by JAY MOORE
“We want freedom now, but we’re not going to get it saying ‘We Shall Overcome.’ We’ve got to fight until we overcome.” — Malcolm X
“A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
On the night of January 18, 1958, the Ku Klux Klan, which the previous week had held cross-burnings on the lawns of a mixed-race couple and of a Lumbee Indian family who had moved into a white neighborhood, tried to hold a rally against race “mongrelization” in Robeson County, North Carolina. But when the fifty Klan members showed up, they were confronted with ten times that many Lumbee Indians led by World War II veterans and armed with stick and guns. Shots were fired, and the Klansmen scattered in fright through the woods and swamps never to return. The same year of 1958, a couple of counties away in Monroe, North Carolina, another World War II vet, the local NAACP head Robert F. Williams, was also organizing armed defense against the Klan. Williams would later write a memoir about his experiences entitled Negroes with Guns. A few years later, in the Deep South, some other ex-soldiers formed the Deacons for Defense and Justice to furnish armed protection from racists for that part of the movement who were engaged in sit-ins and other forms of non-violent resistance. (A movie has been made about the Deacons for Defense.)
Certainly most school kids in this country know a little bit about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and perhaps Thurgood Marshall. They should! But do they know anything about any of the above? That’s because the history of the Black Freedom Movement AKA Civil Rights Movement is presented as a sweet little feel-good fairy tale somewhat along these lines: There were once bad white people down South (we don’t hear much if at all in this fairy tale about the white racists in the North) who were all too willing to unleash violence in the form of shootings, beatings, fire hoses, dogs, and jailings — the horrors of lynching are rarely mentioned — against anybody of the wrong color who was thought to be the least bit “uppity,” not to mention those who might have wanted to rock the segregationist boat. It was a tough uphill struggle. But the story has a happy and uplifting ending: Due to the actions of people like King and Parks, we are able to live today in a country with freedom and justice for all — because the power of non-violence and of loving your fellow man was all that was really needed, along with a good dollop of courage. Goodness (and being well-mannered and well-groomed and always remembering to turn the other cheek) was able to triumph over Evil.
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The current controversy over strategy and tactics in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, spurred by Chris Hedges’s ill-informed, poorly-researched essay in TruthDig setting up the “Black Bloc” as a supposedly mindlessly-violent, window-breaking anarchist strawman to promote his moralizing pacifist agenda, is an echo of earlier movement differences and debates. Although Hedges has been known to waffle, expressing support for rioting in Greece, Hedges seems to think that any kind of militant actions here are ipso facto “violent” and thus illegitimate. Hedges (as well as others like him) likes to wrap his politics in the mantle of Martin Luther King (along with Gandhi’s). But King, while following his own heartfelt path and despite his own strong philosophical differences with them, as far as I know was never once publicly critical of those within the Black Freedom Movement like Malcolm X who espoused the need for a more militant in-your-face approach. Martin was able to understand where people like Malcolm were coming from, given the severe history of racist repression in the black community. Many of our youth of all colors today, in this hollow materialistic capitalist world which is busy destroying the planet, also feel the same fury and uncompromising determination to stand up to Evil.
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