THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, February 5, 1997 TAG: 9702050004
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: OPINION
SOURCE: GLENN ALLEN SCOTT
LENGTH: 103 lines
An exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Art, ``The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954-68,'' prompts meditation on the way things were in the heady, turbulent years when nonviolence answered by violence transformed laws, customs, practices and hearts; when one nailed-shut door after another was pried open by black Americans - at polling precincts, in education, public accommodations, transportation, workplaces, housing.
The emotional high was King's masterly ``I have a dream'' speech before hundreds of thousands of blacks and whites massed before the Lincoln Memorial.
That March on Washington is depicted in the Chrysler show. Taken by news photographers, the photographs were initially exhibited at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. A book with the same title as the exhibit is available at the museum for $35. Steven Kasher, who assembled the photographs, is the book's author.
The struggle by black Americans for simple justice - not preferential treatment - began long before the U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous May 17, 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education decision outlawing racially segregated public schools; long before the high court's Dred Scott decision that added fuel to the conflagration that didn't die down until Appomattox.
Skirmishes in the continuing push by African Americans for liberty and equality before the law date from Southern slaves' earliest flights to freedom in the North and to brutally suppressed slave revolts, not the least being Nat Turner's rebellion in Southside Virginia's Southampton County.
But the Brown decision - the cobbled-together, much-criticized opinion of nine white-male justices - energized both white and black: whites to ignore, overturn or resist racially desegregated classrooms, blacks to press onward and upward, first in the courts, later at lunch counters and in the streets.
White police arrested demonstrators, sometimes peacefully, often not. Birmingham, Ala., police Chief Bull Connor infamously deployed fire hoses, billy clubs and police dogs to break up a street march led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Newspaper and television pictures of that fateful clash shocked tens of millions. A wit observed that Connor had advanced black Americans' civil-rights cause by 20 years with two words: ``Sic 'em!''
Photographs such as those at the Chrysler and television images of nonviolent black marchers being beaten by police and jeered by whites gained widespread sympathy for the marchers' cause and distaste for defenders of racial segregation - of ``our way of life,'' as white Southerners put it.
``Our way of life'' meant white Southerners' way of life, which required - indeed, demanded - that blacks ``stay in their place,'' and woe be to any Southern white who talked about changing the order of things. They were denounced as ``nigger lovers,'' or ``communists'' or ``rabble rousers.'' Southern segregationists regularly warned that ``mongrelization'' of the ``superior'' white race would flow from ``race mixing.''
Jim Crow laws defined the place that black people inhabited. It was a separate and inferior place. Police zealously enforced the separate-but-unequal status quo. The threat of mob violence - of lynchings - reinforced the law.
Ugly, ugly, ugly, it was, and most white Southerners, I among them, didn't notice; didn't see the humiliations and sheer terror that kept in ``their place'' human beings whose skin was darker, though not always that much darker, than our own, attesting to not a little ``race mixing'' over the years.
But separation of white people and colored people was natural, wasn't it? Some earnest souls would say, not always angrily and frequently reverently, that the Bible told them so. Learned professors and genteel whites said birds of a feather flock together - check the science books.
Intellectual, eloquent, entertaining conservative polemicist William F. Buckley Jr. detected peril to no less than Western Civilization itself in the outlawing of racially segregated schools. Buckley also saw that the ruling could be used to overthrow regnant liberalism.
In his lively, influential National Review magazine, Buckley argued that white Southerners would be justified (in response to desegregation decrees) in taking such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally .
``Advanced race.'' Years before, playwright George Bernard Shaw had tartly dealt with just such thinking. White Americans, Shaw observed, forced Negro Americans to polish their boots and then scorned them as bootblacks.
Nonviolence triumphed on many fronts during the years between Brown and King's assassination. Nonviolence triumphed because it was met by murderous white violence. Black and white civil-rights champions were martyred by white racists, and bringing their killers to justice - those who were brought to justice - was a long and iffy businesses.
Riots in the ghettos, where life had gotten worse with the shrinking of blue-collar jobs, tarnished the triumph, sharpened interracial hostility nationwide.
Millions of black Americans, especially those with college diplomas, have benefited from civil-rights gains. But for millions of other blacks, stranded in inner-city wastelands, the intervening decades have been a catastrophe measured by and fed by high rates of joblessness, illegitimacy, female-headed households, welfare dependency, drug and alcohol abuse, violent crime.
``We Shall Overcome'' was the anthem of the civil-rights movement. Much still remains to be overcome, for the sake of least favored blacks, browns and whites, most obviously, but also for the sake of all who inhabit this richest and most powerful land. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot. ILLUSTRATION: Copyright: Charles/Moore/Black Star
A demonstrator being attacked by police dogs in Birmingham, Ala., on
May 3, 1963, from ``The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic
History, 1954-68,'' at the Chrysler Museum of Art.