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Documentary Chronicles
Civil Rights Struggle
(By Stacy Jones, October 1, 2006) |
Many
of us have no recollection of a time in our American past when
all human beings were not afforded the same basic amenities.
To us, a "Colored Only" sign is something we might
expect to see in a museum, not tacked neatly over the entrance
to a public restroom. We have never known a forcibly segregated
South because we were not alive during the time of the horribly
dehumanizing Jim Crow laws that divided our country and created
separate but unequal services and facilities for blacks and whites.
At 32, I am one of these individuals.
From the time I started school, some of my playmates and best
friends were African American. Because no differences had been
made between us legally, it made no difference to us whether
a person was black or white; my friends and I were more interested
in the content of a person's character, to borrow from Martin
Luther King's famous phrase from his "I Have a Dream"
speech. Although the move will never cancel out the terrible
ills our country suffered as a result of a cruel, discriminatory
past, universal school integration has been one of the greatest
positive forces of change in our historical legacy.
Callie Crossley, award-winning
journalist and producer of the 1987 documentary "Eyes on
the Prize," chronicling the civil rights movement, recently
spoke at the National Civil Rights Museum, housed in the former
Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis. Crossley grew up in Memphis
and went on to become a producer for ABC News and won the prestigious
Edward R. Murrow Award.
She recalled a time in Memphis
history when "the laws were changed, but we still had de
facto segregation," she said, meaning that the city's libraries
and zoo were still segregated. Crossley, an avid reader, described
the joy she felt when the public libraries were finally desegregated
and she could enter their doors to check out books without condition.
The audience viewed a clip from
the documentary, which spans the years 1954-1965. Crossley explained
that these years were important as dividing lines because, first,
in 1954, the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court
ruling explicitly outlawing school segregation, declaring "separate
but equal" facilities for blacks and whites as unconstitutional.
And in 1965, civil rights gained another important victory when
President Lyndon Johnson, codifying the 15th Amendment guarantee
of all citizens to vote, regardless of race or color, signed
the Voting Rights Act into law.
According to Crossley, Brown v.
Board of Education, along with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, helped
propel the movement into action. The movement was also spurred
by the brutal 1955 slaying of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black
boy from Chicago who flirted with a white woman while visiting
relatives in Mississippi and lost his life at the hands of the
woman's husband and half-brother, who were acquitted by an all-white
jury but later brazenly confessed to the crime in an interview
with Look magazine. The two men reportedly kidnapped Till from
his uncle's house, beat him until he was unrecognizable, gouged
out one of his eyes, cut off an ear, shot the boy with a pistol,
and then weighted him down with a 75-pound cotton gin fan before
dumping his mutilated body into the Tallahatchie River.
Till's death was part of the reason
why a woman in Montgomery, Ala., decided something had to be
done in defiance of the debilitating Jim Crow laws that helped
validate such atrocities. So in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give
up her bus seat so a white person could sit. This was not her
first violation but did result in her first arrest.
"Why do you push us around?"
Parks asked the driver.
"I do not know," he said.
"But the law is the law."
Parks's brave actions helped spark
the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of our country's greatest examples
of the use of nonviolent resistance to obtain results. Most of
the Montgomery bus riders were poor blacks who could not afford
to buy automobiles, so in response to the boycott, many of them
walked each day to their destinations. In the documentary, one
woman, Donie Jones, stands behind a sign that advertises Esther's
Beauty Shop in Montgomery and tells viewers that she walked,
on average, 78 miles a day during the boycott.
Others pooled resources and shared
cars. Some white women who utilized black women for domestic
help were opposed to the segregation and helped support the boycott
by transporting the black women. At first, the boycotters had
not even asked for desegregation. They simply wanted a more humane
system of transportation. But once they realized that their methods
were accomplishing more than they thought, they pushed further.
Eventually, the boycott worked. The Supreme Court ruled November
13, 1956, that segregating Montgomery buses was unconstitutional.
The documentary goes on to chronicle
another decade of the movement, including the introduction of
a young man who came to Montgomery to pastor a church. Charismatic
and highly articulate, Martin Luther King, Jr., remarked that
he didn't know if he was up to the challenge of galvanizing such
a movement, but if the people wanted him, he would do it.
So we sat there in the same place
where King was assassinated in 1968, viewing the documentary
clip and listening to Crossley speak about it. So much has changed
since that time, but discrimination and racism are still evident
in our country. We find it staining our cities, our workplaces,
and our schools. Crossley reminded us that we shouldn't become
complacent just because we have overcome major obstacles on the
civil rights front. We need to be ever mindful. "We cannot
talk about 'No Child Left Behind,'" she said, "when
there are whole communities left behind."
We hear so much discussion these
days of terrorists, references usually to non-American citizens
who want to threaten our way of life. But it wasn't so long ago
that we were victims of a different form of terror from within:
American citizens who did everything they could to terrorize
and polarize other American citizens. We must never forget that.
For those of us who did not live
through that time and know nothing or very little of it, we must
learn about it. We need to listen to the accounts of those who
came before us. We must go to our historical sites and participate
in history firsthand. For me, an instrumental experience involved
going to Selma, Ala., a few years ago and walking across the
Edmund Pettus Bridge, the same bridge where the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery
March for voting rights began, as I tried to imagine what all
of those people must have felt as they endeavored to overcome
the lack of equality.
In an age, too, of patriotism that
is overtly displayed but hardly practiced, we also need to remember
the words of poet Langston Hughes, who said, "Let America
be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be."
In other words, we have a responsibility and an obligation to
as citizens to make sure that we do everything we can to guarantee
that America lives out its true promise set forth by our forefathers
in the Constitution. We must work towards legislation and personal
relations that will ensure that such an atrocity never happens
again.
---The "Eyes on the Prize"
series returns to television on PBS (WKNO/10 in Memphis) three
consecutive Mondays: October 2, 9, and 16 from 8 to 10 p.m. A
study guide for educators and students is available online at
FacingHistory.org.
(Stacy Jones, a Southerner,
is a Master of Fine Arts student in fiction writing at The University
of Memphis. She is a native of Guys, Tenn., and her columns,
which appear on Sundays, are archived at Southern-Drawl.com.) |
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