Juneteenth -- June 19, 2020

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Happy Juneteenth to all Facing Injustice Project Worker Friends.

“7 Lessons (and Warnings) From Those Who Marched With Dr. King

The tumult and passion of the past weeks have left the surviving veterans of the civil rights era with trepidation and hope.”  This is a marvelous New York Times story in today’s paper.  Maybe you read it.  If not, here are some excerpts. I find hearing from these heroes of the recent past, their wisdom and their concerns, inspiring and informative. I hope you do as well.  My comments are in [   ].  All the rest is directly quoted from the article.
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“A movement is different from a demonstration,” said Taylor Branch, a historian of the civil rights era.

“It’s not automatic — it’s the opposite of automatic,” he said, “that a demonstration in the street is going to lead to a movement that engages enough people, and has a clear enough goal that it has a chance to become institutionalized, like the Voting Rights Act.”

[Our Facing Injustice project to me is a kind of demonstration.  We may not be in the streets, but we are confronting minds with a history that challenges and can change the  ignorance and indifference that resists meaningful, lasting change.]

When a police officer kneels with protesters, pay attention.
Rutha Mae Harris, 79, was one of the Freedom Singers who toured the South encouraging black people to register to vote. . . . When you see the cops kneeling, I just love that. And there are a lot of young white people. I’ve never seen that. We had some white people, but not as many. It is a surprise, and it gives me hope.

Don’t assume this moment will last. 
Bob Moses, 85, an educator who in the 1960s led a drive to register black voters in Mississippi,. . .  What we’ve been doing isn’t working. What are we going to do? That level of consciousness really is new. And it’s not just the broader white population that is waking up to some extent, but also within the African-American population, too.  It may be that the person who killed George Floyd was an aberration. But the system they were a part of, that protects them and is as American as apple pie. [Robert Paris Moses is a long time personal hero of mine.  He said this over fifty years ago. Unfortunately, to far too great and extent, it is still true:
“When you're in Mississippi, the rest of America doesn't seem real. And when you're in the rest of America, Mississippi doesn't seem real.”  – Robert Parris Moses]

White people are now experiencing police violence firsthand.
Don Rose, 89, a white man who served as Dr. King’s press secretary in Chicago, . . .
In those days, when we spoke of police brutality, we weren’t often believed. I often pointed to the behavior of the police in Chicago in 1968 — that was really the thing that showed a lot of people that police brutality was a real thing. That was white people’s lesson for what black people had undergone in their own communities. 

Don’t write off anyone as an enemy. Persuade them.
Andrew Young, 88, a former mayor of Atlanta and ambassador to the United Nations . . .
. . . in St. Augustine, Fla., in 1964, when Ku Klux Klan members had been deputized by the sheriff to disperse the crowd. I didn’t know who they were, but I just feel like I can talk to anybody, so I went over there to try to explain to them why we were marching. . . .  I got stomped a little while, and somebody came up and pulled me up and across the street. What we were demonstrating was the power of nonviolence. The reason I had to talk to them is that you don’t write people off as the enemy.

You may be disappointed. We were.
Fred Gray, 89, who defended Rosa Parks against charges of disorderly conduct, still goes to his law office in Tuskegee, Ala., every day. . . . We didn’t solve it. Several generations later, we have to deal with the same troubles of racism. I was hopeful 60 years ago that we would solve them. I’ve been disappointed so often. I’m disappointed by the fact that I thought the white power structure, once they saw what black Americans were capable of, that they could perform equally. I thought it would change their hearts, but I don’t think the hearts and minds of many people have changed. [To my mind, Mr. Gray is candid, not bitter. He accomplished a great deal and I thank him for his dedication to righteous justice in America.]

Maybe young people now have the urgency we had then.
Xernona Clayton, 89, who helped organize marches for Dr. King, . . . It’s frightening, you see burning and looting. That’s frightening. It scares some people. But you have to recognize, if change is going to come, there is pain and suffering, sometimes, that goes with that. I used to criticize the young people. I thought maybe we, the older people, had solved the biggest problems — you got equal treatment, employment opportunities, civil rights laws, you don’t have to drink from the other fountain. We have made those major changes. I said, “Maybe we solved their problems, and they don’t got the urgency.”  Well, now they got the urgency. Now I think the young people are really bringing the problem to the fore. They got everybody’s attention.

Organize, organize, organize. (And, whatever it takes, vote.)
Bernard Lafayette, 79, who, like Mr. Young, accompanied Dr. King on the 1968 trip to Memphis where he was assassinated, has spent recent years training young activists in nonviolent social change. He traveled to Ferguson, Mo., to advise protest leaders there, . . . we need music, OK? Once you get those artists singing songs about change and the movement, that helps to stimulate people and bring them together. There is nothing like music to bring people together. The other most, most important thing, you got to get people who are ready to register to vote. You have got to have people in power who represent you. You’ve got to be negotiating and talking to the people who will make decisions. You can’t just put it out there and be screaming in the air. The air can’t make the change. [“ . . . we need music, OK?”  I hope we can find a place to fit some music into the Facing Injustice project.]