The Ox Bow Incident
By Rodolfo F. Acuña
Reading the posts in the Huffingtonpost.com I was surprised at the poor
grasp of history of many of the wannabe bloggers. One wrote, "In the
last five minutes I've seen about half a dozen references to Nazi
Germany, which tells me that those who keep using these references have
no frame of reference about what happened in Nazi Germany, and have
nothing constructive to add to the argument, whether their argument be
pro or con." It continued, "Is this bad law? To be sure. Does it warrant
comparisons with Nazi Germany? Absolutely not." The point was that
genocide had not been committed—(yet).
As a historian, I recall the famous statement attributed to Pastor
Martin Niemöller in 1946 about the inactivity of German intellectuals in
the rise to power of the Nazis and their targeting chosen groups.
THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
At what point in history should people have collectively spoken out?
Let's not be hypocritical. Arizonians are targeting Mexican-looking
people. To the credit of a large number of people, there has been a
moral outrage. SB 1070, signed into law this week, among other things,
requires all law enforcement officers in Arizona to act on "reasonable"
suspicion that an individual is in the country illegally—a law that the
Sheriff of Pima County has sternly criticized.
Two days later, the legislature passed,
HB 2281 (bill attacking ethnic/raza studies) states that any course,
class, instruction, or material may not be primarily designed for
pupils of a particular ethnic group as determined by the State
Superintendent of Instruction. State aid will be withheld from any
school district or charter school that does not comply.
It was signed by the Arizona governor. This act sets the stage to attack
the Tucson Public Schools highly successful La Raza Studies program and
to outlaw books which the censors deem critical of the United States.
This follows on the heels of the Texas Board of Education whitewashing
of history.
Everyone should see The Ox Bow incident (1943), especially the following
scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eezMiIuNNn8. When does a society
become a lynch mob? Does this warrant the analogy to Nazi-like actions?
I would say that Nazism took time to whip itself up and did not begin
with the mass genocide of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals etc.
Between 1848-1928, god fearing Americans lynched at least 597 Mexicans.
This does not count Mexicans killed by Texas Rangers and other so-called
citizens.
I write about these injustices to prevent making the same—I hate to use
the word—mistakes as the past. The Arizona law is beyond mean spirited.
It is reflective of a dark mood that many American people are going
through—these so called Minute Men want blood--they are not ready—nor
do they want—to listen to reason.
THEN THEY CAME for me, and people DID speak up
***
From: moderator@Portside.org
http://www.brennancenter.org/blog/archives_books/civil_rights_in_america_snccs_50th_anniversary/
Civil Rights in America: SNCC's 50th Anniversary
Interview with historian Taylor Branch
by Susan Lehman
April 22, 2010
The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) celebrated its 50th
reunion last weekend. SNCC played a major role in the sit-ins, freedom
rides, voter registration drives and marches that defined the American Civil
Rights movement.
Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Taylor Branch says SNCC's role in shaping
America is as essential as that of the Founding Fathers. He reports from the
conference.
Susan Lehman: John Lewis, Julian Bond, Charles Cobb, Ruby Sales, Dave Dennis
and other SNCC veterans gathered at Shaw University last weekend. What most
surprised you about the 50th Anniversary conference?
Taylor Branch: What was most surprising was how many people showed up. SNCC
people are notoriously argumentative. They are dying out. They are scattered
all over the place. And yet, I don't know the precise number, but it seemed
to me there were more than a thousand people there.
SL: How do you explain the big turnout?
TB: There is a hunger for what is fundamental. A lot of people think our
national politics is out of whack. SNCC addressed problems that no one
thought could be solved, and risked their lives doing it. They know they
deserve credit for this. And I think they are alarmed about what is
happening in the country. Apart from all this, there was probably a sense
that for a lot of them, this is their last shot to get together with people
they were bosom buddies with 50 years ago. If it's a 50th, and you miss it,
you can't plausibly say, "Hmm, I'll skip this one and go to the 60th!
SL: How would you characterize SNCC's legacy?
TB: SNCC played a far larger and more positive role in American history than
is commonly appreciated. Correctly viewed -- and historically viewed -- the
SNCC people shoved into motion an awful lot of freedoms that changed the
country in fundamental ways we take for granted today. This extends far
beyond eliminating segregation.
SNCC helped end -- literally -- the spirit of terror in a whole region of
the country where people were afraid in a meeting room or a living room, or
a downtown place that had any mixed presence. Doing so made people's hands
sweat. Because violence was ever present. People were getting beaten up,
killed and insulted and there was a lot of hatred running through the land.
SNCC's witness eliminated this and also changed the partisan structure of
politics in the whole country.
By winning the right to vote for black people, SNCC helped create the
two-party South. It also helped create - or stimulate - prosperity in the
South, which was impossible while the South was gnarled up enforcing
segregation. The region was not fit for major-league sports teams, then, as
soon as segregation was eliminated, sports teams - the Atlanta Braves and
Miami Dolphins teams sprouted up, and the Sun Belt was born. There were all
kinds of blessings for lots of people. And not just black and white people,
but for women and the disabled. The women's movement and a whole host of
movements that followed came out of a fundamental struggle over questions
about what equal citizenship means, what the role of politics is, and the
responsibility of every student.
Properly viewed - and history will one day see it this way - the Civil
Rights movement in general, and SNCC people as the young shock troops,
playing the same role as the Founding Fathers did. They confronted systems
of hierarchy and oppression, and set into motion a new politics of equal
citizenship that benefited everybody.
On the uses of nonviolence
SL: What can be learned from SNCC's successes in eliminating racial
desegregation?
TB: The overwhelming lesson is that they grounded themselves in nonviolence
and in the notion that people will respond to the moral values of equal
citizenship and democracy and basic religious morality, if it's dramatized
sufficiently. And they discovered a kind of nuclear energy in nonviolent
witness from the sit-ins to the voting rights era. That's a pretty big
discovery.
SL: Is there anything in contemporary American political life that suggests
nonviolence could be as powerful a force now as it was during the Civil
Rights Movement?
TB: All political agitation is a form of nonviolence and political debate
will win out in the end. But I don't see any contagious movements of
nonviolence. One of my biggest complaints when I got to universities is that
no one is studying nonviolence. Here you had a movement that came out from
the weakest and most invisible segment of society in civil rights; it was a
movement that adopted nonviolence and really shoved society -- against its
own will -- in a direction of profound and beneficial reform. Yet
nonviolence isn't studied. It's a travesty that you can go on university
campuses in the politics department and find people writing dissertations on
minor attack ads in a campaign but not studying something as sweeping as the
changes eight-year-old girls wrought on the national psyche by walking in
front of dogs and fire hoses. This is a pretty remarkable thing. We are the
oldest experimental democracy, and whole idea of democracy is to settle
disagreements by vote instead of the sword. The vote -- as Dr. King used to
say -- is an act of nonviolence. It's not a totally marginal issue.
SL: Speaking of voting and marginalization -- If patterns of felony
disenfranchisement persist, we'll have a higher level of disenfranchisement
among African Americans in a few years, than we did at the time the Voting
Rights Act passed.
TB: This is a political issue that needs to be addressed. Certainly the
direction of American history from the inception has been to widen the
franchise, not to narrow it. If we are actually narrowing it in a
significant or politically important way, that is a turn backwards in
history and we should be very skeptical and watchful about that.
SL: Attorney General Eric Holder delivered the keynote address at the SNCC
conference. What role did government play in SNCC's understanding of the
path to justice?
TB: This was an issue of tension between SNCC and Dr. King. Dr. King always
tried to knit together the pressure from the movement with results through
politics. He was always looking for way to outlaw segregation and secure
voting rights, legally. The legal part mattered. King tried to keep the
movement together, and, at the same time, he negotiated with all three
branches of government to move towards a voting rights law. For King, the
whole purpose of movement was to gain some footholds in law. SNCC started
that way, but was so disillusioned by the slow performance of the federal
government -- and the fact that the federal government that had been so slow
to move on Civil Rights was that it was starting the war in Vietnam -- that
they disregarded the legal aspect. As an historical matter, I think this is
why King lasted longer. SNCC came apart when it scorned the delicate task of
keeping movement going and getting a political response.
SL: Was SNCC a racially-mixed organization?
TB: It was almost entirely black from 1960 - 1964. Those were important
years. But then when they made the enormously controversial and
philosophically fraught decision to bring 600 white college students down
for freedom summer, a lot of them stayed on, and to a large degree
threatened to swamp SNCC in inter-racialism. It was not smooth. Part of the
inner struggle of SNCC to this day was they professed to be above the race
issue, but in the crucible of risk and trying to work together across
unfamiliar cultures, there was a lot of friction. It was controversial at
this reunion to use the symbol of white and black hands clasped, which was
SNCC's original symbol. The symbol was anachronistic. In the end, SNCC ended
up being an all-black organization. The reunion was about 90% black.
SL: You have written about the way history and myth-making impede progress.
Could you say a bit about how this happens?
TB: Race is a powerful engine of dangerous myth in American history. To some
degree, it is today: a lot of the Tea Party animus is undigested 1960's
resentment that people are called upon to act outside their comfort level
with people from different backgrounds and races, and that government is
forcing them to do this. And this is why they don't like the government. And
because it is subliminal and emotional, it's not ever said directly. A
fantasy is being fed to them: that if it weren't for the government, they
could be totally comfortable, would be wealthy and not have problems. It has
a lot of a success-church mythology sprinkled with an awful lot of
federal-government-is-the-instrument-of-scary-minorities-and-foreigners, and
to that degree that kind of mythology. Some of those same people are totally
blind to all the benefits - even to the white southerners - that the Civil
Rights movement brought to them.
The Future
SL: Harry Belafonte said, during the speech he gave at the conference, that
"no one should leave without a passionate idea about what to do now." What
ideas or issues galvanized most passion?
TB: The issue of education and non-functional schools, particularly in
cities was a big issue. Bob Moses, one of the most powerful forces in SNCC,
has been working on education issues for years. There was a lot of interest
in prisons and the burgeoning prison population. There are two million
people in jail; reasons for this has something do with sentencing
disparities of sentencing, and the effect of the drug war in imprisoning
people for nonviolent crime. The two issues of prison and youth education
dovetailed with some people who were upset about fact that younger and
younger kids, particularly black kids, are incarcerated right out of school.
A lot of people were interested in peace issues and in the question of why
we are continually fighting wars, and, the question of whether there is a
correlation between our having government's tilt towards increased executive
power and the national security state, and the fact that not only have we
been involved in more long-standing wars, but also that we are losing them.
When I saw Eric Holder, I felt badly that people like myself and SNCC didn't
applaud him and step up to offer support when he announced plans to try 9/11
people in civilian courts. This was to me, in a SNCC way that has to do with
questions about what fundamental democracy is, a courageous step.
Essentially Holder was saying: "We are not afraid to test our values in the
open by putting our case there and allowing defense to have its case, and
that is what the American system is about. And to fear that this might fail
or be dangerous is a step backward from our values and a surrender to those
who equate democracy with militarization."
SL: The Attorney General hasn't officially retreated from his announced
decision to try the 9/11 case in civilian court. So it's not too late to
stand up and voice support.
TB: You're right. I came out of the Holder speech thinking that if SNCC
wanted to write him a letter I'd do what I could, and if anyone announced a
march in support of that decision, I will try to attend.
SL: After four days what do you think was the ratio, amongst
conference-goers, of hope to hopelessness or just fatigue?
TB: I didn't sense a lot of hopelessness. I sensed something more like
determination and sprit. There were a lot of people who said, "When we
started SNCC, there wasn't a lot of conscious talk about how that this was
going to change the South. The first thought was we couldn't put up with it
any more and that we simply wanted to do something that would show we
disagreed. And not necessarily because we predicted it would lead to the
kind of change it did." People started this because they wanted to make a
witness or because something welled up in them. That's what a movement is.
It wasn't calculated. Something reminiscent of that spirit was present over
the weekend.
SL: Last question: you used your panel to talk about how SNCC doesn't take
sufficient credit for the profound changes it brought. What difference does
it make if SNCC -- and its accomplishments -- are fully understood?
TB: SNCC doesn't claim the breadth of its impact. And this hurts not only
SNCC's own reputation, but contemporary politics as well. It leaves a gap.
People should be a lot more optimistic about what you can achieve in
politics than they are today. The Pew organization just released a study
that says a huge percentage of people disparage government and say it is
worthless and you can't do anything about it. If everyone had a true
appreciation of breadth of changes spawned by the Civil Rights movement in
general -- and by SNCC in particular -- it would be hard to justify that
level of cynicism and opposition.
Taylor Branch is the author of, among many other books, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning Parting the Waters.
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