“Selma Is Hardly History”: Yet After Ferguson And Staten Island, We May Be Less Optimistic Today
I’ve never forgotten what it was like to be in Selma at the start of the March 21, 1965, Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Rights March, but I’ll still be in the ticket line for the opening of the new feature film, “Selma.”
I’m anxious to see how Selma is portrayed by a director and actors for whom it is history rather than personal experience. The college students I teach have only a hazy knowledge of Selma and its impact on the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Today, though, Selma has taken on new relevance as it approaches its 50th anniversary. The failures of grand juries in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, to indict the police officers whose actions led to the deaths of two unarmed black men has made the gross injustices the civil rights movement fought against in the ’60s seem part of our times.
I am not nostalgic about Selma, but I am struck by how, despite the explicit racism of the South in 1965, there was more optimism then about America’s racial future than we have today. In New York, where I live, nightly #blacklivesmatter marches protesting events in Ferguson and Staten Island have been able to disrupt the city to a degree unthinkable 50 years ago, but among the marchers with whom I have spoken, their hopes are modest and specific. They want to change how policing is done in communities of color, and they are calling for special prosecutors in cases of alleged police misconduct. Few, though, speak of a new racial day in America arriving any time soon.
In 1965 I was far less sophisticated politically than today’s marchers. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been conducting a voter registration campaign in Selma since January 1965, but my awareness of SCLC’s efforts did not come until the night of March 7. That was the date on which everything to do with Selma changed. Shortly after 9 o’clock, ABC interrupted its Sunday evening movie,”Judgment at Nuremberg, with pictures from Selma that showed Alabama State Troopers attacking a column of black demonstrators while jeering crowds rooted the troopers on.
What shocked me about the attack, which quickly became known as “Bloody Sunday,” was that the troopers made no effort to conceal their actions from the television cameras. They were confident they would not be called to account.
The story of Selma has been told movingly by a number of historians — particularly, David Garrow in “Protest at Selma” and Taylor Branch in “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68.” But in March 1965 when I cut my graduate classes at Brown and headed south, I had little sense that a historic undertaking was about to happen. A second protest march, this one on March 9, had been peaceably turned around, and I worried that the March 21 march might remain small, even with Martin Luther King and a series of celebrities heading it.
I was encouraged by the fact that on March 15, in a nationwide television address, President Johnson announced that he was sending a voting rights bill to Congress, and I took heart from the fact that Johnson followed up his address by calling out the Alabama National Guard to protect the March 21 march. Nonetheless, when I got to Selma on the night before the march, my worries continued.
The arrival of outsiders like me put an enormous strain on the black families in Selma who were supporting the march. The racial tensions in Selma and the surrounding counties — already high — were heightened still more by our presence. I was lucky. A black family opened up its house to me and several others, but many who arrived at the last moment ended up spending the night on the pews of Brown Chapel, the church at the center of civil rights activity in Selma.
In contrast to the end of the march, when 25,000 gathered in Montgomery to hear Martin Luther King speak, the crowd on that first day of the march was just 3,200 — an estimate that still strikes me as high. It did not take King’s assistant, Andrew Young (then Andy Young), long to organize us. Wearing bib overalls and a blue jacket, he stood in the middle of the street in front of Brown Chapel and got everyone into rows that would later fill Highway 80, from side to side.
For a moment, the march felt like the start of a small town’s Fourth of July parade, but things quickly turned ugly as we began moving through Selma. I remember the car that played “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” over its loud speakers and a homemade “Coonsville U.S.A” sign that was impossible to miss. Later, the cries of “White N****r,” especially from teenagers who enjoyed shouting in unison as if they were spectators at a football game, became routine along the march route after we left town.
The following day, with a group of volunteers, I helped clear the pasture where the small band of marchers making the complete trip from Selma to Montgomery were scheduled to spend the night. Clearing the pasture meant gathering up the cow manure that was everywhere. It was a thankless job, but in the warm Alabama sun, our work went without incident until early in the afternoon when a caravan of cars with gun racks on their roofs and Confederate flags on their doors pulled up.
There was no place to hide, and in this pre-cellphone era, no way to call for help. Scattered over several acres, we were easy targets for anyone with a gun. The men in the cars cursed us for a while over a bullhorn and tried to provoke a fight, but when nobody reacted, they finally got back in their cars and drove away. For those of us clearing the pasture, it was a lesson in the kind of vulnerability anyone who was black faced for trying to register to vote in Alabama. My fear stayed with me for the rest of the afternoon, but when it went away, I was not relieved. I felt once again how small my role at Selma was. I could count on being safe the minute I got back on a plane and returned North.
When the 50th anniversary of the Selma march is celebrated this year in Alabama, I’ll make sure to stay in the background if I go, but right now I’m leaning toward staying at home. I think the money it will cost for me to travel to Selma might better be spent on working for change in the present.
By: Nicolaus Mills, Professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College; Salon, December 26, 2014
“Rudy Giuliani Crosses Line On Race”: Why GOP Must Finally Push Back On His Recklessness
Quite appropriately, considering how terrible much of the news this year has been, it looks like the last big story of 2014 will be the horrifying murder of two NYPD officers this weekend by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, an unhappy and mentally unstable 28-year-old man who had a history of trouble with the law and a propensity for violence. Claiming on social media beforehand that he was doing it in the name of avenging Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Brinsley approached a squad car in Brooklyn on Saturday and pitilessly killed the two unsuspecting officers within before killing himself after a brief attempt to escape. Like Shaneka Thompson, the Air Force reservist and former girlfriend he’d shot in the stomach earlier that day (who is in critical condition but expected to recover), neither Officer Wenjian Liu nor Officer Rafael Ramos was white.
The worst thing about this terrible event is, by far, the fear and pain that has been visited on those who care for Thompson, Ramos and Liu. On a human level, that’s what most matters. But on the level of politics — which occasionally intersects with that of humanity, but far less often than you’d hope — a terrible development was the response. As my colleague Joan Walsh explained already, a truly surprising and disappointing number of high-profile conservatives and Republicans didn’t even wait until the public knew Brinsley’s name before they began using his atrocity for their own, tangentially related purposes. New York City Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association head Patrick Lynch, for example, almost immediately integrated the attack into his ongoing campaign against Mayor Bill de Blasio. Former Gov. George Pataki, meanwhile, used it to bash de Blasio and test the waters for the latest iteration of his quadrennially threatened (and quadrennially ignored) potential White House run.
Yet even though blaming New York’s mayor for Brinsley’s actions is irrational (and so opportunistic that it borders on the obscene), even more shocking, even more inexcusable, and even more disturbing were the comments from ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The failed presidential candidate and well-compensated consultant to Serbian nationalists trained his fire not so much at Mayor de Blasio as President Obama, whom he charged with fostering an atmosphere that made actions like Brinsley’s seem OK. “We’ve had four months of propaganda, starting with the president, that everybody should hate the police,” Giuliani said on Fox News Sunday morning. “The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged,” he continued. Even the peaceful protests, he said, “lead to a conclusion: The police are bad, the police are racist.” Giuliani all but laid the slain officers’ caskets at the president’s feet.
While it should not surprise us that a man who once, in complete earnestness, said “[f]reedom is about authority” thinks all forms of organized dissent against law enforcement are illegitimate, we should be shaken and concerned by the complete lack of pushback from other elite Republicans that Giuliani’s comments received. Despite the fact that nothing — absolutely, positively nothing — the president said in response to the turmoil in Ferguson or the outrage in Staten Island could be reasonably construed as even tacitly endorsing violence, no high-profile GOPer even tried to scold “America’s mayor” for his brazen claims. In spite of the fact that Giuliani’s comments could only make sense if you accepted a racialized and erroneous subtext (black protesters and president vs. white police), no Republican publicly disagreed. And when Erick Erickson, predictably, brought Giuliani’s insinuation to the surface, saying Obama “does not like the United States,” the silence remained.
When we think of the ways in which Obama’s most virulent enemies have sought to delegitimize him, to depict him not only as wrong on various issues as well as lacking in character but as fundamentally deceitful and un-American, we conjure up images of the birthers. We think of claims that he’s actually from Kenya and/or Indonesia, that he’s lying about his Christianity and/or as his name. But even though the Democrats, the mainstream media and elements of the Republican establishment have managed to push the birthers to the fringes of the GOP, there’s little reason to think Giuliani, Erickson and others who make arguments like theirs will be ostracized from polite society. That’s a great injustice — because what they’re doing now and what the birthers do is, fundamentally, the same.
Granted, alleging President Obama is on a decades-long mission, which began at the time of his birth, to destroy the United States from within is much more superficially outlandish than alleging that he encourages the murder of police. But both claims, at their essence, depict the president as alien from the rest of American society, as an interloper with nefarious designs. For the birthers, Obama is a secret Muslim or Marxist or lizard (or a combination of all three) who wants to weaken the U.S. in order to implement some shadowy scheme. And for Giuliani and Erickson, he’s a secret radical, a crypto-black nationalist, the New Black Panther Party’s best friend in D.C. He’s not a milquetoast liberal technocrat reformer, but an extremist in camouflage, inciting a race war and the murder of police.
These wild, bigoted fever dreams are dangerous accusations for anyone to excuse or ignore, no matter the target. But they’re especially unacceptable when the accused is the first African-American president of the United States. This country has a long, ugly history of treating people of color — but especially black people — as somehow less than fully American. That’s part of what made Obama’s ascension to the White House so important and extraordinary. The prospect of the country’s first black president being repeatedly accused by his political opponents of stoking a race war and sowing disorder is therefore a scary one; and if it came to pass, it would be a clear step back from where we were as recently as 2008. And this is why it’s imperative that all the key players in the political elite push these sentiments back underground, as they (mostly) did with the birthers.
If they’re serious about wanting to strive for national unity and reconciliation on race in America, Republicans and conservatives need to distance themselves from Erickson and Giuliani’s comments — ASAP.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, December 23, 2014
“An Internalized Fear Of Black Males”: ‘Confirmation Bias’ Has Long History Of Helping Whites Demonize Blacks
Does “confirmation bias” influence the way whites think about police shootings of young men of color?
This bias is the tendency to interpret or remember information in a way that confirms what we already believe, and helps us to ignore new data. And it may explain the tension between white cops and black kids — and the public reaction to them — more than outright racism does.
Many of us think police must be in the right because we have internalized a fear of black males and assume that they are up to no good.
As Harvard sociologist Charles Ogletree has pointed out, “Ninety-nine percent of black people don’t commit crimes, yet we see the images of back people day in, day out, and the impression is that they’re all committing crimes.”
Young black males in recent years were at 21 times greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts, reports ProPublica, which analyzed federal data this year. It found that in “1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012, blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million,” compared with 1.47 per million white males in that age range.
Roger J.R. Levesque of Indiana State University says that eyewitnesses to crimes generally report scenarios that are consistent with confirmation bias. Among the studies he cites is one in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that found merely seeing a black face led subjects to be more likely to mistake objects for weapons.
In Ferguson, Mo., the white officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, described Brown as demon-like. Would he have used such a word if the teenager had been white?
Confirmation bias undoubtedly helped the defense in the 2013 trial in the death of Trayvon Martin. Lawyers successfully “thuggized” the black teenager, who was walking home carrying candy and a bottle of tea when he was shot by a white neighborhood watch member. Martin had no criminal record, but the defense dug up some minor problems he had in school and made an animated video showing him attacking the white man who shot him. There was no actual evidence that the unarmed teenager started the fight. But jurors clearly bought that narrative.
Throughout U.S. history, confirmation bias has helped some white people use the image of the evil black man for their own ends. The “Willie Horton” TV ad caused a huge controversy when it ran during the 1988 presidential race between George H.W. Bush and Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. The ad featured a fearsome-looking mug shot of a black convict who raped a woman while free under a Massachusetts prison furlough program backed by Dukakis. The ad was intended to picture Dukakis as soft on crime, and it worked.
Whites trying to escape punishment for their crimes sometimes find black men convenient scapegoats, because they are so readily seen as prone to crime. In 1989, a Boston white man, Charles Stuart, was shot in a black neighborhood in the city, along with his pregnant wife. He blamed a “black male.” His wife and son, who was delivered prematurely, later died.
News coverage was extremely sympathetic until evidence surfaced indicating that Stuart shot his wife and himself.
In 1994, Susan Smith, a South Carolina woman, claimed that a black man had hijacked her car and kidnapped her two young sons. For days, the news media gave around-the-clock coverage to a nationwide search for the black carjacker. But no such man exist. Smith had drowned her two sons by pushing her car into a lake with the boys inside. She had a wealthy boyfriend who allegedly was not interested in having a “ready-made” family.
It’s no wonder whites so easily accept the image of the evil black male. But this was not always so.
Early in the history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, notes Audrey Smedley, now professor emeritus of anthropology at Virginia Commonwealth University, blacks were not set apart from other laborers. The first slaves the English used in the Caribbean were Irish. And there were more Irish slaves in the middle of the 17th century than any others.
At that time, Smedley writes, African slaves and European slaves “worked together, they played together … they lived together” and color didn’t “make much difference … because they were all in the same boat.”
One 17th century planter who wrote to the trustees of his company said, “Please don’t send us any more Irishmen. Send us some Africans, because the Africans are civilized and the Irish are not.”
But plantations grew ever larger and the African slave trade exploded. To justify the cruelty of lifetime slavery, the myth had to be manufactured that blacks — especially men — were subhuman and violent. That image stuck.
In the years since, those ideas too often have intensified. As Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson points out, “More than 45 years ago, the Kerner Commission concluded that we lived in two societies, one white, one black, separate and still unequal.” And we still do. If we don’t resolve this gap, Dyson writes, “We are doomed to watch the same sparks reignite, whenever and wherever injustice meets desperation.”
Only when we realize the power of confirmation bias, and start looking at reality instead of stereotypes and misinformation, will things change.
By: Caryl Rivers, Journalism Professor at Boston University; Op-Ed Opinion, The Los Angeles Times, December 11, 2014
“Racial Strife Can Lead To Progress”: Learning More About How Race Is Experienced By Different People In Our Very Diverse Society
Big city mayors have to stay as neutral as possible when asked about disputes between their citizens and the police. But New York City mayor Bill de Blasio found his voice in a profoundly moving way when he responded not as a mayor, but as a parent.
His sentiments came out in a news conference and an ABC-TV interview after a grand jury decided not to indict a white police officer in the video-recorded choking death of Eric Garner, a black suspect in Staten Island.
The mayor, who is married to an African-American woman, described his own warnings to his biracial son, Dante, about making any sudden or otherwise suspicious movements in an encounter with police.
“What parents have done for decades who have children of color, especially young men of color, is train them to be very careful when they have … an encounter with a police officer,” de Blasio said on ABC’s This Week.
Asked if he felt his son was at risk from his city’s own police department, de Blasio responded: “It’s different for a white child. That’s just the reality in this country. And with Dante, very early on with my son, we said, ‘Look, if a police officer stops you, do everything he tells you to do, don’t move suddenly, don’t reach for your cellphone,’ because we knew, sadly, there’s a greater chance it might be misinterpreted if it was a young man of color.”
Although the mayor expressed “immense respect” for New York’s Finest, police union officials fired back. The cops felt “thrown under the bus,” said one.
But I appreciated de Blasio’s remarks. We have something in common. We are both fathers of handsome young African-American males with conspicuous hair.
Dante’s explosively huge Afro made headlines during his dad’s campaign last year as a major asset, especially with young voters. My son has long dreadlocks, today’s version of the big Afro and mutton-chop sideburns with which I upset my own parents. “Grandma’s revenge,” I call my kid’s hairstyle.
I appreciated de Blasio’s remarks because one does not often hear a prominent white official speak candidly about “The Talk,” which is what many black parents call the painfully necessary conversation they have with their kids about how to behave if stopped by police.
The Talk has slipped into more widespread conversations with the recent wave of controversial police killings of black men and boys, some of which — like Garner’s — were captured on video.
Besides Garner, who died this summer when a police officer put him in an alleged chokehold after stopping to arrest him for selling untaxed “loosie” cigarettes, there was 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, after a struggle.
More recently, a Cleveland cop fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing with a fake gun. Video of that shooting has run repeatedly on TV, along with the shooting of unarmed Levar Jones, 35, who reached into his car for his license too quickly in a Richland County, South Carolina, according to the officer, who has since been fired. Jones fortunately survived.
Is this why a narrow majority of Americans in a new Bloomberg Politics poll say they think racial interactions have gotten worse under President Obama? I think things only seem worse, especially to those who didn’t want to face the persistent canyon of our racial and cultural differences.
Racial discord in my view is a lot like sex: We may not be having more of it than we used to, but we’re talking about it more than ever.
In that way, we’re learning more — whether we intended to or not — about how race is experienced by different people and families in our very diverse society. Part of the thanks goes to modern media that, depending on how they are used, can shed light or more heat.
But those who expect to reach a “colorblind society” without a lot of effort and occasional setbacks are, as Frederick Douglass — one of the 19th century’s most important African Americans — said, are “people who want crops without plowing the ground.” We have many miles to go before we reap.
By: Clarence Page, The National Memo, December 15, 2014
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