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Gut-check: The courage it took to stand up for civil rights
by Randall P., Unknown News July 13, 2008
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Of course we've all seen the film footage, watched the documentaries, who hasn't, but if you weren't there at the civil rights marches of the 1950s and 60s you almost can't imagine the courage and the fear. I wasn't there, I wasn't born, and the real risk and bravery of what those people did, black and white, wasn't anywhere near clear to me until my father explained it to me.
He's dead now and in all the years I knew him he rarely spoke of such things, but my father spoke of it once to me, when I was a teenager, and I've never forgotten it. He eyes welled up as he told me about the feeling at the several marches for civil rights that he participated in, emotions that don't often come across in the grainy black-and-white videos they show on TV, along with maybe twenty seconds of Martin Luther King's life, every year to mark his birthday.
To understand it, my father told me, you have to understand the times, and so much has changed that it's almost impossible to understand or remember or even imagine the times. To march for civil rights in a Southern city in the 1950s or '60s, it wasn't just an easy question of standing up for what's right. To show up and stand with the crowd for civil rights you had to think first about dying, because that was a very real possibility. My dad told me of one march with a few dozen people just singing and walking, and how he talked with a man marching with him, and not half an hour later a shot rang out and that man found a bullet in his arm. There was just the one shot out of the blue, and the man found a ride to a doctor's house and he was OK. But then just think about this: the marchers huddled behind parked cars for a few minutes, and my father said that he wet his pants he was so scared... and then most of them continued walking, continued singing. Gut-check yourself right now, would you have kept going?
Other people were often followed from the protests and beaten on their way home. Or worse. Yes, people died, and not just the famous people, not just Martin Luther King and Emmett Till and the others whose names you might have heard of, but so many more whose names you can't find with a quick Google search because
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Pfft and blood and shrieks of terror and, yeah, sometimes even funerals, and still, men and women, black and white, came and massed and marched.
It was never anything like the marches of today, where you maybe heard about a protest and decided whether it fit your schedule for a Saturday afternoon and if it did maybe you went and carried a placard for an hour or maybe you found an excuse not to go.
No, it was something different.
It was putting your life and your health and your guts if you had any on the line.
It was a risk for the right thing but it was a serious risk.
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their deaths never even made the news. The murders you heard about, of civil rights protesters and activists and innocents, were the murders that made the local papers or (more often) the murders that caught the attention of northern reporters on assignment to the South. But there were other casualties not uncommon, that never made the paper even in their home towns, murders and shootings and explosions and beatings where people died or maybe didn't die, but you weren't too likely to read about those crimes in white-owned newspapers in Alabama or Georgia or Mississippi.
Put yourself in the time and place. You're pacing and carrying picket signs in front of a store, or you're marching down the street in a small crowd, and you know that what you're doing is right and necessary and important... and you know also that what you're doing is an affront to everything in many peoples' hearts, and those people are watching you. So you hold your sign and walk the walk but you have to wonder if one of those people is watching you from a distance through a rifle scope. You have to know that if that person is angry enough to gently squeeze the trigger you'll hear a pfft and see the blood and someone could be wounded or worse, and there's barely the faintest chance that the white sheriff or his white deputies would even seriously investigate.
It happened and it wasn't all that uncommon. Pfft and blood and shrieks of terror and, yeah, sometimes even funerals, and still, men and women, black and white, came and massed and marched. It was never anything like the marches of today, where you maybe heard about a protest and decided whether it fit your schedule for a Saturday afternoon and if it did maybe you went and carried a placard for an hour or maybe you found an excuse not to go. No, it was something different. It was putting your life and your health and your guts if you had any on the line. It was a risk for the right thing but it was a serious risk.
My father died ten years ago this month. He would occasionally mention the marches in passing, but only the once did he really go into any detail about it with me. But only the once was enough to bring the message home, and I'll never forget it.
Nowadays you see black and white friends, black and white couples, mixed workplaces and mixed families, and it's so common it barely registers in your mind. A black man is running for President of the United States, and he's a little too blandly Clintonesque for me but he's still so unmistakably the better candidate it would take a crime of violence or another stolen election to keep him out of the White House. That's how far we've come.
There's a lot going wrong in this country and the leadership of George W Bush has been disastrous and things need to change, but at least one thing has changed a lot and changed for the better. This isn't the America my parents grew up in, thank God, and thanks to my dad, and thanks to so many thousands of others who literally put their lives on the line with a kind of courage America desperately needs again.
© by the author.
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