#SayTheirNames

This is one of the books I'm reading

A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses Of Civil Rights History 

by Jeanne Theoharis

It's going to take me a while to finish it because I give into the temptation to vet Theoharis's subjects and sources, so I can't give you a comprehensive critique. The point I want to make with this post however can't wait, because this is a movie I bought Wednesday and am watching for the third time today. (It's what I do. I dissect the Historical record (and the Historians) so I can discover the dynamics beneath the story of US)

The most important film we're not teaching

So I was reading Theoharis's book, and learning how we Americans have manipulated the narrative of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) to portray an America that has risen above its past and claimed the victory. She renounces that idea, and the notion that BLM and other legitimate activist groups are too far removed from the spirit of the struggle as it played out in the Sixties. In our narrative, Theoharis claims, Rosa Parks is just another "accidental heroine", and MLK is a "dreamy hero;" both are courageous individuals who would consider today's activism an affront to their legacy. 

Now as I was reading all that and marveling over how far we haven't come, I was keeping an eye on the beautiful and terrible sequence of indignities heaped upon Dr. King and everyone involved in the CRM's Southern campaigns as one clip followed another on my wide screen TV.* 

Bald faced hatred flowed out of white mouths, violence was carried out by fists clubs dogs and water hoses. Then came the murder of four little girls; Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson (say their names). Four men, who occasionally wore white robes, hid dynamite under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama. The explosion shattered the basement wall next to where the children were donning their choir robes.  

That was less than a month after the March on Washington, where Dr. King delivered everyone's favorite "Dream"er speech (I found out that if you haven't truly listened to the whole speech, you know next to nothing about it).

That all too common tragic irony caught my previously divided attention, and I had to rewind just so I could listen to Diahann Carroll (I must have been six or seven the first time I fell in love with her) recite from Robert Hayden's poem, "Frederick Douglass." Notice how she bites "politicians."

Frederick Douglass 

BY ROBERT HAYDEN

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,   

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,   

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,   

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more   

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:   

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro   

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world   

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,   

this man, superb in love and logic, this man   

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,   

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives   

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Robert Hayden, “Frederick Douglass” from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Copyright © 1966 by Robert Hayden. Reprinted with the permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.Source: The Collected Poems of Robert Hayden (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1966)

The words and the memories of the great man were still raw; Fredrick Douglass died seventy-one years before Hayden penned the poem. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered two years after that, and the King documentary was released two years after that.

"...this man shall be remembered... Oh, not with statues' rhetoric not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone, but with the lives grown out of his life... fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing."

I guess Hayden was hoping that more of those lives would have been white lives by now...sigh.

Stephon Clark

C'mon white people:
Don't be angry because of the reminder, just say his name and be angry because we still need the reminder.

***

I hope this made you more than a little sad. Not that I like making people sad, but because sometimes we need to be sad, especially when the cure's main ingredient is Hope (It is one of Jesus's big three after all).

Hope is not something we have. Hope lives, but only as long as we feed it properly, and protect it from the slanders that have hounded it for millennia. More than that, Hope has to be followed for the simple reason that it is the promise of things to come. 

The question for us is simple:

What do we Hope for, Memphis?

Peace Y'all

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*I think we make a mistake when we try to understand the Civil Rights Movement as a monolithic phenomena. There was so much more going on, especially in the North and West, that we either never heard of, or refuse to talk about. Stay tuned for future posts.