Tag: civil rights

Ruby Bridges: civil rights icon

Ruby Bridges went to a school by herself; well, except for U.S. Marshals dispatched by President Eisenhower.

rubybridgesHere’s the thing: there are so many iconic people in the Civil Rights movement that are etched in my brain that, sometimes, I forget they are not seared in everyone else’s. So during the month, I’m going to mention some folks you may have heard of, or possibly not.

RUBY NELL BRIDGES, who turned 60 on September 8, 2014, was the first black child to attend an all-white elementary school in the American South. She attended William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana, starting in 1960. Ruby appeared on the cover of LOOK magazine, a very popular publication in the day, portrayed in this iconic picture by Norman Rockwell entitled The Problem We All Live With.

She notes: “Though I did not know it then, nor would I come to realize it for many years, what transpired in the fall of 1960 in New Orleans would forever change my life and help shape a nation.

“When I think back on that time and all that has occurred since, I realize a lot has changed… I also know there is much MORE to be done… That fateful walk to school began a journey, and I have now developed a vision to continue moving forward.”

Ruby was born in Tylertown, MS, but her family moved to New Orleans when she was four. In response to a request from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), her parents volunteered her to participate in the integration of the New Orleans School system, Ruby passed the test that determined whether or not she’d be allowed to attend William Frantz. Five other black kids also passed the test, but either decided to stay at their old school or transferred to another black school.

Ruby Bridges went to a school by herself; well, except for U.S. Marshals dispatched by President Eisenhower. As she described it, “Driving up I could see the crowd, but living in New Orleans, I actually thought it was Mardi Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside of the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of goes on in New Orleans at Mardi Gras.” Former Marshal Charles Burks later recalled, “She showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn’t whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier, and we’re all very very proud of her.”

Read about her from Biography.com and watch the 1998 TV movie.

The 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

The notion that we could, or should, as a nation, not only allow, but tacitly encourage, discrimination, based on sexual orientation, is quite troubling to me. That we should use religion as the basis of that discrimination is abhorrent to me.

Lyndon_Johnson_signing_Civil_Rights_Act,_July_2,_1964
It was late February, the week between when the Arizona state legislature passed S. 1062, allowing a “religious exception” to provide service to people, presumably gay people, and when Governor Jan Brewer vetoed the bill. I was watching JEOPARDY!, in real time. A clue popped up about the Greensboro Four, the young black men who, in February 1960, sat in at a Woolworth’s “whites only” lunch counter.

Suddenly, the Daughter started singing this song, about it, Rosa Parks, and the Little Rock Nine like events, which I had never heard before:

“Some young men in Carolina sat down at a counter and asked for something to eat
Cause they had a dream, yes they had a dream
And when no one served them, they just kept sitting, they never missed a beat
Cause they had a dream, yes they had a dream
They had a dream that all our children could live in harmony
And go to school together and work in the land of liberty”

It was actions such as the Greensboro sit-in, several retaliatory incidents of violence against blacks and of whites who supported them, capped by the peaceful August 1963 March on Washington, that prompted Congress to take action. From the Senate Judiciary committee webpage:

The House Judiciary Committee approved the legislation on October 26, 1963, and formally reported it to the full House on November 20, 1963, just two days before President Kennedy was assassinated. On November 27, 1963, President Lyndon Johnson asserted his commitment to President Kennedy’s legislative agenda, particularly civil rights legislation.

“No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the Civil Rights Bill for which he fought so long.”

The House of Representatives passed a final version of the Civil Rights Act on February 10, 1964…

After a 54-day filibuster of the legislation, a bipartisan group of Senators introduced a compromise bill. The legislation… was ultimately passed on June 19, 1964, by a vote of 73 to 27. On July 2, 1964, the House voted to adopt the Senate-passed legislation… President Johnson signed the bill into law that very afternoon. The Civil Rights Act paved the way for future anti-discrimination legislation, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Here’s another narrative from ten years ago. Check out Bryan Cranston on playing President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the play All the Way.

President Obama has been saluting the passage of the Civil Rights Act and honoring LBJ for his work to make it so. There is no doubt that the Act irrevocably altered the American landscape, and for the better.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Yet the notion that we could, or should, as a nation, not only allow, but tacitly encourage, discrimination, based on sexual orientation, is quite troubling to me. That we should use religion as the basis of that discrimination is abhorrent to me.

Do we need another Greensboro sit-in, say in Mississippi, which passed a bill, signed by the governor, as onerous as the Arizona bill? Not advocating that (yet), but the thought DID cross my mind.

Race in America, late summer, 1963

“We often hear it said here that while the Negro drive for equality is a justifiable movement, in the last year the Negroes have been pushing too hard and too fast….”

NBC News did a very interesting thing last month: it rebroadcast the August 25, 1963 episode of the news panel program Meet the Press, 50 years after the original broadcast. You can read the transcript at the site as well. The guests were Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, and Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They were speaking three days before the massive March on Washington.

What I found fascinating is that there are two overriding themes in the questioning. One comes in the first question from Lawrence E. Spivak, “permanent member of the MEET THE PRESS panel,” and future moderator of the program: “Mr. Wilkins, there are a great many people, as I am sure you know, who believe it would be impossible to bring more than 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possibly rioting. What do you see as the effect on the just cause of the Negro if you do have incidents, if you do have any rioting?” Love the use of the word “militant.”

Of course, the march was peaceful, as Wilkins suggested would be the case, even larger than Wilkins’ upper estimation of up to 190,000 participants, and with a great number of them white people.

I found this concern particularly interesting in terms of current MTP host David Gregory’s description of the times: “The previous months of 1963 were tumultuous ones in the civil rights movement.

“King was jailed in April, images of brutality were widely publicized as police turned fire hoses and attack dogs on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, and the NAACP ‘s Medgar Evers was murdered in Jackson Mississippi in June.”

The other emphasis was based on this question to Dr. King: “We often hear it said here that while the Negro drive for equality is a justifiable movement, in the last year the Negroes have been pushing too hard and too fast…. There has been concern about the sit-ins, about some of the incidents that have happened in connection with them. Do you find any substantial reaction among white people to this effect, or does it affect you in any way in the conduct of your movement ?”

I always found this notion that fairness coming “too fast” laughable, given, as Dr. King noted that black people at the time had “waited for well-now 345 years for our basic constitutional and God-given rights.” I remember that national polls into at least the 1980s suggested that white people thought the black people were moving too quickly towards equality, a view not shared by black people.

Less than a month after the “I Have a Dream” speech, four black girls were killed in their Birmingham church, as Arthur noted. I was pleased that President Obama signed legislation posthumously awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. But I was saddened to discover that the body of Addie Mae Collins had gone missing, probably in the first five years after her death.

I found it ironic that the panelists on that 1963 segment of MTP talked about violence BY blacks when violence TO blacks was so often the reality in the day.

Fortunately, we live in post-racial America in 2013, where the selection of a Miss America of Asian Indian descent was universally cheered. OK, NOT so universally cheered. At least we can be comforted (?) by the fact that if she had eligible to be competing for Miss India, she probably wouldn’t have even made it to the finals.

World AIDS Day, and the Civil Rights movement

Most years I would go visit the AIDS quilt, in part to see if the quilt for my friend Vito Mastrogiovanni, who died in May 1991, was there; it was, at least twice in my viewing.

 

December 1 is World AIDS Day, with the current theme “Getting to zero: zero new HIV infections. Zero discrimination. Zero AIDS-related deaths”.

It’s also the date, in 1955, that the Montgomery Bus Boycott began in Alabama, which, for me, signified the beginning of the modern civil rights era. Yes, Truman integrated the armed forces before that, and the Supreme Court had integrated the schools. The bus boycott, though, was a mass mobilization of many “ordinary” people to not sit in the back of the bus.

I resisted telling this story before because… well, let me tell it, then get into that.

In Albany, the state has had the AIDS quilt displayed at the Empire State Convention Center just about every year since it started traveling. Most years I would go visit, in part to see if the quilt for my friend Vito Mastrogiovanni, who died in May 1991, was there; it was, at least twice in my viewing.

There were guides, who would make sure people weren’t touching the quilts, but were also directed to comfort the people who might become upset by the event; there were plenty of boxes of tissues on hand. Most of the guides were state Department of Health guides, but a few years back, they were looking for additional volunteers and I opted in.

One year, about a decade ago, I was in my particular section, and I could see someone who seemed to be overcome by emotion in another section. Yet no one seemed to be responding, which I found to be odd. As I got closer, though, I figured out why.

The crier was almost certainly a transgender person, born male, transitioning to female. I’d like to say that I was unfazed by this, but that just wouldn’t be true. Still, here is a soul in pain. So we talked, and I handed out tissues, which were appreciated. And then it hit me: what the heck was that all about, Roger?

My reluctance to telling this was because I didn’t want to be critical of those who shied away from this person. Nor did I want to sound like I was all wonderful or something, but in fact was embarrassed by my own narrowness.

I haven’t been a guide in the last half dozen years; they’ve cut back on the hours of the display, for budgetary reasons, and I surmise that they’re using DOH employees exclusively. I trust that they are now more sensitive, or at least ACT with more sensitivity than they did 10 years ago to this person.

It is a truism that the more you know people who are “different” from you, the more understanding and compassionate you’re likely to be. At my church this past June, we had a transgendered person, now a she, who explained some of the physiological, psychological, and societal issues involved with the transgendered in this society.

Who was it who said, “None of us are free unless all of us are free”?

E is for Equality

Booker noted: “I shudder to think what would have happened if the civil rights gains, heroically established by courageous lawmakers in the 1960s, were instead conveniently left up to popular votes in our 50 states.”

 

The news that made the recent headlines in terms of marriage equality in the United States was that a federal appeals court ruled Proposition 8, the California plebiscite overturning gay marriage, violated the Constitution, setting up an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, or possibly not. Meanwhile, the Washington state legislature passed a bill legalizing gay marriage; here is part of the debate. Also, New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch has vowed to veto efforts to repeal that state’s same-sex marriage law.

Discussing specifically the California judicial ruling, writer Mark Evanier noted: “I still wish this thing could be settled by a vote of the people rather than to reopen silly arguments about ‘judicial activism.'” And in an ideal world, I would tend to agree with him.

But I was struck by something that Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, New Jersey, a Democrat, said. He broke with Governor Chris Christie, a Republican with whom he has previously been aligned. Booker opposed Christie’s call for a gay marriage referendum, and his threat to veto a gay marriage bill because, as Christie put it, “I need to be governed by the will of the people.”

In response, Booker noted: “I shudder to think what would have happened if the civil rights gains, heroically established by courageous lawmakers in the 1960s, were instead conveniently left up to popular votes in our 50 states.” He submitted that leaders are elected to make difficult decisions, not submit to a public referendum. “Equal protection under the law – for race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation – should not be subject to the most popular sentiments of the day. Marriage equality is not a choice. It is a legal right. I hope our leaders in Trenton will affirm and defend it.” You can watch Booker here.

I was fascinated by a lengthy article in Salon: The making of gay marriage’s top foe: How Maggie Gallagher’s college pregnancy made her a single mom, and a traditional marriage zealot. “The organization she founded in 2007, the National Organization for Marriage, helped organize the successful effort in 2008 to pass Proposition 8 in California…

“Gallagher’s opposition to gay marriage seems to have very little to do with gay people, indeed with people at all. What really excites her is a depersonalized idea of Marriage: its essence, its purity, its supposedly immutable definition…For Gallagher, gay people are the enemy only insofar as their desire to marry is yet another attack on Marriage…”

Except that marriage had already been on the decline, at least in the United States, long before the first gay nuptials. I suspect it’s a function of children with divorced parents being less likely to tie the knot. It’s almost ironic that gay couples, for whom marriage had long been out of the question, are now a growth segment in the matrimonial business.
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A brief history of the Gay Rights Movement.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a legal challenge to the (so-called) Defense of Marriage Act.
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ABC Wednesday – Round 10

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