By Carolyn Bennett
Yelling “racist,” “racism” is just too easy. Clearly, we
have problems, serious problems. We as a nation of people, a race of people, as
human beings we have problems; but we do not conceive them accurately or handle
them appropriately by using disparaging characterizations such as “racist” and
“racism.” How would you feel if someone
belittled you or called you names?
Looking at name calling another way, only the defensive, the
ignorant, the lazy resort to smoke screens and name-calling, tactics to avoid
looking at themselves (ourselves) and or to divert attention from themselves (ourselves). To avoid
ignorance, one needs to take an unblinking look at history and study the
varieties of interpretations of history.
For those preferring the easy charge of “racist”/“racism,” what
do you call it when your tribe commits unspeakable cruelties against members of
your tribe? What happened to Fannie Lou
Hamer in 1963 and the MOVE Organization in 1984 was unspeakably cruel.
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n the summer of 1963 (June 9), the Ruleville, Mississippi,
native and American voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was traveling with
other activists from a literacy workshop in Charleston, South Carolina. They
stopped in Winona, Mississippi, and were arrested on a trumped-up charge and
thrown into jail. While in the Winona jail, “Hamer and her colleagues were
beaten savagely by the police, almost to the point of death.” History texts and various biographies have reported the horrors
of what happened to Hamer:
She was taken out of one jail cell
and transported to a separate cell.
Under orders of a State Highway Patrol
officer, two Negro (black male) prisoners bludgeoned Hamer with a police
blackjack.
The first prisoner beat her until
he was exhausted.
The law enforcement officer then
ordered the second prisoner to beat her.
Only after three days were members
of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) allowed to take Hamer to a
hospital.
These black men had a choice and they made the personal
decision to follow orders and brutalize this black woman, one of their own tribe. Hamer later reported that in physiological
terms the beating caused her “permanent kidney damage, a blood clot in the
artery of her left eye, and a limp.”
In 1964 before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic Party
National Convention convening in New Jersey, Fannie Lou Hamer, then founding
member (along with Ella Baker and Robert Parris Moses) of the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), spoke about the struggle to register and vote
and about that June 1963 Winona jailhouse beating.
‘All of this is on account [of our
wanting] to register, to become first-class citizens. If the Freedom Democratic
Party is not seated [credentialed] now, I question America.
‘Is this America, the land of the
free and the home of the brave -- where we have to sleep with our telephones
off the hooks because our lives [are] threatened daily, because we want to live
as decent human beings…?’
This occurred 50 years ago and, in the light of Ferguson,
Missouri, I have to wonder what Americans of Missouri or Mississippi,
Massachusetts, Maine or California have been doing together all these years for securing and cementing rights and
justice for all of America’s inhabitants, citizens and noncitizens? Apparently
not much: In 1984, twenty years after that New Jersey Democratic National
convention, another black male committed and received accolades for committing
a barbaric act against black people. This horrendous event happened in one of
America’s 13 original colonies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. “Racist”/
“racism” yellers take note.
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hiladelphia elected its “first black mayor,” Willie Wilson
Goode, in 1984; and in 1985, Goode’s government presided over the bombing of a
house and neighborhood inhabited by the MOVE Organization. MOVE is a
Philadelphia-based group founded in 1972 of mostly black people who “lived
communally and frequently engaged in public demonstrations related to issues
they deemed important.” After this egregious act of violence (bringing to mind
today’s U.S. federal officials’ bombings of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya,
Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and others) the citizens of this ‘city of brotherly love”
granted Wilson Goode a second term in office.
MOVE still exists and Fannie Lou Hamer (b. October 6,
1917-March 14, 1977) devoted a lifetime to securing constitutional rights,
human rights, first-class citizenship. The United States of America, however,
has failed to continuously progress and is today in a state of regress on human
rights and constitutional rights – and a black male is into a second term as
head of state.
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often ask myself what I have done with my life. If all I can
answer is that I have bought this or that – then the answer is I have done
nothing with my life. If can measure my life only in terms of possessions, then
I have nothing to show for my life. If I measure my life in comparison to
others’ acquisitions, then I have wasted my life.
Yelling “racist” and “racism” shuts off conversation, denies
relationship. Nothing moral, human, important or of lasting value is achieved through
violence or inflammatory language. I know of no instance in which Fannie Lou
Hamer -- whose life was a heck of a lot harder than my life -- yelled “racists.”
Fannie Lou Hamer did not have much
formal schooling – not of the Howard and Harvard varieties (quality education was denied in her era), certainly, no access to
an Internet as there was none, or any similarly easily accessible information database
– but she was never stupid, ignorant or inflammatory. She was never asking even
for a single-party-line phone let alone “iphones” and “Blackberries”, even
Fords and Chevrolets, or the “right” to buy these things. Her quest was
fundamental, essential, never trivial.
Fannie Lou Hamer (her last name pronounced as in “name r”) neither trivialized substantive
issues nor disparaged other individuals. She set about working on the problems
and documenting the struggle. She was a wise, civil, moral and nonviolent
leader; she was a citizen who sought a place at the table for those denied to
serve as an equal among a citizenry of equals.
Sources and notes
Fannie Lou Hamer
In 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer ran for Congress in the
Mississippi state Democratic primary.
She participated in rallies and spoke to college and university students
across the United States. In 1965, she led the cotton picker’s resistance
movement and helped bring a Head Start program to Ruleville, Mississippi, her
hometown, and was involved in other programs throughout Mississippi. From
1968-1971, she was a Democratic Party National Committee Representative.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Lou_Hamer
http://www.projectblackman.com/GreatBlackWomenInHistory.aspx?notablePersonId=382
SNCC, COFO, MFDP
Participation in the state Democratic Party was “whites
only” and generations of African-American (Negro, black American, colored)
Mississippians had been denied voting rights. In 1961, SNCC and COFO began
campaigns against what was often “violent opposition to register black voters.”
The Council of Federated
Organizations (COFO) was a coalition of the major Civil Rights Movement
organizations operating in Mississippi.
Formed in 1962, COFO’s mission was
to coordinate and unite voter registration and other civil rights activities in
the state and oversee the distribution of funds from the Voter Education
Project.
It was instrumental in forming the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. COFO member organizations included the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE), Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC; often
pronounced "snick": /ˈsnɪk/) was one of the most important
organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged
from a student meeting organized by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in April
1960. SNCC grew into a large organization with many supporters in the North who
helped raise funds to support SNCC's work in the South, allowing full-time SNCC
workers to have a $10 per week salary. Many unpaid volunteers also worked with
SNCC on projects in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and Maryland.
SNCC played a major role in
sit-ins and freedom rides, a leading role in the 1963 March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Smmer, and
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
Its major contributions: fieldwork organizing voter registration drives all over the South, especially in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.
The U.S. state of Mississippi law in 1963 denied black
(Negro, colored) Americans the vote so before the November general election,
black Americans “organized an alternative ‘Freedom Ballot’ to take place at the
same time as the November voting.” Approximately, “80,000 people cast freedom
ballots for an integrated slate of candidates.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Freedom_Democratic_Party
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COFO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_Nonviolent_Coordinating_Committee
Wilson Goode
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Goode
MOVE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE
Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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