Freedom Dispatches From Memory to Now

American Tanks in Cairo, 1943

I don’t know much about the politics of Egypt or the Middle East. But I do know about police crack downs and the dangers and legacy of damage from state directed violence. What I see in Egypt weighs in heavily with what I know.

 In 1968, I had former high school friends who were shot by state troopers and sheriff deputies who opened fire on students gathered non-violently by on a college campus, at SC State, in Orangeburg. Law enforcement opened fire on campus and three students were killed. Twenty-eight were wounded. Most were shot in the back, which means they were running away, fleeing for safety into nearby dorms. A pregnant woman lost her child after being beaten by the police.

 In Egypt, as I write, the report is at least ten dead and more than a thousand wounded.

Back then SC’s governor called for order, much like Egypt’s President Mubarak did in his televised speech. His words echo and ring in my ears along side of the shouts of the Egyptians who are now standing for political and social change. Both leaders, one in America, one in the Middle East, forty-three years apart, speaking in different languages, worshiping different gods, could have been reading from the same script. With stiff resolve, they called for those with urgent grievances to give up their fight, to return to their old places and put the security of the society and the state above the demands for progressive and humane change. They shifted blame and worry to outsiders. (SC’s governor blamed unnamed “black power advocates.”). They cited their job descriptions as the reason for the exercise of power without addressing its excesses.

In Orangeburg, students were protesting segregation in a bowling alley near campus. Can you imagine the year of my high school graduation, African-Americans died in a protest on a state-supported college campus because they wanted to go bowling? Can you imagine that the governor of SC saw this evening rally as a threat to the security of the state?

I learned a life-long lesson, that freedoms are often born from blood spilled on a killing ground. I haven’t been to Cairo, but I have been to Birmingham and walked around the memorial wheel with its symbolic healing waters that honors a few of those who gave their lives for the promise of American civil rights. Beijing, Sharpesville, South Africa; we all have places where the blood of freedom are the silent tears of our memory.

 By 1970, students were killed during protests at Jackson State in MS and Kent State in Ohio. By that time, I had an injunction restraining me from meeting with more than two students at Ohio State, which I violated nightly since four of us shared a dorm suite. 

I am angered and saddened when I hear reporters asking why the President hasn’t made a phone call. Or whether twitter is on or off. Frederick Douglass was right when he observed on a long forgotten 4^th of July, “power concedes nothing without a demand.” A phone call is media theater; press fodder; so is thinking tweets are more important than boots.

 So again, repression is framed as a patriotic reaction to “threats” to the “security” of the state. In Egypt, Mubarak said, “I speak as an Egyptian.” But he believes he is a “dutch uncle.” (My apologies to the Dutch; the English started this slag.)

 And in Orangeburg? Now that students can go bowling without being a threat to the state, the bowling alley has long since closed.

In Egypt, I hope neither the movement nor the monuments and institutions to new freedoms and better lives are shut down for a long time.

HaleyB Rolling Back the Good Times

 
Mississippi’s Governor Haley Barbour isn’t guilty of racism. But he is guilty of one of my favorite southern sins – revisionism. Believe me, I know the differences in racism and revisionism.

As an African-American from the deep south who blogs in Mississippi on the state’s leading newspaper website, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, I am keenly attuned to the governor’s positions. I like his state. I’m friends with members of its legislature on my blog site. I featured in Southern Perlo a collection of stunning Mississippi portraits by Dorothea Lange. Lange was America’s top photographer during the Great Depression, and she captured Mississippi life during a 1937 swing through the state. I can tell you Haley Barbour’s verbal snapshot of 1960s Mississippi has simply brought to the front a conversation that I have heard shared in the South for many years. At conferences and lunch tables, after church and at receptions, I have heard it expressed as a view of the period and events that dismantled segregation.

Sadly, to my ear and experience, Gov. Barbour’s quotes are verbatim repetitions of talking points that inform discussions by many old native southerners. Often heard comments also include: “We got along very well; everybody knew everybody; we attended each other’s funerals.” These comments are really not very different than the paternalism expressed in the traditional northern liberal remark, “some of my best friends are African-Americans,” or the remark I once heard in corporate America: “we have no problem in hiring, but many of our clients are opposed/uncomfortable/old fashioned.”

The point of all these remarks, north and south, old and new, in the broad net of American conversation about race is to create a “kinder, gentler” portrait of race relations, one without sting or special privilege or penalty for those whose skin made them oppressed. But the most important part of the civil rights movement was not just to integrate the old South’s schools and lunch counters; it was to end the status of African-Americans as economic chattel. In the governor’s time, thousands worked in a system that combined segregation and share cropping. Most who experienced it remember it as only a nudge beyond slavery, and in some ways, even more restrictive socially and economically.

William Cash, also a native southerner, writing in his brilliant  1941 work, The Mind of the South, pointed out one of the overlooked and misunderstood ironies of slavery; that it was a period of close contact and open relationships. Lives were touched from cradle to grave by contact across the races daily and in the most intimate ways: nursing children, cooking, caring for the sick, celebrating milestones—even as slavery’s dark side, its control of every aspect of human life and its brutal cruelty, was hidden away from this genteel view.

What Haley Barbour omits is even a mention of the dark side of race in Mississippi during his youth. This omission is more telling than what he actually says. He has firsthand knowledge that doesn’t fit the status quo.Yazoo City (like Manning, SC in my home state) was a center of the cotton economy that was still paying adult workers (and children as young as ten who cut school) to hand pick cotton fields in sweltering heat under blazing sun in dusty air that left the taste of grit on your teeth not for a minimum hourly wage but for a piece rate, calculated by the pound: two cents. Two cents a pound; a grand bonus of fifty cents for those who picked a hundred pounds in a single day. There were no worker or health protections or required breaks or heat monitoring or water stations or restrictions on child labor. There was no overtime, however long the day. Martin Luther King, Jr. reported meeting southern pickers in the 1960s who had never seen a dollar bill. I know personally families who worked the fields for shares or piece rates, who worked with stiff, bent fingers stooped over rows of cotton, whose day started well before dawn to get a small edge on the raising heat.

Against this backdrop, Gov. Haley claims, things (race relations) in Yazoo City “weren’t so bad.” His memories certainly differ from those who worked in Mississippi fields that provided Yazoo City with its wealth and commerce. The labor of these field hands enabled his and other families to achieve prosperity during an era when the workers were exploited, discriminated against in education and hiring, restricted in opportunities, and denied the right to vote.

Civil rights was not so much about social protest as it was about economic progress. The video clips and histories and memories of those from “off,” overlook a fact Haley Barbour knows well. Social change was simply the necessary pre-condition for economic change. Schools wouldn’t improve, hiring practices wouldn’t change, streets wouldn’t get paved, officials couldn’t run for office, football players couldn’t take the field until the old system of social segregation was broken apart. Whether it fell easy or hard is not the measure of a community, town, or state’s character. A place’s character is not in marking its process of change, but it celebrating its progress. Mississippi’s greatest legacy is how it won the battle with itself and offered equal opportunity to all, a mission still bearing fruit. As we say in my part of the south, pondering how much damage the rock did is less important than fixing the broken wheel.
Like many Southerners, the governor surely must have respected the character of the people who endured such conditions for so little benefit or hope. He certainly recognized their faces and can greet them by name on the streets of the small southern town that was his home. But the governor’s remarks plainly revise the truth. That despite hard work and personal effort, African-American farm workers in Yazoo City doing his youth were consigned to a life of poverty and to a citizenship that was egregiously and envisceratingly second class.

These citizens who were denied American freedoms petitioned by song and foot, rallying in churches and marching non-violently. They participated in the peaceful exercise of rights considered “inalienable,” clinging to the country, state, and city they loved, despite how they had been wronged. I am glad Yazoo City met them, as the governor notes, with a like spirit. They, not the members of the citizen councils, are the real heroes of southern change and the drivers of its new economic progress, and the governor should have given them credit and said as much.

Thanks for reading! /wr. Stir the Perlo, add a comment. Image: Mississippi: The Fourth of July, 1937, by Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress Archives. Use without restrictions.