A Couple of Maya Angelou Quotes
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"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget how you made them feel."
“When you learn, teach, when you get, give.”
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Fifty years ago, on June 21, 2014, three civil rights activists - Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney - disappeared. The three had been working on the "Freedom Summer" campaign, attempting to register African Americans to vote in the South. They left to investigate a church burning near Philadelphia, Mississippi and were never heard from again. They were shot at close range by a lynch mob that included members of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County's Sheriff Office and the Philadelphia Mississippi Police Department. Mississippi officials refused to bring murder charges against the perpetrators, who were eventually tried on Federal charges of conspiracy and "deprivation of rights under color of law." Seven men were convicted. None served a sentence of more than 6 years. Nationwide outrage over the killings assisted in Congress' passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Spurred by student sit-ins in restaurants, a black woman's refusal to move to the rear of the bus, peaceful marches led by charismatic clergymen, and the courageous actions of civil rights activists, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 put to an end ninety years of the infamous "Jim Crow" laws - the de jure segregation laws enacted in the states of the former Confederacy since the end of the Reconstruction in 1876.
The Civil Rights
Act didn't end the racism that festers like a cancer in the American
body politic, but it did put the force of Federal law on the side of
people heretofore powerless in the face of white supremacists and of
states determined to keep them in their place.
The Civil Rights
Act didn't restore the right to vote to blacks in the South.
(Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven states of the Confederacy
had enacted laws that effectively disenfranchised African-Americans.
) The country had to wait another year for the Voting Rights Act of
1965 (yes, that Voting Rights Act, the one purchased with the blood
and beatings of civil rights activists...the one gutted last year by
the Roberts' Supreme Court). But the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a
step along the way.
The Civil Rights
Act's greatest success was in the domain of public accommodations.
The June issue of Harper's has a thoughtful article by Randall Kennedy, whose parents fled the Jim Crow South in the 1950's and who now teaches law at Harvard. He describes the tense holiday journeys from their home in D.C. to Columbia, South Carolina, where he was born. The elaborate preparations for the journey were thought by the Kennedy children as an effort to make the eight-hour ride into a
party...As I matured, I saw that once we crossed the Potomac and
ventured into Virginia, we encountered a terrain that filled my
parents with dread....The drive took us into territory that featured
signs distinguishing "colored women" from "white
ladies", signs indicating whether a business served blacks,
signs designating which toilets or water fountains or entrances
African Americans were permitted to use.
Kennedy writes of
the fierce debates, the student sit-ins, the courageous actions, the
heinous responses, and the political will that finally ended Jim
Crow. The proponents had to overcome the longest filibuster in
Senate history and counter arguments that will seem familiar to those
listening to today's policy debates: Opponents of the Civil
Rights Act warned that its implementation would further empower an
already tyrannical federal government...Mississippi Governor Ross
Barnett charged...that the bill was part of a communist
conspiracy....Alabama governor George Wallace... [denounced] the bill
as "a long step in a socialistic scheme...[to destroy] private
property rights."
The struggle for
racial equality in public accommodations has been more successful than
on other fronts - education, housing, employment. Why is that so?
For one thing, the provisions of the Civil Rights Act that address
public accommodations attack a more easily provable target and one
which was largely confined to the South. Also, in Kennedy's words,
the desegregation of public accommodations did not require from
white people [anything] more than psychic sacrifices...[and] gave
many white business people cover to do what market forces would have
nudged them to do anyway.
For these reasons,
the Civil Rights Act is sometimes downplayed as mainly symbolic. But
that misses the point. The law made a real difference in the daily
lives of African-Americans, destroying de jure segregation and
diminishing the blatant racism to which they were subjected. Kennedy
concludes that symbolism can be of transcendent importance and that
the Civil Rights Act was ultimately about historically oppressed
racial groups being given equal respect. It was about the symbolism
of inclusion.
Maya Angelou grew up before the Civil Rights Act. She passed away May 28 at the age of 86. The New York Times called her 1969 autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings "a lyrical, unsparing account of her childhood in the Jim Crow South." She was fortunate - she rose above the demeaning treatment inherent in the de jure segregation of that time. She became a great writer who enjoyed critical acclaim and was hosted by Presidents.
Unfortunately, even those no longer subjected to the overt racism of their youth and middle years are in danger of losing one of their most basic democratic rights - a right purchased with the blood and lives of civil rights activists like Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. I'm speaking, of course, of the nationwide voter suppression campaign by the Republican Party. MSNBC and Empower Alabama tell the story of the disenfranchisement of a 93 year-old African-American in the June 3 Alabama primary elections. Willie Mims, 93, showed up to vote at his polling place in Escambia County...for Alabama’s primary elections. Mims, who is African-American, no longer drives, doesn’t have a license, and has no other form of ID. As a result, he was turned away without voting. Mims wasn’t even offered the chance to cast a provisional ballot, as the law requires in that situation. Mims’s voter file showed he has voted in every election since 2000, as far back as the records go. Welcome to the poll tax-2014 style.
"The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom."
—From Maya Angelou's poem "Caged Bird"
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