The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s never ended, it just moved into the mainstream.
When viewers of national newscasts watched mounted sheriffs truncheon activists, release dogs on them, and use firehoses on them, they began to think, “hey, there may be something to what this guy – who the government is telling me is a radical – is actually saying.”
Young people – many of them white Northerners – began to join the movement in large numbers. The FBI, (we discovered later through stolen COINTELPRO documents) began spying on them out of concern they might legitimize the movement the FBI was trying so hard to delegitimize. First, they accused them of being Communists co-opting the civilian unrest to destroy our democracy. Then to attack the issue from the other end, they decided if they got a few bruises and broken bones, it would scare these mostly suburban white kids away from the movement. So they alerted the Southern racists when these activists traveled south, so they could meet them and beat them.
But that apparently wasn’t working fast enough to satisfy the Southern racists, who were becoming desperate.
Three Civil Rights activists traveling together disappeared – two of them white – and later showed up bound and shot dead and dumped in a ditch. Their photos looked an awful lot like the children of the average white family, not the devious communist instigators our government was telling us they were.
Sadly, that’s what it took for shit to get real for many northern whites. They finally realized there were only two sides to this fight: You stood with the Civil Rights marchers, or you stood with the white racists so desperate to keep their stranglehold on the South they were willing to kill peaceful activists in cold blood.
There were a lot more events before and after the ones I’ve highlighted, but I think these were some of the seminal turning points that caused the tide to turn. Even President Lyndon Johnson knew he had to act.
He did the political strong-arming he was famous for, and legislation was passed institutionalizing the goals of the movement, which were pretty mild – mainly stopping outright segregation and voter suppression. That was by no means the end of the struggle, as until this day Southern racists have done everything they could to throw sand in the gears of change. But now the movement had the power of the federal government and even more important, a plurality of Northern voters behind it.
Many activists moved from the street into positions where they could continue to work towards the goals for which they had been marching. John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who was brutally beaten at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, went on to be elected to Congress, where he served the state of Georgia from 1987 until his death this past Friday. John Conyers, who joined the movement after serving in Korea, was elected in 1964 and served in Congress for more than 50 years. Hosea Williams was elected to the Georgia State Assembly in 1974. Whitney Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, acted as an adviser on racial matters to President Lyndon B. Johnson, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1968. These are just a few of the activists that have now spent entire careers working to fight inequality.
Because Americans like a happy ending, and have the attention span of a tsetse fly, after that massive spasm of civil unrest, we (white America, that is) all went back to our daily business smug in the belief we had stopped racism. It became gauche in polite society, and the racists crawled under rocks to lick their wounds, drink too much crappy beer, salute a flag of American traitors, and plot a comeback.
Meanwhile, the institutionalized racism continued, but just quieter. Bankers and city planners continued to redline neighborhoods; suburbs on the right side of the lines sprouted up, and our society continued to be, for the most part, segregated.
Things went on much the same as they had in black communities, North or South: options were limited, incomes for all but a few lucky people in the North who got into high-paying factory jobs continued to be far below their white counterparts.
Sure some people succeeded and rose to great fame and fortune.
But opportunities were few, and many more did not. They were stuck in neighborhoods mainly owned by slumlords that allowed them to continue to deteriorate. Then the few good-paying factory jobs evaporated, which hit Black communities to a higher level than white communities.
And police continued to treat the residents in those neighborhoods far differently than they did white suburbanites living on the other side of that magic line.
But white Americans didn’t see it. All they heard on the news were the stories about the Black criminal who police were forced to kill when he attacked them. The voices screaming the truth were ignored by a media becoming more and more concerned with ratings than telling the whole story.
Then something funny happened: some guy decided to put a camera on the cell phones that were becoming all the rage.
Very shortly after that we began to see a string of videos that contradicted the stories police were telling us.
The police, their ugly secret exposed, rather than soul searching and reexamining their philosophies and methods, seemed to rather prefer to turn off the body cams they now wore, try to stop people from trying to record their actions, and double down on their brutality.
Time and again we were treated to video of a police officer executing a person of color in the streets. In response, the local neighborhood would explode in a spasm of protest and, almost inevitably, violence. And when the violence erupted, whites would “tsk-tsk,” say “It’s really terrible that this person died, but this property damage just has to stop,” and turn their backs.
Police would then attack the protesters with every riot control weapon they had, and lock down the neighborhood until the anger passed.
Finally, after years of protests mostly contained to one or two cities, several events across the country led to protests that spread across multiple cities from coast to coast, and drew the attention of society as a whole. Enough white people began to join the protests that it prevented police from using the worst of the belligerent violence they normally use to quash protests in black neighborhoods.
But we as a country have also changed since the end of the Civil Rights marches. Someone has made racism cool again, and all the racists have been coming back into the light, including at the highest levels of government.
So instead of being able as a society to confront the brutality with which police treat people of color, the federal government is trying to turn the story into one of “anarchists” co-opting a movement who must be stopped before they destroy our democracy.
Sound familiar? That’s because we have now come full circle back to the original Civil Rights movement.
And again, activists are being kidnapped off the street. But this time rather than using white-hooded surrogates, the Federal government is now using unmarked, balaclavaed storm troopers who appear to relish the assignment.
This was entirely foreseable to anyone who, if they didn’t live through it, has taken the time to familiarize themselves with the history of our Civil Rights Movement.
The question now is, how long before the secret police wearing no insignias decide that just snatching, scaring, and releasing activists isn’t working?
How long will it be before activists are found in a ditch, bound and shot dead?