Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader.
Chapter Five: “Mississippi: Is This America? (1962-1964)”
Introduction by Clayborne Carson
1. “Mississippi: 1961-1962″
Robert Moses
2. “To Praise Our Bridges”
Fannie Lou Hamer
5. “Mississippi at Atlantic City”
Charles M. Sherrod
8. “To Mississippi Youth”
Malcolm X
9. “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement”
Bayard Rustin
Chapter Six: “Bridge to Freedom (1965)”
Introduction by David J. Garrow
3. “A Letter from a Selma, Alabama, Jail”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader.
Chapter Five: “Mississippi: Is This America? (1962-1964)”
Introduction by Clayborne Carson
In the intro to chapter five Carson explains how the SNCC director Robert Moses madethe influential decision to include white students in the voter registration drives of in the fall of 1963. This–according to Carson–was a calculated move that Moses and the other member of SNCC hoped would “restrain white violence [against SNCCworkers] or perhaps, if violence occurred, provide a confrontation between federal and state authorities” (167) that would bring publicity to life under Jim Crow in Mississippi. This was an abrupt about face for Moses, who believed in community organization that utilized local residents and “local black leaders…who would carry on the after SNCC had left” (166).
The deaths of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and the convictions of their killers seems to have proved the strategy Moses proposed tragically effective; sadly, the investigation and conviction was a reversal of the Federal government’s previous involvement with the Civil Rights’ workers. Before this incident, the FBI “had responded unenthusiastically to previous SNCC requests to investigate attakcs on black Mississippians” (168), and, in what I think is the effect of Clayborn’s arrangement of events in his retelling of history, the efficacy of the white student plan contributed to a rethinking by those in SNCCabout the mission of the organization. The crass reality of the importance placed on the lives of the white students over the black workers, coupled with events like the freedom schools (which taught the practices of the culture of power as a form of empowerment as well as African American history as a sense of pride), the rejection of the Democratic National Convention Compromise by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (see 168 for a full description) and the contact with and influence of Malcolm X (169), led to the organizers from within SNCC to question the “merits of interracialism as a strategy of black advancement” and made some “more determined to seek fundamental social change rather than merely civil rights legislation” (169).
It seems the intro is prepping the reader for the change from reform movement to seperatist movement, from civili rights to black power.
1. “Mississippi: 1961-1962″
Robert Moses
This selection is a recounting by Moses of his ugly, difficult start in Mississippi. Trying to register African Americans led to severe beatings, and even (according to Moses) the death of Herbert Lee. In juxtaposition to the intro, this selection drives home the point that there was no federal intervention. All of these incidents/cases were handled by the local, racist authorities; the only intervention from the federal government came in the form of lawyers from the Dept. of Justice–and these lawyers had come to Mississippi “finally began to come in [and] investigating the voting complaints” (173). The lawyers did nothing when it came to the brutality of the white resistance movement, which could only exist on such a scale with the tacit consent of the local white police force.
The end of the selection, I think, is the explanation of why SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) was formed. Moses recounts how no adult (whether in the churh or not) could be trusted to speak out against the white establishment in Mississippi since they were all, in someway, dependent on the said white bourgeoisie superstucture for their economic lifeline. Students, Moses explains, were ideal for the work of organizing voter registration drives because they were not “responsible economically to any sector of the white community and who would be able to act as free agents” (176), meaning they could perform “socially inappropriate acts” without causing economic hardship to dependents, nor have that threat hung above their heads to coerce “good” behavior from them.
2. “To Praise Our Bridges”
Fannie Lou Hamer
This selection has a great folksy tone (and I don’t use this term to degrade, I mean in the descriptive and pithy style common to every day people who have the wherewithal to articulate their material situation using the dialects of English common to their communities) to it that displays Mrs. Hamer’s resolution, and yet at the same time continues as an example to demonstrate the change of the movement from civil rights to black power. After recounting the vile treatment she received at the hands of the local and state police for trying to exercise her right as a citizen to vote (178), Mrs. Hamer’s selection closes with these lines:
But we learned the hard way that even though we had all the law and all the righteousness on our side–that white man is not going to give up his power to us.
We have to build our own power. We have to win every single political office we can, where we have a majority of black people.
The question for black people is not, when is the white man going to give us our righrs, or when is he going to give us jobs–if the white man gives you anything–just remember when he gets ready he will take it right back. We have to take for ourselves. (179)
Not touched upon: African Americans were also excluded from participating in the part of their choice. Mrs. Hamer complains the local Democratic Party would lock out African Americans from meetings or move the meeting place and time without public notice–which is against the law–to ensure African Americans had no say in the political sphere at any point of entry (178).
5. “Mississippi at Atlantic City”
Charles M. Sherrod
This is a recounting of the Democratic National Convention Compromise and its rejection by the Freedom Democratic Party. This was already recounted in Juan William’s Eyes on the Prize, but what’s different here is the language used to describe how and why the rejection of the compromise occurred. Sherrod explains the refusal to compromise meant:
we had come through another crisis with our minds depressed and our hearts and hands unstained. Again we had not bowed to the “massa.” We were asserting a moral declaration to this country…We are a country of racists with a racist heritage, a racist economy, a racist language, a racist religion, a racist philosophy of living, and we need naked confrontation with ourselves. (189)
Gone is all talk of reform and non-violence and love. Gone is even the “public talk” of such topics. While there is no talk of outright violence, the language has definitely switched from a working with the mainstream and working with the best intentions of white culture or working from the position of sentimentality to gain white identification. There is nothing endearing here and no attempt at meeting the wider, whiter culture with images of America which pull on a history of tolerance, understanding, and egalitarianism. This is a direct, brutal critique. The speaker here is speaking at the audience, not caring for the audience, and not caring about adapting his message to make it more palatable for the audience. This speaker is talking in the lion’s den, not the echo chamber.
8. “To Mississippi Youth”
Malcolm X
Malcolm’s message at the end, that “You get freedom by letting your enemy know that you;ll do anything to get your freedom; then you’ll get it. It’s the only way you’ll get it” (201), I think obscures the larger, more interesting piece of the selection. Malcolm intimates a Pan-African sentiment when he says
Because now, whenever anything happens to you in Mississippi, it’s just not the a case of somebody in Alabama getting indignant, or somebody in New York getting indignant. The same repercussions that you see all over the world when an imperialist or foreign power interferes in some section of Africa…nowadays, when something happens to black people in Mississippi, you’ll see the same repercussions all around the world. I wanted to point this out to you because it’s important for you to know that when you’re in Mississippi, you’re not alone. (201)
This segment, I think, exemplifies the idea that the tone of the movement is changing. The talk, the talk being forgroudned, is no longer about reforming the American system, nor is it even working within the boundaries of the US. It’s now about a sense of being African, one that goes beyond boundaries and the idea of nation-states. The movement is now on the road to confrontation, to revolution, and not mere reform.
Questions: How will this change the rhetoric of the speakers? What happens to the mediatory field? Is there one anymore? Instead of talking in two registers (one to the wider, whiter culture cloaked in the language of American egalitarianism and Christianity, and one directed towards the African American masses using the language specific to the black church) will it go to only one register, which even though easily understandable and blunt, will only appeal to and allow identification among African Americans?
9. “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement”
Bayard Rustin
Rustin’s selection outlines the changes the movement has gone through, and ties back to the other selections as his is the one which articulates the change. Rustin himself, the editor’s note explains, was considered a radical himself at one time but modified his position over time, thinking the best way for continued advancement for African Americans would come through “alliances with liberal and labor forces in the Democratic party” (201).
Towards the end of the selection, Rustin asserts the movement itself is changing from a “protest movement” to a “political movement” because even with the advances in social equality the movement afforded African Americans:
the Negro [sic] today finds himself stymied by the obstacles of far greater magnitude that the legal barriers he was attacking before: automation, urban decay, de facto school segregation. These are problems which, while conditioned by Jim Crow, do not vanish upon its demise. (202)
And so, since Rustin makes the argument these are deeply ingrained and essential elements of American society, Rustin claims that any plan to overcome them will be seen as containing radical objectives. The only way to achieve such radical objectives “is simple, deceptively so: through political power“(202, emphasis original). Rustin does believe this is the natural evolution of the movement (in a way getting back to his radical foundations) and yet his methods are not too radical. He explains for African Americans to do this they will “need allies. The future of the Negro [sic] structure depends on whether the the contradictions of this society can be resolved by a coalition of progressive forces which becomes the effective political majority in the United States” (203), which ties into the editor’s note about Rustin and his belief of making friends within the Democratic party. Rustin is radical and transgressive for his time in forwarding and articulating, publicly, the move to political power is a natural one for the movement, but his methods still rely on a reformist attitude of working within the legal and political institutions of the US.
Chapter Six: “Bridge to Freedom (1965)”
Introduction by David J. Garrow
This intro explains the events surrounding the March to Selma and how the events were planned and implemented, not spontaneous or the fruit of one person’s labor (the SNCC and DCVL had worked for years in the area and invited Dr. King in an attempt to bring attention to the situation in Dallas County, the county in which Selma was the county seat).
Questions: How does the concept of sentimentality connect to the decisive moment on the Edmund Pettus Bridge? Would that count as a moment of sentimentalism, and does the “immediate national outrage” (206) explain the continuing social (in contrast to institutional) racism that saturates the American landscape? And does this moment, using television and broadcast journalism and not the genre of the novel, fit Browne’s parameters for sentalmentality or does that only apply to traditional texts?
3. “A Letter from a Selma, Alabama, Jail”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The text presented is a letter written and readied for a run in The New York Times before King’s planned arrest in Selma; the letter is both a way to bring national attention to the march and raise funds for SCLC workers. This selection displays the rhetorical savvy of King and the SCLC, and at the same time, also highlights the emerging differences between King and his contemporaries. Unlike Hamer, King is still using phrases like “self-help projects” to describe the movement (playing into the American myth of meritocracy and social evolution) couching the civil rights movement as American citizens merely trying to vote (and glossing over any other issues of power, poverty, or social inequality in the process), and the trope of the passive, suffering, but perennial good natured Christian by ending the letter “With warmest wishes from all of us” (thereby continuing the ideology of non-violence since he’s not threatening violence like Malcolm X) (212).
1 Comment
November 9, 2008 at 6:08 pm
[...] is the discussion concerning “interracial activism” (245). In an earlier post about Bayard Rustin and SNCC, I mentioned the move by leaders to interracialactivism as a decision made to make wider, whiter [...]