CRS 568

CRS 568.  Aug 25th

 Eyes on the Prize.  Juan Williams

 

Eyes on the Prize does an excellent job showing a more realistic, less romanticized vision of how the Civil Rights Movement up until ’65 moved, operated, and navigated through the political and social scene of America; it makes plain the work leaders did to position their particular organization as the best subject for media  attention.  Whether this meant the NAACP taking up Rosa Park’s not uncommon (but still degrading) situation on the public bus system over other candidates (other women were reviewed and deemed unfit due to social station or illegitimate children [63]), unflinching accounts of the violence visited upon lunch counter sit-in members and Freedom Riders, the distance between the various groups involved (CORE, NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, FOR), the Kennedy administration’s hands-off approach due to conflicts of interest on an in-house party level (remember, Democrats were the party dominated by white Southerners at this time), and the socio-economic differences between those organizing and those being organized, the book makes clear that everyone involved (segregationists and anti-segregationists) were all using the means available to cajole, shame, poke, and persuade the American media as well as the Federal Courts.  Eyes on the Prizes, for the most part, an honest and pragmatic recounting of years within the movement often lost in the retellings and recreations of the Movement today.

This being said, and understanding there is no perfect recounting nor pristine point of view, the book does have the tendency to fall into the “great woman/great man” narratives.  The sections dealing with Parks and King, in particular, come readily to mind.  Also, and again while the book overall does an excellent job of explaining the Civil Rights Movement up until ’65, I think a more nuanced and rich version could have been told if Williams had been more in-depth explaining why certain people were foregrounded at that time and catapulted to the national spotlight; this, of course, would have meant a breif explanation on the African American community’s history and language practices–replete with the importance of sacred rhetoric, the spoken word, family, education, socio-economic markers, and children.

Interesting quotes/interesting sections

Houston realized the importance of speaking to people. “Lawsuits mean little unless supported by public opinion” he [Charles Houston] once said.  “The really baffling problem is how to create the proper kind of public opinion” (15).

The great man narratrive: the Houston section from chapter one.

The great woman narrative: the recouning of Parks’ arrest (66).

The epic tone: Freedom Riders conclusion on 161.

The re-occurnace, throughout the book, of the accusation the Civil Rights Movement was a “Communist plot” or “infiltrated by Communists.”  Adds creedance to Sara Diamonds observations in Roads to Dominion how the idea (threat?) of Communism was the rallying cry used by social conservatives, well into the 1980s, to demonize anything deemed contrary to the American way of life.

160–the Civil Rights Movement is made more palatable to white/Euro Americans by explaining it as a “quest for enfranchisement.”  This would be an example of creating the ”proper kind of public opinion.”

Questions

Wasn’t Rosa Parks even being on that bus on that day also a conscious move made by her and the other organizations she was apart of prior to her case being taken up by the NAACP?

The reoccuring tendenacy of Williams to fall into the great woman/man/Americans narrative is not only particular to this book or even Williams.  Is this a general (Western) rheotorical tendency?  Do writers/speakers use this method whenever time and distant seperate the audience from the event? In the crush to persuade people are choices made, even unconsciously, to make sure the audience has some aspect to grab onto, to feel good about, to use as a device to turn the characters (and here I think the individuals turn into characters since this occurs in the past) into figures the audience can relate to, make similiar, make likeable?