A Mountain of a Different Name: Civil Rights
- mcglynnkerry
- Mar 5
- 4 min read
3-5–26. Last month I traveled with Road Scholar, a travel company geared for the 50-plus age group. Curious about American history of the Deep South I chose their “The Civil Rights Movement: Atlanta, Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham” tour. In addition to visiting historic hot spots of the Movement, we travelers had the privilege of hearing live witness accounts of some of the events that collectively made up the Civil Rights Movement.
Here is a limited snapshot of my impressions:
For a week we were immersed in the Black history in the Deep South. It was brutal learning the extent of evil that existed. And how, from the perspective of most whites, it was all an accepted way of life.
Thing is, Black history isn’t “their” history, it is Our history.
Local guides joined our group in each of the cities we visited. They were there at the time of the Movement, in the struggle for human dignity by way of civil rights, including the right to vote. These guides lived during this era. They saw and heard and participated in this movement. What a gift to hear their live witness accounts.
One thing that’d surfaced, every one of these guides made references to our current American events and were distressed by what they were seeing in the news. Specifically, the news reports of federal agents killing nonviolent citizens in Minneapolis.
This article, “How Minneapolis Protests Fit into the Larger Struggle for Civil Rights,” came out two days before I departed on this trip:
Laws are the foundation for how we citizens live in our nation and communities.
Although the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, it has not been a straight forward road to freedom. Especially in the South, it has been fraught with terror. Blacks continued to suffer under oppressive laws that ensured inequality and segregation. The Civil Rights Movement - a hundred years after Emancipation — was a crying out for the soul of humanity.
For instance, there were laws designed to keep Blacks from being able to vote. If you can’t vote, then you cannot participate and have a say in things that directly effect your life, you don’t have a say whether where you live is segregated or not.
In Selma, I learned why it was difficult - impossible - for Blacks to register to vote.
Dianne Harris, our guide that day, shared with us several questions on the voter literacy test of that time. (The test doesn’t apply to whites because if your grandfather was registered to vote that was enough to qualify you.) Our educated Road Scholar group managed to get some questions correct but not most. Besides the test, while you are trying to register to vote, they had a large jar of jellybeans on the counter and you had to tell how many jellybeans there were. Too strange to be true, but it was true.
I have no words to describe how messed up life in the South was ….except to say, Blacks did not have agency over their lives.
Here is the link for the Alabama Voter Literacy Test (circa 1965)
Dianne Harris, was a fifteen year old student at the time of Bloody Sunday, in 1965, when peaceful marchers pursuing voting rights, attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way to Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. She said she marched in order for her mother to be able to vote. She and her thirteen year old brother were toward the back of the rest of the marchers, thankfully. As people were being brutally forced back over the bridge, they escaped. But she saw the beatings, she saw the men on horseback chasing down unarmed protestors. She saw men wearing gas masks and helmets. She saw hecklers made up of her white neighbors on the sidelines. She saw the attackers wielding batons. Because law enforcement had to temporarily deputize many citizens to help with crowd control, the owner of the local furniture store provided as many table legs as needed to be used as batons.
The mindset of many whites at the time, epitomized by the likes of Bull Conner, as described by Jonathon Rieder in Gospel of Freedom, was “…violent squads that fancied themselves as saviors of the white race.” Their fear, which I see reflected in much of our current day events, is the white race may at some point not be the race in control. It is not hyperbole to suggest that these were Hitler’s fears as well. For white supremacy to reign there is tragic sacrifice to achieve this. No one wins.
Our society values power and money and social status over the lifting of a people, over the healing of our nation. Why are whites afraid of helping non-whites gain equality? Isn’t there so much more to gain if we all lift each other up? Isn’t democracy the prize? And why are today’s Christians, in a nation founded on freedom of religion, so threatened by non-Christians?
Today’s government is antagonistic, and dare I say, enjoys being antagonistic, and does not have its citizens’ best interests at heart. Instead of our federal government protecting us we have to protect ourselves from them. We see it on the news, practically on a daily basis, federal agents covered up with gas masks and wielding clubs.
It feels crazy to write this but the United States is on course to lose its democracy. What I see, is, there are a select few of the powerful and uber-wealthy that seem to be gaining traction, and we ordinary citizens, you and me, have less of a voice over our lives. Our right to vote is under attack. The integrity of the voting process, is convoluted and twisted up into conspiracy theories. Can’t we recognize our world, our beautiful world, is made up of many peoples and cultures and that working to develop a strong democracy means nurturing the good characteristics of humankind (compassion, caring, lifting of the downtrodden)?
White supremacy - supremacy of any group - cannot compare to a great democracy. One oppresses; one lifts.
Here are a few links for additional details:
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