Today is June 21, 2009, the start of summer. But it's also 45 years since the start of summer in 1964, which was Freeom Summer, people going down to Mississippi to get black people on the voter registration. It got off to a bad start, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner were doing advanced work on the project and were killed on this day in 1964 because of that work.
I think that Freedom Now button I have on the main page is from that, it's certainly from the era. (The Yellow Submarine button is when a sub-group of the War Resisters League usurped the image from The Beatles and used it to protest against nuclear submarines in Groton, CT and then later as a more general symbol of pacifism.). I carried the button around five years ago, and then there was a real conviction in the murder of those three civil rights workers. I put the photo of the button up back in November when Obama was elected.
I've had the photo of Coretta Scott King up on the main page since she was sick a few years ago, and then died. She welcomed us to New York City on June 7th, 1982, I carry her around because of that connection, stronger than her husband who was killed when I was eight.
I barely remember 1964. I must have seen The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, I remember mimicking them on a toy guitar. I don't know whether that was the year we travelled around part of the US or if it was the year before, the big net of crabs in Oregon, cinnamon toast for the first time, outhouses at that campground in Oregon, and Disneyland. 1964 was alos the New York World's Fair, and going to Europe for a year that fall. I was oblivious to everything else.
Then when the innauguration took place in January, someone pretty much whined about the event on one local sort of well known blog, and I posted a reply about what a significant day in history it was. I've pasted it in below.
I don't pay attention to the US campaign. But then when he won, I realized how much it meant.
I suppose younger people, or those who don't know history, might not realize what it all means. I have no idea how the speeches sound to those who don't know, but for those who do, you can hear subtle references to the past, and basically how the riff-raff got to the US presidency. It's in effect folding Black history into common history.
The acceptance speech back in November quoted Sam Cooke's "A Change is Going to Come", which in effect referenced the civil rights movement. Obama mentioned various events in that movement that night, I think subtle so only "insiders" really picked it up. They were layered with other important points in US history.
Today, more explicit references, maybe most explicitly by others. There was John Lewis up there behind the new president, a leader of SNCC, veteran of the sit ins and the 1961 Freedom Rides, and Freedom Summer in 1964. I'm pretty sure it was him who stood up when Obama mentioned how his father wouldn't have been able to eat lunch just anywhere fifty years ago.
Diane Feinstein mentioned those who had given their lives in that struggle that laid the foundation for a Black president today. Those lives lost weren't in the traditional "gave their lives for democracy" which means defending the US, they gave their lives to make change within the US, change that shouldn't have been needed. Reverend Lowery, so important in Martin Luther King's work, gave more references, the only one I can remember now is the one about being at the mountain top.
All those people who fifty years ago had such hope, and took such massive steps that only look small in retrospect, challenging that which they didn't think could be challenged, because to challenge it meant the threat of violence, the threat of some retribution. Some got beaten, some were killed. They were nobodies, their power completely derived from their right, and they claimed it.
They decided they'd no longer sit at the back of the bus, they decided they'd not eat at segregated lunch counters, they decided they'd go to the schools they wanted to, they decided they'd claim the right to vote. They decided to be treated a different way.
If people hadn't gone down to Missisippi in '64, then voter registration wouldn't have started that year. If the reaction to the desire for change hadn't happened, the fire hoses and the dogs and the killing of four young teenagers in Birmingham in Sept. of 1963, and three murdered at the start of Freedom Summer in '64, then it's hard to say if new laws would have been implemented to allow those civil rights. And even when federal laws were passed in the US to forbid some of what was happening, it had to be reinforced by people claiming those rights.
And that changed things, so the riff-raff could get into power, because they were able to run and there was a base of the population that would vote for them. And then it stalled.
The people who were killed never saw the day when a black man would be president of the US. But even sadder is all those people who were so young and had such hope, who grew old waiting for that day. They were in their teens and twenties fifty years ago, they are old now. But they got to see that day. Some missed the big day by just a few years, people like Rosa Parks and the mothers of James Chaney and Andrew Goodman (who were two of the three killed at the start of Freedom Summer) and Coretta Scott King. Even one of Martin Luther King's children, Yolanda, died less than two years ago.
This day didn't happen without all of that, and it now becomes American History because it is the steps that made a Black US president possible.
It was a huge step to make, which is why it took so many decades after that big wave of change. But by being there, the step is now smaller.
The Civil Rights Movement was important not just because of what it changed, but because it was about the power of the individual. And a "nobody" getting into power is just an extension of that. The US now has a president that reflects that population, it renews the hope of the Civil Rights Movement. People who wouldn't vote because nobody on the ballot was what they saw in their mirror now see themselves. The cliche that anyone can be the President of the US is now more or less true, a barrier broken that lets the rest in. That's a radical shift, just like Rosa Parks refusing to go to the back of the bus. It gives others power, rather than taking power from others.
His presidency brings someone who isn't locked in the old networks of power, not even the Civil Rights oldtimers who had always seemed like the logical choice for the first black US president. It's the first time in my life that a US president has been younger than me. By his being someone else than the old white guard, he has already made change.
Fifty years is both a short and long time. It was long enough ago that black and white tv and movies was still common, as were outhouses. And segregation. But it's also the exact span of my life, which means it isn't a long time. This is a day for crying because it recognizes the people who fifty years ago wanted change. It's a day to be happy for Michelle Obama's mother, sitting up there minding the children, who is old enough to remember the old days. In fifty years, there was only one greater day, back in July of 1969 when man first walked on the moon.
Michael