People milled and marched through the streets for about two hours before heading to the Barclays Center. At a couple intersections men spoke from very tall step ladders. One talked about God. Another talked about violence, urging protestors to avoid it. I saw a dozen cops observing. They weren’t blocking anyone’s path. There were no confrontations. I left in time to get home before the 8:00 p.m. curfew.
Chalk writing related to the death of George Floyd and others, Brooklyn by by Rhododendrites
I’ve heard a lot of expert interviews on racism in America, so I think it would be useful to put some of this into historical context. I’ve been reading and writing about this for over twelve years while researching my almost-done book so feel as informed as any of the experts.
The ideology of white supremacy didn’t start with slavery – which is as old as civilization. It originated as a response to the Abolition Movement of the 1830s. By the 1850s, slave owners and their supporters were arguing that slavery was a positive good because Africans were inferior to whites and couldn’t handle freedom.
After Emancipation, Southerners struggled to achieve slavery by another name. That very convoluted history can’t be summarized in a few sentences. Suffice it to say that by the end of the 19th Century there was a movement to institutionalize white supremacy. That’s when the segregation laws were passed and state constitutions rewritten to disfranchise persons of African descent.
During the Civil War whites had portrayed their slaves as docile and loyal, devoted to looking after the families who owned them even while the white men of the plantation were away fighting to keep them enslaved. In subsequent decades, whites portrayed these same people as sex-crazed brutes who had to be kept in check with violence. Elites in the South created the "cult of white womanhood" to justify "protection" of white women from black men.
The 1920s was probably the zenith of white supremacy. The second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan could elect Governors and Senators, as well as local town councils, throughout the South and occasionally in other states. The cultural consensus in the North as well as the South, was that white supremacy benefitted both blacks and whites. Some scholars (especially anthropologists) were challenging this belief. But the cultural consensus didn’t begin to shift until the Holocaust became public knowledge. The realization that Aryan Supremacy (a refined version of white supremacy) had led to genocide undermined its legitimacy.
During this time the ideology of white supremacy became frozen in the South while it became fragile in the North. The Southern civil rights movement began in the South in the 1950s and spread to the North in the 1960s. It came to the Bay Area in the fall of 1963 when I was a college student at Berkeley. Like young people today, I spent the next year protesting, getting arrested and going to court (as well as to class).
Unlike today, we were denounced by pretty much everyone in authority. Governor Pat Brown said we were endangering other people lives. Mayor John Shelly said we were "wild, irresponsible and thoughtless." All the news media denounced our "outrageous tactics" (sitting in). We were particularly condemned because most of us were white.
Contrast that with today.
The number of people who actively support white supremacy is too small to be statistically significant, at least in Brooklyn, maybe in Mississippi. Protest signs said FUCK WHITE SUPREMACY. (In the Sixties, putting "fuck" on a sign would have resulted in an arrest for using obscenity). As far as I could tell from the news media, the participants in the bigger protests I didn’t get to were as overwhelmingly white as they were in the ones I did get to. Pretty much everyone in authority except the President supports our protests.
What’s missing from the Sixties? Non-violence. While the bulk of the demonstrators weren’t violent, a few were. I don’t mean the criminal opportunists who looted. But the protestors who threw rocks, bottles and fire crackers. The ones who defaced or burned cop cars may have been showing off their bravado but they weren’t helping the cause. Violence certainly attracts attention but it undermines legitimacy.
In the sixties, we were trained in non-violence, mostly by CORE, and constantly urged to practice it. When I was working for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1965-66, we were taught to go up to anyone who was picking up rocks and put our hands on theirs while urging restraint. When there were enough of us, we surrounded anyone who looked like he or she wanted to bust anything – be it people or property. The practice of non-violence gave our protests moral authority. It made us strong.
Non-violence should be the legacy of the sixties, not just protest. Where is that legacy now that we need it?
© 2020 Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com
Jo’s tweaking her next book: Tell It Like It Is: Living History in the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 1965-66
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