How the Montgomery Bus Boycott can drive more purpose into the new social justice movement

" They knew why they walked, and the knowledge was evident in the way they carried themselves. And as I watched them I knew that there was nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity."

The economic "Black out" proposed for this week has generated much discussion from some who are in adamant support and others in opposition, if not to the boycott itself then to what they suggest is an action too short in its proposed duration or incomplete in explanation of its potential impact.

In discussing the "Black out," some people mention the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the most effective economic social action conducted at the start of what became the Civil Rights Movement.

The Black citizens, business and religious leaders planned that boycott of the Montgomery bus system spontaneously, between a Friday and Sunday, after hearing of Mrs. Rosa Parks arrest on December 1, 1955 for not giving up her seat to a white man. The boycott was planned for the first work day of the following week, which was Monday, December 5, 1955.

Like the proposed "Black out" Friday, November 2nd of this year, the 1955 boycott was generated by outrage at acts of “over-prosecution” and social injustice, at that time represented by Mrs. Parks’ arrest, which was then the latest social injustice in a long series of injustices that Black citizens had suffered in Montgomery, and across the country.

It is instructive to consider that over the course of three days the Montgomery organizers put together a plan, publicized the action, and successfully carried off the first day of the boycott, even in the face of expressed doubts about the duration of the boycott and potential impact of the plan.

The story of that year-long boycott is told in Stride Toward Freedom, a memoir of the nearly day-to-day activities of the Montgomery bus boycott, written by a young Baptist preacher elected to the movement's leadership, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The story is a must read for Black Americans, all Americans really, a view from the first hand account of Dr. King how a system of entrenched discrimination sabotages the social and economic progress of its victims, and how a people unified by higher ideals of self-determination and dignity overcame legalized oppression through sustained and determined effort.

It may be surprising to some that over the harried weekend of planning, Dr. King struggled with the idea of "boycott." At that time, some persons compared the proposed bus boycott with similar boycotts conducted throughout the South by the racists White Citizen Councils with the purpose of denying goods and services to the Black community--and Whites of good will. Dr. King was certain that their discrimination was evil but questioned, as some do today, whether participating in a boycott was not as immoral as bigoted White groups. Was a boycott a negative action, when what was intended was a positive action, “to give birth to justice and freedom, and to urge men to cooperate with the law of the land...,” he asked.

He reconciled his struggle in recalling Henry David Thoreau's “Essay on Civil Disobedience.” The answer for Dr. King was non-cooperation. He wrote:

“When oppressed people willingly accept their oppression they only serve to give the oppressor a convenient justification for his acts. ... So, in order to be true to one's conscience and true to God, a righteous man has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system. This I felt was the nature of our action. From this moment on I conceived of our movement as an act of massive noncooperation. From then on I rarely used the word, "boycott."

Finally, Monday, December 5th arrived. Dr. King and the organizers waited to see what would happen. Would the Black Montgomery citizens unify, would the boycott be a success?

Dr. King and the other Black leaders had hoped for about 60% cooperation of the people. Early on Monday morning, Dr. King wrote, he and Mrs. King were up and dressed by 5:30am, waiting to see the first buses of the morning ride by their street. Soon, looking out their living room window, they saw an empty bus ride by--a bus normally filled with domestic workers.

"I jumped in my car and for almost an hour I cruised down every major street and examined every passing bus. During this hour at the peak of morning traffic, I saw no more than eight Negro passengers riding the buses." Jubilant, Dr. King said he realized that instead of 60% cooperation the Black community of Montgomery was participating at nearly 100%.

One of the most powerful passages of Stride Toward Freedom is Dr. King's description of the beautiful sight of men and women participating on that first day of the "massive noncooperation," which was sustained through the rest of 1955:

"During the rush hours the sidewalks were crowded with laborers and domestic workers, many of them well past middle age, trudging patiently to their jobs and home again, sometimes as much as twelve miles. They knew why they walked, and the knowledge was evident in the way they carried themselves. And as I watched them I knew that there was nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity."

Reviewing our past efforts in the wake of new social actions is educational, unifying and inspiring. In the next few days, as people plan their participation, we recommend that participants in the "Black out" get together and read aloud selections from our historical record of social protests. This activity will frame the current purpose with historical perspective, inspire unity, strengthen resolve and help to ensure sustained success in this new effort and those we engage in in the future.

Doesn't have to be a physical gathering. Send quotes by email, text message or just pick up the telephone. Each one, reach one; each one, teach one, our history, our inherited legacy, and our responsibility to one another.

For this week, we recommend Stride Toward Freedom, the first book selection for BookTalk, our online reading group focused on social action texts. We will post a date for an online discussion of the book soon.

Send us your recommedations for other books to include in the quarterly BookTalk discussion.

Peace

Is hanging a noose a hate crime or a prank?

During its Saturday programming, (9/22/07), CNN asked if hanging a noose is a hate crime or a prank? The question itself is insulting. There is no basis for there to be a question. Of course hanging a noose is a hate crime. As one person reportedly responded to CNN by email, "there is only one use for that noose and we know what it is."
Another person responding to the question cut to the point: "people are promoting terrorism" by displaying the noose.
One responder said displaying nooses was "crass" but not a crime. Another said the act was a "hate prank." These comments reflect a sympathetic attitude with the teens (and others) who are testing the line of social tranquility. In effect they are saying that these acts are inside jokes and humor in the white community, reflecting a prevailing undercover attitude that is crass but tolerated and harmless.
Young people growing up in the tolerant hostility are now acting out--just letting off a little steam. They don't mean nothin' by it.That is not good enough, however. Displaying a noose is not letting off steam--it is a threat meant to cower black people into submission and passivity. That is the history of the noose, a history some who are still living participated in, and apparently their youth have taken up as a cultural legacy.
Title edited 9/22/07 2:06pm

Jena Six: “Shot heard ‘round the world”

Watching the Jena rally broadcast on television and described on the radio raised much to compare and contrast with social action protests of the past. The coverage seemed a strange hybrid of a party atmosphere—celebrating the presence of R&B groups--and the more sobering and focused purpose of social protest against institutional injustice in the American legal system. What also caught my attention was that repeatedly commentators remarked how the great outpouring of support for the so-called "Jena Six"—at least 50,000 people attended the rally—all began last fall at the beginning of the 2006 school year around a question about who could sit under a shade tree.

Many persons interviewed on radio and television said that this outpouring of support from across America—from whites and blacks--was not just a one day event. It marked the beginning of a movement, something of a revolution. If this is true then the Black student who asked the Jena high school principal if there was any reason that he could not sit under a shade tree "reserved" for white students essentially issued the equivalent of the "shot heard 'round the world" in this 21st century. The "shot heard 'round the world" (Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”) refers to the initial shot fired in the battle that ignited the American Revolution. The premise of the student’s question shook the core of Black America. The fact that our children are still denied such basic human rights, that they are still instructed in a system of social inferiority, rightly exploded complacency and ignited a call to action in many Black Americans. Nearly one year later, the world saw Americans of all backgrounds rise up to reject this despicable social residual of this nation’s segregated past.

After hearing from the principal that he could sit anywhere on school grounds, Kenneth Purvis and his friends stood under the shade tree. White students responded by hanging three nooses from the tree. Kenneth Purvis said in an interview that after seeing the nooses, he and others went back to stand under the tree again.

These students acted in the spirit of resistance which is Black America's legacy and responsibility, from early enslavement through the Sixties and beyond. Resistance is a core value of Black American culture. "Resist, resist, resist," sang veteran social revolutionist poet Sonia Sanchez to an audience in New Haven just a few months ago.

Entrenched segregation in Jena shocked Black America but did not faze white Jena residents. The white adults of Jena who say that their town is not racist should be alarmed however that their children are. (How far does the "white" shade tree grow from its root?) At least three white Jena youth not only harbor racist attitudes, but situated themselves in the appalling historical context of American racial bigotry by hanging three nooses, thus invoking the heinous reign of terror whites levied against black men. (See 100 Years of Lynching by Ralph Ginsburg)

The white students’ actions represent an attempt to threaten and intimidate based on racial supremacy, essentially an imbalance in power.

Taking a stand by sitting under the tree was the bravest and most affirming action those young people could take. They acted in the affirming tradition of forbearers such as Dred Scott, Rosa Parks and many others whose resistance contributed to dismantling legalized segregation and discrimination in America.

They challenged institutional racist attitudes, previously sanctioned by the school administration and exercised by their peers. Resistance was an imperative not only for their present school days but also for their future. What would be their prospects to obtain social equality in Jena five or ten years after high school, when a white Jena graduate would then be a supervisor in a position to hire them? The roles of segregation, submission and inferiority established in high school will carry over implicitly, if not explicitly, into work situations and all aspects of social order.

To allow this Jim Crow situation to dominate the small patch of ground in front of the high school is to sanction Jim Crow across the land. As Dr. King said again and again, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

There is much more to examine and build upon based on the sincere response of more than 50,000 black Americans, and Americans of all races, who came to Jena to protest injustice, to support the cause. There is much to be proud of in the youth who led the way.

Support the Jena 6!

Is the Black community in a battle to save the souls of our young people?

"Our children are our greatest asset." "They are our future." We hear some variation of those comments often in our community. What is the evidence of their value to us?

I believe, I know, many of us are in pain over the headlines, news reports, unreported violence and abusive environment that some of our children experience each day. I am in pain over it.

Three of our best and brightest young people--college students--were shot and killed execution style in New Jersey a few weeks ago. Another of the group survived her wounds and helped police to identify the assailants. These hopeful young people had survived growing up in the Newark streets and were in the process of gaining access to education and opportunity until the moment they were attacked. The gunmen included teenagers, younger than the victims, and an alleged adult illegal immigrant and convicted criminal.

The stories of teenage murders in particular seem unending and unreal.


I do not relate to the extreme conditions I hear that our children grow up in today. I did experience a breakdown in the primary family, my parents separated for a time when I was a child, but the extended family (living with my grandparents) was a shelter and hedge against the encroachment of poverty and any challenge to moral values and a standard of behavior that my parents had instilled in me. This added protection from the extended family was firmly in place for a lot of my friends and our generation that grew up in the social revolution of the Sixties.

But it is clearly dismantled or at least severly weakened in present day families and communities. As a result, children are catching (or dodging in desparation) the full frontal impact of the the family breakdown--absent or unenforced standards of moral behavior, drug abuse, sexual abuse, poverty. The fruits of evil prevail in the absence of family social values, economic support and community intervention.

In addition to the family and extended family, the public schools were a strong enforcer of moral values that I learned at home. I despair the erosion of the high standards that teachers held themselves and my friends and I to beginning in my elementary school education.

Even though stories proliferate about the social malaise that has infected many poor Black communities, I have not had such a clear and powerful window to the entrenchment of this perverse social order until I read Cindy Brown Austin's novel, By the Rivers of Babylon (2007).

My reading is light in the urban fiction trend, and even less have I encountered the Christian thriller, which Rivers might be viewed as. But what Austin showed me more than any other text I've read is how our young Black boys are systematically reared into the criminal culture on a wide scale, and how a poor community (trapped in an expansive project complex) is occupied by a dominant drug culture as overtly as the U.S. military invades foreign territories, or the way I recall the National Guard occupied my neighborhood in Baltimore in the wake of riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

By the Rivers of Babylon showed me that there is a force of evil that has set up a recruitment of our greatest assets, our future, our children. Through the interaction with Gabriella Sinclaire, a talented Christian journalist/love interest, Austin takes the reader along the narrative to peer into the mind and heart (such as it is) of the main character, Lincoln Duvall, one of the most notorious drug lords of a poor community, based loosely on the one Austin hails from in her native Hartford, Connecticut.

Lincoln Duvall is a menace, a terror. However, he also has a background that show him victimized by his parents volatile relationship and weakened moral foundation that left him exposed to the lure of acceptance, power and money in criminal life.

But what I caught sight of, hovering in the background of the outrageous criminal exploits of Lincoln Duvall and his flank of teen rogues, was the tedium of life that everday people were living, trapped as they were in a housing complex where the police were in partnership with the criminals, if only by complicity through their absence.

What I caught sight of was the despairing result when community breaks down, when the stronger more stable segments of the community are cut off, or cut themselves off, from the segments that are vulnerable to poverty, poor education, lack of exposure to opportunity and the access to society's rewards. What I saw was my own complicity defined by my lack of interaction with our young people.

Although the conditions have existed for more than a few generations, the novel is an eye-opener for me, another call to action that I am increasingly answering.
In the inagural issue of Devotion Journal we asked, "How are we telling our children who God is?" I believe that we must answer this question--how and even if we are telling our children who God is--as a means to reinstate a moral center for the family and the greater community.

Dialogues, community organization, increased mentoring, youth activites, public school revitalization, promoting marriage and extended family, and moral values--all of these responses are being discussed and planned by concerned community partners who have been affected by Austin's book, and most importantly, who have been answering the call to rescue our young people. There is more to come.

Knowing who God is is irretrievable from knowing our history as Black Americans. Our forbearers told us of the link between our history in America and our Christian heritage when they sang "I look back and wonder how I got ovah."

By the Rivers of Babylon poses its story as an underlying battle of good against evil, and that is accurate. In reaity, we are in a battle of good against evil, a battle to save the souls of our young people from the fruits of evil. By entering the battle we will be saving our own souls as well.

Talk to Me

Don Cheadle (“Crash,” "Hotel Rwanda") is fantastic in the broadly drawn summer released biopic, “Talk to Me,” which he co-produced and Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) directed.

Cheadle is mesmerizing as the ex-convict turned walk-on radio personality, Ralph Waldo “Petey” Green. Cheadle convincingly takes on the loud-mouth bad man persona of Petey Green, without going over the top. He’s got the tough walk, the hip Seventies threads, and the pedigree of the streets: a thief, convict, and product of a dysfunctional home--his mother and father were simultaneoudly serving time while he was doing the same.

The movie tells Petey’s story as a deejay that used his empathy and wit to tap into the soul of Black Washington, D.C.

Petey cut his teeth as a radio deejay in the early Sixties while serving time in Lorton, a prison in the D.C. suburbs. It is the only thing he says that he can do well that is not illegal. A chance meeting between Black radio exec Dewey Hughes and Petey in jail leads to the unlikely opportunity later for Petey to “audition” at the station where Dewey is attempting to shake-up the format.

Petey's humor and inviting radio banter (“talk to me!”) with listeners raised ratings for the white-owned radio station that was the forerunner of the successful Black owned-WOL-AM radio in D.C. Eventually coming under the ownership of Dewey Hughes, the co-star in the movie, WOL became the flagship of the present day Radio One media conglomerate owned by Dewey’s former wife, Cathy Hughes.

As depicted in the film, Petey Green’s influence in the Black community was based on his willingness to speak “truth to power” and to the status quo. For example, in his first moments of his debut at WOL radio, according to the film, Petey spoke dispargingly about Hitsville music mogul Barry Gordy. The station manager (played by Martin Sheen) went ballistic and made Petey apologize moments later. In his own defense, Petey insisted that he only said what everybody knew about Gordy.
Petey tells the station manager, “I am the people.” That’s who Petey was, a voice of the people.

At a turning point from the light fair comprising the first third of the movie, Petey’s authentic voice paid off for the station and the D.C. capital during during a national crisis. The assassin’s bullet that killed Dr. King also exploded angry outbursts from Black America. The movie depicts the anger that spilled onto the streets of the nation’s capital (and other majority Black cities) that terrible night in April 1968. Fires burned, people were attacked and injured. Petey was the right man on the scene at the right time. Taking over the WOL microphone late into the night of Dr. King’s death, Petey spoke directly to the anguish that had cut the heart of Black Americans. He told the people that he knew they were hurting and wanted revenge. He did not blame them. However, the destruction of the community he said was not what Dr. King would have wanted. Both Petey and Dewey, the grassroots con-man and the professional hustler, were credited for their combined efforts to quell some of the unrest during this time.

The movie comments credibly on the class tensions between poor and affluent Black Americans. Dewey Hughes is a talented radio executive who models himself on the conservative and smooth Tonight Show icon Johnny Carson. Initially unknown to Petey, Dewey is also a graduate of the the poor and Black housing projects in Anacostia in Washington, D.C. He tells Petey that he made it out of the projects through moxy and the revelation, gained through watching the Tonight Show, that there was more in the world than his immediate surroundings.

The central tension of the movie exists between Petey and Dewey. Dewey views Petey through the prism of Dewey’s Hollywood-styled ambitions to become an entertainment mogul. Dewey aims to take Petey’s street-honed radio humor to the top ala comedians Dick Gregory or Richard Pryor. Despite his wit and bravado, Petey actually understands his limitations—or his range—and is comfortable and confident in his role at WOL and as host of a local public affairs television program. He tries to signal this to Dewey. However, blinded by his own aspirations, Dewey does not understand the depth of this truth until it is too late.

The dynamic is also interestingly played out using the metaphor of a pool game which causes both men to assess his own ability to “sink the nine ball.”

“Talk to Me” is ultimately an important movie because it points out the essential role of Black media. The movie showed that Black media is a necessary component of Black social unity in this country. There is the added benefit that the movie will spur on a movement among Black media producers to bring information and inspiration to Black audiences from the perspective of Black audiences. And encourage Black audiences to demand, protect and preserve Black media.