THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, February 15, 1995 TAG: 9502150511
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
Civil-rights leaders were not ``namby-pamby activists'' looking simply to link arms with whites.
The movement was not the brainchild of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
And female activists were not relegated to second-class status.
Martha P. Norman, a former civil-rights worker, tried to puncture a few of these ``myths'' of the 1960s during a speech Tuesday at Norfolk State University.
Norman was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the leading student civil-rights group in the South, in the '60s. She worked in Alabama and Mississippi, trying to get blacks to register to vote.
Offering what she called ``a view from an average civil-rights worker,'' Norman said: ``I held no title; I held no position of importance. . . . But you don't have to be particularly special to play a role in historical events.''
Books and movies, she complained, have watered down the details of the movement. They have emphasized images of blacks and whites marching hand in hand, speakers dreaming of black and white children sitting blissfully side by side.
But the activists were not ``pitifully begging and pleading to sit next to white people,'' Norman said. ``They were insisting that black children have equal access to resources so they could meet their full potential.''
And black leaders, like King, were not interested simply in blending into America. ``What was absolutely clear was that we loved black people first and foremost, and that it was on their behalf that we struggled,'' she said.
Another misconception, she said, was that the black power movement in the late '60s diminished white clout in all civil-rights groups. Even in the early '60s, the student committee, known as ``Snick,'' was almost entirely run by blacks.
``It was a black movement in every respect,'' Norman said.
``The leadership was black, the participants were overwhelmingly black, the decisions were made by black people. . . . The role of white participants was to be supportive.
``The thing that pulled me into SNCC was a sense of racial pride. It was seeing young people like myself involved in sit-ins on TV. It just made me so proud, and I wanted to be a part.''
And Norman and other women did not take a back seat to men. ``I had no sense of being limited,'' she said.
``At 16 and 17, I was writing press releases, I was raising money, I was organizing national demonstrations.''
Norman, who spoke to more than 100 students, has taught black history courses at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University in Detroit. She now runs an after-school program for children with sickle cell anemia in Philadelphia.
Though the focus often rests on King, he was not the sole architect of the movement, she said. Thousands of others, from Northern students to Southern sharecroppers, braved life-threatening situations in the fight for equality.
The trouble with glorifying King and excluding the rest is that ``it leaves you with nothing to do but wait for a great leader to appear. It takes you out of the running.
``Nobody starts out that special. As students, you have the opportunity to develop yourself and create talents that are useful.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
CHRISTOPHER REDDICK/Staff
Martha P. Norman, a former civil-rights worker in the 1960s, told
Norfolk State University students on Tuesday that ``you don't have
to be particularly special to play a role in historical events.''
by CNB