Anybody Here Seen My Old Friend Martin. . .

David James here -
May 12, 2008 - Day 2 [Caution: contains the “n” word)

Comments on Beale Street:
“I definitely left my soul on Beale Street.” (Monday morning)
“B.B. King’s had the best band.” (Monday morning)
They also had a mighty good acoustic blues-man Monday night.
The record store next door had a phenomenal blues collection for sale.

That was the morning. At 3:15 PM this afternoon I emerged almost speechless from the National Civil Rights Museum here in Memphis. If I was appalled before I went in at what Americans did to Black people (and, I’m sure, many other races—the Japanese-Americans during WWII the Latinos, the Irish after the Famine—white people in America have been equal-opportunity racists for so long!) I am even more appalled now; at the ferocity of violence and hate that was hurled against sweet but determined friends during the sit-in movements, in Birmingham, at the Pettis Bridge. Though I did not know many of them, they were and are my friends, the people who went to the wall for Justice, and I hope to continue to be inspired and goaded by their example. They went to the wall; they were pinned to the wall by dogs, smashed into the wall by fire hoses, pushed and beaten into the wall by fists and clubs, hung from the wall by nooses. Proclamations were fastened to the wall declaring them non-persons, somehow ¿without souls or something? ¿what do they have, does Lysa have less of a brain, does Tony have less of a heart, LaRonda different mental processes, less love, compassion, Kris less determination; is Maurice 3/5 of a man? HOW could anyone EVER believe such unmitigated rubbish? And they pushe and pushed until the wall fell down. This afternoon I wish that there was a hell, so all those who profited from this atrocity could cook in it ‘til they understood what hurt they caused. I sympathize even more with Bob Moses, who according to reports walked away speechless and never wanted to talk to a white person again. The white people beating and abusing the Nashville sit-in people were chanting on the film strip “Eeny-meany-miney-mo, catch a nigger by the toe,” while all the time pounding the #$@! out of them. So I walked away; I won’t forget that for a while, you can be sure.
John Lewis was right when he said they ought to be looked at with compassion; that they were really the lesser human beings even thought they have the guns, the laws and the power. J. Todd Moye, in Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986 (Chapel Hill: U. of N.C. Press, 2004) suggests that whites in Mississippi prepared for confrontations with the response of massive resistance, economic, political, and physical. From the archive films of the sit-ins, the whites seemed to be beside themselves with rage. How could they have been brought to feel that way?
I remember a song from the musical, South Pacific:

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

A few snippets:

“’Sure, we’ll give you your rights, but not now.’” “It would never have occurred to me in my lifetime that I would have to buy water. . . It was my generation that messed up the environment. . . and it was strictly greed.” “I had a civil rights meeting with the people in the back of the bus. . . I said, ‘The steering wheel is in the FRONT. . .’ They had lost their dream.” “You can’t kill the dream; the dream is still alive.” “If you make a saint out of him, it excuses US” [from taking action]. Rev. Kyle at the NCRM*, 5/12.

Thomas the trolley driver in downtown Memphis told us of the street where his line started: Auction Street, where there was a stone, with an historical marker, where slaves were auctioned [en]during slavery.

Three quotes from the past; they were no dummies:

From an exhibit, NCRM: “Right is of no sex, truth is of no color, one is the father of us all and all we are brethren.” Frederick Douglas, in The North Star.

From an exhibit, NCRM: “The Honorable Robert B. Elliott, 1842-1884, South Carolina, delivered a famous speech in the U.S. House of Representatives on behalf of the pending civil rights bill of 1875, during which he said. ‘What you give to one class you must give to all, and what you deny to one class you shall deny to all.’”

Here’s one that might be tough for you to swallow, although I understand it well. From an exhibit, NCRM: “I don’t know if I can get across to you the thing that came over me whenever I went to a meeting of the Communist Party. All my life I have been sweated and stepped on and Jim Crowed. I lay on by belly in the mines for a few dollars a week and saw my pay stolen and slashed and my buddies killed. I lived in the worst section of town and rode behind the “colored” signs on the streetcars, as though there was something disgusting about me. I heard myself called ‘nigger,’ and ‘darky,’ and I had to say ‘Yes, sir’ to every white man, whether he had my respect or not. . . I had never known that anything could be done about it. . . And here I had found organizations in which Negroes and whites sat together, and worked together, and knew no difference of race or color. Here were organizations that weren’t scared to come out for equality for the Negro people and for the rights of workers. . . It was like all of a sudden turning a corner on a dirty old street and finding yourself facing a broad. Shining highway.” Angelo Herndon (May 6, 1913-1997, B. Wyoming, Ohio.
“Angelo Herndon was an African American communist organizer arrested and convicted for insurrection in 1932 in Atlanta, Georgia. Sentenced to 18-20 years in prison, he was released after serving 2 years, and 6,000 people greeted his return in 1934 at New York’s Penn Station.” [from his Wikipedia entry]


*NCRM = National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN. I've tried to upload some photos but the wireless connection here is very poor. I'll try again tomorrow.