“Fists of Freedom: An Olympic Story Not Taught in Schools”

Taken from: http://www.good.is/post/fists-of-freedom-an-olympic-story-not-taught-in-schools/

July 23, 2012

It’s been almost 44 years since Tommie Smith and John Carlos took the medal stand following the 200-meter dash at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and created what must be considered the most enduring, riveting image in the history of either sports or protest. But while the image has stood the test of time, the struggle that led to that moment has been cast aside.

When mentioned at all in U.S. history textbooks, the famous photo appears with almost no context. For example, Pearson/Prentice Hall’s United States History places the photo opposite a short three-paragraph section, “Young Leaders Call for Black Power.” The photo’s caption says simply that “…U.S. athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists in protest against discrimination.”

The media—and school curricula—fail to address the context that produced Smith and Carlos’ famous gesture of resistance: It was the product of what was called “The Revolt of the Black Athlete.” Amateur black athletes formed OPHR, the Olympic Project for Human Rights, to organize a black boycott of the 1968 Olympic Games. OPHR, its lead organizer, Dr. Harry Edwards, and its primary athletic spokespeople, Smith and the 400-meter sprinter Lee Evans, were deeply influenced by the black freedom struggle. Their goal was nothing less than to expose how the United States used black athletes to project a lie about race relations both at home and internationally.

OPHR had four central demands: restore Muhammad Ali’s heavyweight boxing title, remove Avery Brundage as head of the International Olympic Committee, hire more black coaches, and disinvite South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympics. Ali’s belt had been taken by boxing’s powers-that-be earlier in the year for his resistance to the Vietnam draft. By standing with Ali, OPHR was expressing its opposition to the war.

By calling for the hiring of more black coaches as well as the ouster of Brundage, they were dragging out of the shadows a part of Olympic history those in power wanted to bury: Brundage was an anti-Semite and a white supremacist, best remembered today for sealing the deal on Hitler’s hosting the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. By demanding the exclusion of South Africa and Rhodesia, they aimed to convey their internationalism and solidarity with the black freedom struggles against apartheid in Africa.

The wind went out of the sails of a broader boycott for many reasons, partly because the IOC re-committed to banning apartheid countries from the Games. The more pressing reason the boycott failed was that athletes who had spent their whole lives preparing for their Olympic moment simply couldn’t bring themselves to give it up. tetThere also emerged accusations of a campaign of harassment and intimidation orchestrated by people supportive of Brundage. Despite all of these pressures, a handful of Olympians was still determined to make a stand. In communities across the globe, they were hardly alone.

The lead-up to the Olympics in Mexico City was electric with struggle. Already in 1968, the world had seen the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, demonstrating that the United States was nowhere near “winning the war”; the Prague Spring, during which Czech students challenged tanks from the Stalinist Soviet Union, demonstrating that dissent was crackling on both sides of the Iron Curtain; and the April 4 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the urban uprisings that followed—along with the exponential growth of the Black Panther Party in the United States—that revealed a black freedom struggle unassuaged by the civil rights reforms that had transformed the Jim Crow South. Then, on October 2, 10 days before the opening ceremonies of the 1968 Olympic Games, Mexican security forces massacred hundreds of students and workers in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Square.

Although the harassment and intimidation of the OPHR athletes cannot be compared to this slaughter, the intention was the same—to stifle protest and make sure that the Olympics were “suitable” for visiting dignitaries, heads of state, and an international audience. It was not successful.

On the second day of the Games, Smith and Carlos took their stand. Smith set a world record, winning the 200-meter gold, and Carlos captured the bronze. Smith then took out the black gloves. The silver medalist, a runner from Australia named Peter Norman, attached an Olympic Project for Human Rights patch onto his chest to show his solidarity on the medal stand.

As the stars and stripes ran up the flagpole and the national anthem played, Smith and Carlos bowed their heads and raised their fists in what was described across the globe as a “Black Power salute,” creating a moment that would define the rest of their lives. But there was far more to their actions on the medal stand than just the gloves. The two men wore no shoes to protest black poverty, as well as beads and scarves to protest lynching.

Within hours, the IOC planted a rumor that Smith and Carlos had been stripped of their medals—although this was not in fact true—and expelled from the Olympic Village. Brundage wanted to send a message to every athlete that there would be punishment for any political demonstrations on the field of play.

But Brundage was not alone in his furious reaction. The Los Angeles Times accused Smith and Carlos of a “Nazi-like salute”. Time had a distorted version of the Olympic logo on its cover but instead of the motto “Faster, Higher, Stronger,” it blared “Angrier, Nastier, Uglier.” The Chicago Tribune called the act “an embarrassment visited upon the country,” an “act contemptuous of the United States,” and “an insult to their countrymen.” Smith and Carlos were “renegades” who would come home to be “greeted as heroes by fellow extremists,” lamented the paper. But the coup de grâce was by a young reporter for the Chicago American named Brent Musburger who called them “a pair of black-skinned storm troopers.”

But if Smith and Carlos were attacked from a multitude of directions, they also received many expressions of support, including from some unlikely sources. For example, the U.S. Olympic crew team, all white and entirely from Harvard, issued the following statement:

“We—as individuals—have been concerned about the place of the black man in American society in their struggle for equal rights. As members of the U.S. Olympic team, each of us has come to feel a moral commitment to support our black teammates in their efforts to dramatize the injustices and inequities which permeate our society.”

Smith and Carlos sacrificed privilege and glory, fame and fortune, for a larger cause—civil rights. As Carlos says, “A lot of the [black] athletes thought that winning [Olympic] medals would supersede or protect them from racism. But even if you won a medal, it ain’t going to save your momma. It ain’t going to save your sister or children. It might give you 15 minutes of fame, but what about the rest of your life?”

The story of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics deserves more than a visual sound bite in a quickie textbook section on “Black Power.” As the Zinn Education Project points out in its “If We Knew Our History” series, this is one of many examples of the missing and distorted history in school, which turns the curriculum into a checklist of famous names and dates. When we introduce students to the story of Smith and Carlos’ defiant gesture, we can offer a rich context of activism, courage, and solidarity that breathes life into the study of history—and the long struggle for racial equality.

“Israel’s ‘Rosa Parks’ refuses to take back seat”

Taken from: http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/19/world/meast/israel-rosa-parks/?iref=obnetwork

December 19, 2011

When Tanya Rosenblit boarded an inter-city bus bound for Jerusalem from her native Ashdod Friday morning, she did not anticipate the storm it would spark within Israel.

The public bus she boarded normally carries ultra-Orthodox passengers and travels to an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem. As a matter of custom women sit in the back portion of the bus, because the ultra-Orthodox avoid mingling of the sexes according to their beliefs. She was the first passenger that morning on the bus and took a seat behind the driver. As the bus took on more passengers along its route, an ultra-orthodox man demanded she should sit in the back of the bus as is the custom on that route.

“I heard him call me ‘Shikse,’” Rosenblit wrote on her Facebook page, referencing a Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman. “He demanded I sit in the back of the bus, because Jewish men couldn’t sit behind women (!!!). I refused.”

“This is my home town of Ashdod, I live in an Israeli democracy, people cannot tell me where to sit on a bus.”

An argument ensued and ultimately the bus driver called the police to intervene, but not before a crowd of black-clad ultra-orthodox men had gathered outside the bus. ”I was starting to get scared, to tell you the truth,” Rosenblit recalled. “There were like 20 of them, all wearing black. Most of them were just curious, but they were definitely on his side.” Rosenblit snapped throughout this disruption, and said she was comfortable knowing that Israeli law was on her side. In a case brought by an Israeli woman earlier this year, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that involuntary separation between the sexes on public buses was against the law.

The responding police officer tried to talk to everyone and calm things down. Rosenblit said he asked if she was willing to show respect for the objectors and move to the back of the bus. She refused and, after a 30-minute delay, the bus moved on to Jerusalem with her sitting up front.

A day after posting the account on Facebook, Rosenblit’s story was picked up by the Israeli media, which has been devoting a lot of coverage to the public outcry over the growing political power of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel, and fears they are forcing the generally secular Israeli public to adopt their religious standards.

Israel’s largest circulation newspaper put her story on its front page with the headline, “They Won’t Tell Me Where to Sit,” and compared Rosenblit to the American civil rights movement’s legendary Rosa Parks.

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought up her story in his weekly cabinet meeting. ”Up until this day we have agreed to live in peace with mutual respect by all sectors of the Israeli society,” he told his government ministers. ”In recent days we witness attempts to break this coexistence apart. Today, for example, I have heard of an attempt to move a woman from her seat on a bus. I oppose this unequivocally. I believe we must not allow margins groups to break our common denominator and we must keep our public spaces open and safe for all of our citizens. We must find the uniting and mediating ground rather than the things that divide and separate us.” Netanyahu said.

Rosenblit also received a call from Israel’s opposition leader, Tzipi Livni, who offered her support and called her a symbol of determination against “anti-democratic radicalization that pushes women away from the public space.”

A spokesman for Egged, the transportation company that runs the bus line, told CNN in a statement that it “does not deal with seating arrangements” on its buses and that “even if there are population groups that prefer to sit separately due to their beliefs, it is a voluntary choice and does not bind the other passengers.”

Rosenblit describes herself as secular and said she did not ride the bus looking for a confrontation. She said what motivated her to write about her experience was not “not to declare the Orthodox Jews as pure evil and the oppressors of human rights and liberties,” but to point out what she sees as societal problem in Israel. ”There are a lot of lovely things about religion, but forcing people to choose religion is wrong,” she said. ”It is wrong to use religion as an excuse to eliminate people’s basic rights: the right for freedom and the right for dignity.”

“Elizabeth and Hazel: Little Rock women struggled after iconic civil rights image”

Taken from: http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/22/little-rock-nine-elizabeth-hazel-margolick/

December 22, 2011

David Margolick’s latest book, “Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock,” explores what happened to two teenagers captured in one of the civil rights movement’s most iconic photos.

Elizabeth Eckford was one of nine black teenagers to integrate Little Rock, Arkansas’, Central High School in 1957, and the photo shows her walking a gauntlet of shouting, taunting white students and adults. In the photo, Hazel Bryan, now Hazel Bryan Massery, was the white girl caught in the midst of yelling a racial epithet. The moment depicted in that image continued to reverberate throughout both girls’ lives.

Eckford struggled with depression and anxiety throughout adulthood, once being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder due to the near-constant bullying she experienced at Central High. She attended two colleges before depressive symptoms forced her to drop out. Bryan Massery transferred to another high school before dropping out to marry at 16. She was the mother of two children when she first called Eckford to apologize for what she’d done. Although the two women eventually reconciled and even became friends, the pain and guilt each experienced because of the events in the photo crushed their friendship, and they no longer speak to each other.

CNN: What motivated you to write this book?

Margolick: I was in Little Rock doing a piece, a [Bill] Clinton-related piece for Vanity Fair that didn’t pan out. While I was there, I went to Central High School, which had always been a legendary building for me. I was well aware of what had happened in Little Rock in 1957 … Central High School was a holy place for me, and I wanted to see it for myself. When I was there, I went to the visitors’ center across the street, which had just opened, and right when you got in you saw the famous picture.

It seeped into my consciousness the way it seeps into the consciousness of every historically curious person.

I can’t tell you [how old I was when I first saw the picture]. I could no more tell you than I could when I first saw the picture of the little boy in the Warsaw ghetto with his hands up. You just know you’re changed once you see it. These are images that haunt you for the rest of your life.

But what happened in the visitors’ center was that very close to the picture, in the gift shop, was a poster of the grown-up pictures of these girls … I realized this was the same Elizabeth and Hazel, only they were grown up and they were friendly. The picture was taken in 1997, and I was there in 1999 … I thought, as any journalist would, how did we get from the first picture to the second? And why didn’t I know anything about it? How had these two archetypal racial antagonists buried the hatchet? How could that be? So that’s what made me curious enough to start looking into it.

CNN: What was it like reporting this story – were the two women and the people around them willing to talk?

Margolick: It was a delicate matter reporting the story, but not for the reasons that I anticipated. The two women were initially quite willing to talk. They met with me right away, and – but there were problems very quickly. When I met the two women, the bond that had developed very quickly between them in 1997, had begun to fray.

Hazel was wary of me and decided not to cooperate with me. Hazel felt that me and Elizabeth would gang up on her. For the first eight years that I worked on the story, she wouldn’t even talk to me.

When a version of the story appeared in Vanity Fair in 2007, an early version, and Hazel could see I bore her no ill will and was trying to be fair to her, then she agreed to see me. And from there I went back and forth between the two of them. They only live a few miles apart. Though they hadn’t talked to each other since 1997, they were talking to me.

I found that their families were not anxious to speak about it. Their children – I never spoke to Hazel’s children, she would never let me. She thought some of the ostracism that she had suffered for coming out and apologizing would spill over to their lives and hurt them, their businesses.

There were a lot of white people in Little Rock that thought Hazel had given them a bad name, that they had behaved completely appropriately in 1957 and never did anything to hurt the black people at the school, and here they were saddled with the image of Hazel in the picture. They were seen as racists, when all they did when the black children at Central were being harassed and humiliated, was look the other way. They think that they were good kids, and that the trouble inside Central to which Elizabeth and the others were subjected was the work of 200 troublemakers, and the other 1,800 of them were living as normal a life as possible in a school that was militarily occupied.

CNN: What do you find most tragic about this story?

Margolick: There are lots of tragic things here, lots of tragic dimensions to this story, but each has a positive side, too. This story is very mixed; it’s complicated. It’s a great tragedy that, because of her own demons and the abominable way she was treated, Elizabeth’s growth was stunted. Elizabeth could have been anything. She could have been a great lawyer or a history professor. So that’s a great tragedy. It’s a great tragedy that a childish mistake – Hazel has had to bear this cross for the last 55 years, and this picture will be on top of her obituary. It will be the only reason she’ll have an obituary in The New York Times.

It’s a tragedy that the despite the intents of these well-meaning people, they ended up incommunicado, despite the great bond of love between them even to this day.

That’s why I think the last chapter of this book will not be in my book. It may not be written yet.

CNN: From what I understand, Hazel’s life took an upward, or at least normal, curve, while Elizabeth struggled for decades after the day that picture was taken. What do you think accounts for the difference in the levels of their successes?

Margolick: I think it’s a matter of their mental makeup – I think that Elizabeth had a family history of depression that Hazel didn’t have to deal with. And Elizabeth had suffered much more egregiously than Hazel ever had, and that exacerbated whatever tendency Elizabeth had toward depression, whereas Hazel was just sort of a normal southern girl. Hazel wasn’t troubled at all until the picture began to torment her years later. And she was traumatized incrementally and episodically when the picture came up, but few people knew that she was the person in it. So it was a sort of private embarrassment she suffered. With Elizabeth, it was an ongoing affliction. And it wasn’t just the picture and wasn’t just her experiences at Central, it was everything thrown together. And the affliction was just constant and unrelenting for decades.

CNN: What’s the overarching lesson to be learned from Elizabeth and Hazel? Is there one?

Margolick: I guess it’s just that even for people with good intentions – the best of intentions – it’s very hard to overcome the history of racial tension in this country, and racial misunderstanding and racial division. Because both of these people mean well. And, as I said, underneath all the tension and anger and bitterness and resentment, there still exists a great bond between them. I know there does, because whenever they talk about each other, they tear up. They miss each other. And I think that compounds the tragedy that you were talking about before

CNN: People want so badly for this story to have something like a happy ending. What does it say about America that this happy ending never materialized?

Margolick: I think it says something about American naivety that we think it should have materialized, and about American impatience over the fact that it hadn’t. This would be a much bigger story, a more newsworthy story, if it had materialized. Then Oprah would be talking about it again. And the fact that it hasn’t yet makes it less interesting to people, when that fact is, it should make it more interesting to people because it’s real.

So it’s very stirring – movies get made of unrealistic, completely implausible situations like ‘The Help,’ but not vexing real-world situations like this one. And that’s very sad. Revisionism is much more popular, much more marketable, than reality. You can walk out of the theater eating your popcorn and feeling happy. I wanted there to be a happy ending to this story, but I felt it wasn’t my role to stage manage a happy ending when there wasn’t. I didn’t even want to ask them to pose for a picture together. I did, but that was only at my photographer’s insistence, and only at the very end, when the book was almost completely done.

CNN: What did writing this book teach you about racism and race relations?

Margolick: It just reminded me of how complex they are, I guess, and how heavy the hand of history is on us still, and how omnipresent America’s racial legacy remains. There’s no such thing as ‘post-racial,’ and all these problems are still lurking. They’ve just gone a bit beneath the surface. They’re not as bad as they once were, but there’s still a long way to go. I write all my books trying to figure out the kind of person I am, how I would behave in those circumstances and these books give me a chance to ponder that.

CNN: The current generation of 15-year-olds is growing up in a more integrated society, in many ways. Do you think racial reconciliation of past and current racism will be any easier for them than it was for Elizabeth and Hazel?

Margolick: Oh, I think so. Even though the races are very much separated still, they are so much more mixed together than they were.Elizabeth told me she actually didn’t understand some of the white kids when she arrived at Central; they spoke with an accent she had never heard before. That would be inconceivable today. So things are starting from a much more advanced place, and the level of racial understanding is necessarily much, much higher, however far it still may have to go. And in a school that’s as heavily black as Central High School is now, the sort of harassment that the Little Rock Nine had to put up with would never be tolerated. It would be crazy even to attempt it.

CNN: Do you find that people of different races, ages, backgrounds react differently to the story?

Margolick: I’m not sure if I have enough of a cross-section of reactions, frankly. I think that blacks get this story more than whites do, and feel more drawn to it than whites do, in some instances. That certainly goes for some of the reviewers. But then I haven’t had any black reviewers, I’m just thinking, anecdotally. I so much want this book not to be read just by the usual white liberals. I don’t want to just round up the usual suspects for this book. I want blacks to read it too. I want white conservatives to read it, because I think that Hazel would really resonate with them. The thing that burns up some conservatives is that only liberals are [portrayed as] tolerant.

I’d like this story to be discussed on Fox as well as CNN, but I’d be satisfied with it on either. Instead of just on MSNBC.

CNN: Is there any other photo in American history that you’re dying to find out about?

Margolick: No, I don’t think I want to do another one of these. I think no picture better captures the racial divide in this country than this picture, and since the racial divide is such a large part of the American story, and since I’m so interested in that racial divide, there’s no other picture I want to write about. I was incredibly lucky to write about this one. I was incredibly lucky that no one had ever written about this picture.

“Alabama’s immigration law: Jim Crow revisited”

Taken from: http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/17/opinion/trumka-king-civil-rights-alabama/index.html?hpt=us_t2

November 17, 2011

Editor’s note: Martin Luther King III is president and chief executive officer of The King Center in Atlanta. Richard Trumka is president of the AFL-CIO.

(CNN) – It is one of the painful ironies of our time that in the same season Martin Luther King Jr.’s memory is finally honored with a memorial in our nation’s capital, the state where he began to lead the civil rights movement is once more the center of an ugly conflict over racial injustice.

The passage of Alabama’s anti-immigrant legislation, HB 56, invokes inhumanity reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. And the police state it has created is equally cruel.

If the law stands, children will be denied admission to public schools if they can’t prove their citizenship, and schools will be turned into enforcement operations. Poor people of color will be ripped from their families if they are caught in public without their papers in order. Samaritans and people of conscience who employ, harbor or help undocumented workers will be severely punished. Already, opportunistic corrections firms are standing by to pocket money off prejudice and terrified families are selling off their meager possessions and fleeing the state.

Our immigration system is broken, but our answer as a nation cannot be to terrorize and criminalize families. Our immigration policy must be consistent with our core values and our moral obligation to treat all people with dignity and respect. For all the differences that divide us, we are in this together. In these harsh economic times, we are more than ever wearing the “single garment of destiny” of which King wrote in his ”Letter From Birmingham Jail.”

When communities suffer discrimination and degradation, we all suffer. When some citizens are denied fair treatment, we are all denied. When any group of workers can be underpaid and overworked, all workers are victimized. When families are threatened if they dare organize or speak out, America is threatened. ”Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application,” King also wrote in “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” where he was imprisoned for nonviolent civil disobedience. Much about our nation’s immigration practices echoes that observation.

We call on President Barack Obama to oppose and terminate all programs — including collaboration between state and local law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security — that result in racial profiling and target immigrant communities. Our focus should be on comprehensive immigration reform. And we must focus simultaneously on fixing our broken economy, an economy that is forcing 99% of the people to compete for a smaller and smaller piece of the receding American Dream.

We also hope the good and righteous people of Alabama will rise up, oppose and repeal the abomination that is HB 56. Theirs is the state where our historic civil rights movement began, where King and his followers developed a model of nonviolent activism that changed not only Birmingham and Alabama and the South, but our entire nation.

This week, a delegation of African American labor and civil rights leaders are visiting Alabama to support Latino families who face hostilities all too familiar to what King saw in 1963. Perhaps the ugly problems in Alabama can once again play a part in building a new understanding about the strains of division that weaken the fabric of society for all of us.

“From Jim Crow to Juan Crow: Alabama’s Civil Rights Legacy”

Taken from: http://newamericamedia.org/2011/10/alabama-depriving-water-to-immigrants-stirs-civil-rights-memories.php

October 12, 2011

Last week the Water Works — in the ironically named community of Allgood, Ala. — informed local residents that they must now present a valid driver’s license or ID. Otherwise, the notice threatened, “You may lose water service.” The warning stems from part of Alabama’s drastic new immigration law stipulating that no one can qualify for a driver’s license or any other government service in the state unless they can prove citizenship or are otherwise authorized to be in the United States — especially those who are brown or have a Spanish accent.

Water as a Racial Divide

The official notice from the Allgood Alabama Water Works was not the first time the good citizens of the Cotton State have used water as a racial divide.

Similar images flowed through my mind during a long bus ride 46 years ago. I was on my way to join the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. That was a time of shocking black-and-white TV pictures of police blasting demonstrators off their feet with water canons, a time of separate toilets and water fountains — legislated by other laws — for blacks and whites.

Today, Jim Crow has become Juan Crow.

Last week’s eager decision on the Water Works by the Allgood mayor streamed from the unexpected ruling by U.S. District Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn in Birmingham. Although she nullified much of Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law, she left intact clauses that authorize police to demand “papers” showing citizenship or immigration status, such as during traffic stops, and denying the parched but undocumented so much as a tap of water.

Frightened by Judge Blackburn’s decision, Alabama’s growing Latino population is now fleeing that state in huge numbers. One small town, Albertville, lost a substantial part of its Hispanic population — including those with documentation to be in the United States — practically overnight. While local farmers and contractors complain that the exodus leaves them without enough labor to harvest crops and complete their jobs, I wonder how many of those in flight from the prospect of police harassment are fully established U.S. citizens, born and bred here – like me, and maybe you, too.

Judge Blackburn also preserved a requirement compelling public schools to verify the immigration status of children and their parents. That, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center is “a provision that will have a chilling effect on children’s access to public schools.” Of course, outrage and condemnation over the immigration law will continue to flare in the coming weeks, and the Obama administration has asked for a federal court injunction to stop implementation of the law until it can work its way through the federal judiciary.

Rolling Toward Selma

But the Alabama decision–coming the same week that witnessed the death of Fred Shuttelsworth, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King, Jr., andDerrick Bell, the Harvard law civil rights advocate–sent my mind rolling back through Birmingham on a chartered bus full of college students almost a half-century ago.

I was 19 and one of about 20,000 people wheeling in from around the country following Bloody Sunday. That was the police riot that left protesters like John Lewis — now a member of Congress — bloodied as they tried peacefully to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the first leg of a march to the state capital in Montgomery. Decades before Twitter feeds existed, and long before anyone called us baby boomers, calls had gone out for student support. Organizers at the University of Minnesota, where I was a sophomore, mustered enough of us to fill two, maybe three buses.  In the ensuing days after the attack on the marchers, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy called out the National Guard to protect marchers from the likes of the Klan and police thugs, such as Selma Sheriff Jim Clark and Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, one Eugene “Bull” Connor.

As our Minnesota bus traveled south through the afternoon and night, I hunched sleepily against a bus window. In the aisle seat next to me was my college roommate, Teferi, a fellow journalism student from Ethiopia.

In the early morning light, I felt the bus pull into a gas station. Drowsy at first, I took in the station’s homespun blue-and-white paint job. Then I found myself wide awake at a sight I’d only read about until that moment. Two water fountains were marked “For Whites” and “Colored.” I was not prepared for the jarring emotional impact that sight had on me. As I glanced over at my ebony friend and idol, Teddy (whom we on the Minnesota Daily staff all called the coolest, most worldly guy), I felt tears moisten my eyes and anger tighten my chest. There it was, right in front of us, in all of its banal, institutionalized expression of fear and hatred. The prosaic sight now before me was somehow even more unsettling than the televised images of police dogs, Billy clubs and flailing limbs in water.

By Alabama law, Teddy and I simply could not share the same spout for a drink of water because — because why? The gas-station stop was quick, and only those with a morning urge got off the bus; we were trying to get to Selma and the Brown AME Church as soon as possible before heading out to join march.

The decades have rolled by like so many state “Welcome To …” signs, and the years have sped along fueled by many causes, loves and regrets, among the latter a falling out with Teddy — all my fault — that remains unrepaired. But in the miles toward Selma that morning — and again now — I couldn’t help but think of the folk-music inquiry of those days, “When will they ever learn?” Sad to say, even after this “long time passing,” the answer remains, not yet…

“Civil Rights Leader Shuttleworth Dies”

Taken from: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44788700/ns/us_news-life/#

October 5, 2011

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, who was bombed, beaten and repeatedly arrested in the fight for civil rights and hailed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for his courage and tenacity, has died. He was 89.

Relatives and hospital officials said Shuttlesworth died Wednesday at a Birmingham hospital. A former truck driver who studied religion at night, Shuttlesworth became pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1953 and soon emerged as an outspoken leader in the struggle for racial equality. ”My church was a beehive,” Shuttlesworth once said. “I made the movement. I made the challenge. Birmingham was the citadel of segregation, and the people wanted to march. In his 1963 book “Why We Can’t Wait,” King called Shuttlesworth “one of the nation’s most courageous freedom fighters … a wiry, energetic and indomitable man.”

Mayor William Bell ordered city flags lowered to half-staff until after Shuttleworth’s funeral. Bell, who is black, said he would not be mayor if not for leaders like Shuttlesworth. ”Dr. Shuttlesworth means so much to this city and his legacy will continue for generations,” he said.

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth right,  escorts Dwight Armstrong, 9, and his brother Floyd, 11, from the Graymont Elementary School in Birmingham, Ala, Sept. 9, 1963. State troopers, on order from the governor, opened the school but turned the African Americans away.

Shuttlesworth survived a 1956 bombing, an assault during a 1957 demonstration, chest injuries when Birmingham authorities turned fire hoses on demonstrators in 1963, and countless arrests. ”I went to jail 30 or 40 times, not for fighting or stealing or drugs,” Shuttlesworth told grade school students in 1997. “I went to jail for a good thing, trying to make a difference.” Alabama’s first black federal judge, U.W. Clemon, said Shuttlesworth flung himself at injustice well knowing he could be killed at any moment. “He was the first black man I knew who was totally unafraid of white folks,” said Clemon, who retired from the bench and is now an attorney in private practice. Shuttlesworth remained active in the movement in Alabama even after moving in 1961 to Cincinnati, where he was a pastor for most of the next 47 years. He moved back to Birmingham in February 2008 for rehabilitation after a mild stroke. That summer, the once-segregated city honored him with a four-day tribute and named its airport after him. His statue also stands outside the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

In November 2008, Shuttlesworth watched from a hospital bed as Sen. Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first African-American president. The year before, Obama had pushed Shuttlesworth’s wheelchair across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma during a commemoration of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march — a moment Obama recalled Wednesday. In Washington, Obama released a statement lauding Shuttlesworth as a “testament to the strength of the human spirit” and said America owes him a “debt of gratitude” for his fight for equality.

“As one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Reverend Shuttlesworth dedicated his life to advancing the cause of justice for all Americans,” Obama said. In the early 1960s, Shuttlesworth had invited King back to Birmingham. Televised scenes of police dogs and fire hoses being turned on black marchers, including children, in the spring of 1963 helped the rest of the nation grasp the depth of racial animosity in the Deep South. ”He marched into the jaws of death every day in Birmingham before we got there,” said Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and U.N. ambassador who served as an aide to King.

Young said it was Shuttlesworth’s fearlessness that persuaded King to take the struggle to Birmingham. ”We shouldn’t have been strong enough to take on Birmingham … But God had a plan that was far better than our plan,” Young said. “Fred didn’t invite us to come to Birmingham. He told us we had to come.” Referring to the city’s notoriously racist safety commissioner, Shuttlesworth would tell followers, “We’re telling ol’ ‘Bull’ Connor right here tonight that we’re on the march and we’re not going to stop marching until we get our rights.” According to a May 1963 New York Times profile of Shuttlesworth, Connor responded to the word Shuttlesworth had been injured by the spray of fire hoses by saying: “I’m sorry I missed it. … I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.” Fellow civil rights pioneer the Rev. Joseph Lowery said Shuttlesworth was determined. ”When God made Bull Connor, one of the real negative forces in this country, He was sure to make Fred Shuttlesworth.” Lowery said.

While King won international fame, Shuttlesworth was relatively little known outside Alabama. But he was a key figure in Spike Lee’s 1997 documentary, “4 Little Girls,” about the September 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four black children.

Shuttlesworth was born March 18, 1922, near Montgomery and grew up in Birmingham. As a child, he knew he would either be a minister or a doctor and by 1943, he decided to enter the ministry. He began his theological courses at night while working as a truck driver and cement worker by day. He was licensed to preach in 1944 and ordained in 1948. It was 1954 when King, then a pastor in Montgomery, came to Birmingham to give a speech and asked to stop by Bethel Baptist and meet Shuttlesworth. Then in late 1955 in Montgomery, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus, prompting the boycott led by King that gave new impetus to the civil rights movement. In January 1956, King’s Montgomery home was bombed while he attended a rally. Eleven months later, on Christmas night 1956, 16 sticks of dynamite were detonated outside Shuttlesworth’s bedroom as he slept at the Bethel Baptist parsonage. No one was injured in either bombing, although shards of glass and wood pierced Shuttleworth’s coat and hat left hanging on a hook. The next day, Shuttlesworth led 250 people in a protest of segregation on buses in Birmingham.