Cornerstone Speech on March 21, 1861, in Savannah, Georgia. This speech was Stephens justification for white supremacy and black subordination, upon which he based secession and confederation. He used the word “cornerstone” to describe “the great truth”.

He said this.

“…its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

A people who were born free in their African homeland, free to pursue their own dream of what life could be for them, according to Alexander Stephens, were in their natural and normal condition slaves. Not much left to the imagination there.

Post War Black American Suppression

The trials and tribulations of Black Americans did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which freed some, but not all slaves. Nor did they end when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, which granted citizenship to all people born or naturalized in America, including former slaves. Nor did they end end when the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, which gave black men, but not black women, the right to vote.

White Americans terrorized, physically abused, and marginalized Black Americans for many more years. Between 1882 and 1968 white mobs leveled trumped up charges against Black Americans and lynched nearly five thousand of them, with no or little due process under the law. That is 86 years of systematic suppression of Black Americans. White mobs threw them off bridges, drug them behind cars, hanged, shot, and burned them to death. Many were tortured. Some white people lynched white people for helping black people. This is the stark, un-varnished truth. Imagine how terrified surviving Black Americans must have been during those times. Always looking over one’s shoulder. Laying low. Staying quiet.

In the summer of 2019, I visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, where one can see over eight hundred hanging steel coffins, all engraved with the names of lynched Black Americans. The memorial, a somber place indeed, serves as a stark reminder of a shameful part of American history. In a museum nearby, built on a site where enslaved people were once warehoused, one can find hundreds of jars of soil from lynching sites known to exist throughout America. The museum is a block away from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America.

Jim Crow

Beginning in the 1870s, state and local governments passed Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation in all public places. The U.S. Supreme Court essentially codified that un-American activity in 1896 when it laid out a “separate but equal” legal doctrine. That simply said, races could be segregated as long as public institutions were equal. Separate but equal? Not hardly.

There was not much equal in being separate during those times. The white establishment systematically denied Black Americans equal schools, access to banks and capital, public places, and adequate housing. Local and state governments in the South passed laws and regulations that pushed Black Americans into segregated, poor communities, often near hazardous industrial infrastructure, places where white people, except poor white people, would not think about living. Black communities did not have near the resources that white communities enjoyed. “Separate but Equal” was a ruse, a device to isolate Black Americans and keep them from tainting white culture and society.

During Jim Crow, state and local governments systematically denied Black people the right to vote. And today, in this time, in this very time, voter suppression is still a robust enterprise in America. Through Jim Crow, white supremacists forced Black Americans to use separate public bathroom facilities and fountains. Many white people denied Black Americans entry into some restaurants and other places of business. Localities enforced Jim Crow laws until 1965. Think about that.

I was a clueless, seventeen-year-old high school student then. In my hometown, blacks and whites were segregated. Separate schools. Separate neighborhoods. Separate churches. Separate businesses. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Undaunted by that ruling, the southern white establishment resisted integration tooth and nail through the Jim Crow days.

I was there when the first black students came to Robert E. Lee High School in 1968. Think about what is must have been for them to walk the halls in a school named after a Confederate general who fought to preserve the south’s right to continue the horrid practice of slavery.  Since that time thankfully the local school board voted to change the name of that school.

In my hometown in the 1950s, black people were allowed entry in the public park swimming pool once a summer, on the last day of the season. At the end of that day park attendants drained the pool. Whites repeated these kinds of indignities against black people throughout America, not just in the south.  Do not tell me black lives mattered as much as white lives in this period. That is simply not true.

Monuments

The United Daughters of the Confederacy and groups like them built Civil War monuments during the years between the 1890s and 1950s, roughly coinciding with Jim Crow days. The earliest monuments, usually found in cemeteries, memorialized dead soldiers, often a relative or near ancestors. However monuments built between 1900 and 1920 and placed in public places glorified Confederate war leaders and distorted the real cause for which the South fought.

Throughout the South today, schools, streets, public buildings, parks, and other public facilities are named for Confederate war leaders, and white men who owned slaves or had a history of racial positions. One example is the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where Bloody Sunday occurred on March 7, 1965, when police attacked Civil Rights Movement demonstrators with horses, billy clubs, and tear gas as they peacefully protested and tried to cross the bridge on a journey to Montgomery, the state capital. The bridge is named after Edmund Winston Pettus, a Confederate brigadier general, U.S. senator, and leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. I walked across that bridge recently and thought about what it must have been like for those peaceful protestors. To be brutally beaten by a white mob and police officers who had a constitutional duty to protect them from harm.

The United Daughters had a remarkable amount of political influence. Many of their members were married to influential men with political and economic power. In addition to setting up war monuments, they also inserted textbooks into public schools that were sympathetic to the false notions that slavery was benign, and slaves happy and grateful to their masters. The lessons in their books promoted white supremacy and the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy”, the belief that the principle for which Confederate States fought was a just and heroic effort to stop Northern aggression and preserve the Southern way of life. They worked diligently to ensure that these ideas would carry on for generations in public school curricula throughout the South.

You can bet your last dollar that at the same time that the Daughters were building monuments no one built monuments to black soldiers, black freedom fighters, or abolitionists who risked their lives to help enslaved Black Americans escape into free states using the “underground railroad”. Black Americans did not have the economic or political power to carry out such a true telling of history.

For most of my life, I have walked amongst these monuments and, I am ashamed to say, never gave much thought to why and how they got where they are and for what they stood. I have sung my share of the old tune Dixie at football games.

Think what it must have been like in 1950 for a Black American man or woman living in Richmond, Virginia, or any southern city, to walk amongst those monuments. A black man or woman whose near ancestors were likely slaves or sharecroppers. A black man or women who most likely experienced daily discrimination and indignities. Think what it must have been like for them to live in a place that glorifies men who fought to protect the right of white people to own black slaves, men who rebelled against the bonafide government of the United States and, in essence, its constitution. Think for a moment what these black men and women and their parents talked about around dinner tables. I suspect it was not about the grand and noble cause of the Confederacy. Black Americans, generations of them, have a justifiable reason to be angry, it seems to me.

The Stark Truth

It is obvious that in our history Black lives have not mattered near as much as white lives. The inequities are well-documented. The Black Lives Matter movement is a clarion call for action. It is the new American conscience. It is a demand for equality and justice.

Do not listen to those among us who say this movement is about violence, looting and destruction of private property, despicable enterprises to be soundly denounced and punished. Those activities are perpetrated by disgruntled people on the margins of the movement. The Black Lives Movement, is not, at its core, Marxist, communist or anti-American. It is for America, the American idea of equality for all.

The overwhelming majority of Black Lives Matters followers are non-violent protesters. They are not looking to end capitalism and free enterprise. They look only to eliminate racially motivated violence against black people. They look only to right long-standing inequities in our society, to make all lives matter equally. Their leaders are people like recently deceased John Lewis, who spent his entire life waging a nonviolent fight for freedom for his people. John Lewis, born in 1940, who as a boy in Troy, Alabama was denied the right to take out a book from a local public library. The librarian told him that privilege was only for white people. John Lewis, who knew of white mobs that had lynched Black Americans practically in his backyard, often for the slimmest of reasons. Whose parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles were afraid to register to vote for fear of midnight visits by those very same mobs. Who himself had been beaten by white mobs and police on many occasions as he went his way in peaceful protest, a right guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Hope for the Future

History is clear on all these matters. It is time for America to own up to a true telling of that history, stare it in the eye, and work together to form “a more perfect Union”.

“Times they are a changin”, said Bob Dylan in 1964. Maybe today they really are. Maybe there will be real progress toward racial justice and equality in America. Just maybe a new American conscience is appearing.

When the day comes when all Americans are truly treated equally it will no longer be necessary for Black Americans to remind us that Black lives matter because all lives really will matter.

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”

Dr. Martin Luther King