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| What Happened Next? After the Supreme Court of the United States, in 1954, overturned its earlier validation of “separate but equal” schools, hospitals, public washrooms, busses and trains for Blacks and Whites, and told the Topeka Board of Education that segregated education is in breach of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution? After US Marshalls and federalised National Guardsmen were required to enforce the Court’s ruling? |
See what happens when you give up on the prospect of ever persuading Southern Whites to abandon Jim Crow? When your fear of the Klan overwhelms your determination to change the hearts and minds of your neighbours. When you turn, instead, to the civil rights lawyers and begin the long, painful ascent through state and federal, courts. When, in 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States overturns its earlier validation of “separate but equal” schools, hospitals, public washrooms, busses and trains for Blacks and Whites, and tells the Topeka Board of Education that segregated education is in breach of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. When US Marshalls and federalised National Guardsmen are required to enforce the Court’s ruling. When all that Southern Whites see are the ghosts of the Union soldiers who occupied the defeated Confederacy at the end of the Civil War.
Even then, we didn’t learn.
See what happens when Dr Martin Luther King’s extraordinary strategy of non-violence sears the consciences of not only the liberal North, but also the racist South, setting in motion a national change of heart, only to be condemned as too slow and insufficiently radical by his younger followers? When the ghettos erupt in violence, looting and arson. When the heavily-armed Black Panther Party scares the skin-deep liberalism right out of White America. When the FBI’s COINTEL programme is unleashed upon the Civil Rights Movement. When the final passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 seals the fate of the Democratic Party in the South and sets the Republican Party in pursuit of its racist “Southern Strategy”. When James Earl Ray guns down Dr King in Memphis.
Even then, we didn’t learn.
See what happens when the Supreme Court upholds a woman’s right to abortion? When seven (out of nine) unelected judges, strike down state laws that, for better or for worse, reflect the values and beliefs of the electors and their representatives in those states. When the opportunity offered to the Republican Party to drive a wedge between the “secular-humanist elites” of the big cities on both coasts, and the “God-fearing” working-class communities of the much smaller towns and cities of the “flyover” states, is simply too good to pass up. When the arguments between the “Pro-Life” and the “Pro-Choice” movements divide not only men, but women as well. When religious belief and political ideology find themselves on a collision course.
Even then, we didn’t learn.
See what happens when a charismatic conservative, Phyllis Schlafly, attracts more and more conservative/religious women to her cause, and powerful men shower her Eagle Forum with advice and money? When all the easy, liberal states are safely included in the feminists’ “Yes” column, but the hard ones in the South and the Mid-West show no signs of following suit. When the clock is running down on the Equal Rights Amendment, which had sailed so effortlessly through the Democratic Party-controlled Congress, but which now seems certain to fall victim to the United States’ arcane federal constitution. When – yet again – the clear will of the majority will be thwarted.
Even then, we didn’t learn.
See what happens when you tell White men, already alienated by the claims and counter-claims of the Black civil rights, women’s liberation, and anti-Vietnam War movements, that the liberals are coming for their guns? When centuries-old family traditions of hunting in the forests and mountains of America, and of acquiring the marksmanship needed to bring down game animals, is presented as some sort of political sickness. When the stark reality of a criminal fraternity accustomed to carrying and using handguns has rendered it only prudent for ordinary citizens to similarly arm themselves. When the social and economic conditions that unhinge the most damaged members of American society are routinely ignored, and their bloody rampages are, instead, blamed on the ready availability of firearms. When trust and confidence in the political process has reached such a low point that many Americans feel it necessary to arm themselves against their own government.
Even then, we didn’t learn.
See what happens to a nation when the core values that once encouraged its citizens to refer to themselves as “We, the People”, fracture and are rearranged into antagonistic belief systems? When long-established economic, sexual and racial hierarchies are challenged by those expected to endure their subordinate status in perpetuity? When the rights enjoyed by the privileged few are claimed by the disenfranchised many? When, in short, the purpose and distribution of social, economic and political power are subjected to unrelenting questioning – and there is no agreement as to the answers?
It is only then we learn that the rights we seek are never given. If we cannot summon sufficient strength to take them, and hold them, then we must resign ourselves to living without them.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 29 June 2022.
"When the heavily-armed Black Panther Party scares the skin-deep liberalism right out of White America."
ReplyDeleteIt was the conservatives, led by Ronald Reagan and supported by the NRA that crapped their pants when the Black Panthers quite legally armed themselves in order to protect black people from the police.
I suspect somehow that Martin Luther King had less effect on the south then he was given credit for, given that it was the federal government that obtained some sort of conscience from somewhere and started passing laws about equality.
I don't think it was liberals who were calling King a communist, or using the FBI to investigate him.
Sure, some liberals were intimidated by the Black Panthers, particularly when they started carrying weapons. But some actually had them round to dinner, and some realised that they were simply " Mau mauing the Flak Catchers."
The success of nonviolence depends entirely on how far the authorities are prepared to go to suppress it. Gandhi wouldn't have lasted five minutes in Nazi Germany for instance – he and his followers would simply have been mown down. It seems to me that the state governments in the South were reasonably happy to be using fire hoses on kids – that King put in the front row deliberately, and was called on it by the Panthers incidentally – but the images that went round the world made America look bad, and we used by the USSR in its propaganda. So I think the Cold War had a lot to do with the success of civil rights.
King is now lionised, but even in the early days there were people who realise that his methods weren't for them, who were perhaps impatient. I'm not at all sure they were entirely wrong.