Civil Rights Is More Than

Civil Rights Is More Than a Period in Time Don't Just Say, "Civil Rights": Believe in Justice as a River of Possibilities In his acclaimed novel, Bombingham, Anthony Grooms writes skillfully about the battlefields of Vietnam and the battlefields of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in particular, the battles fought in and around the Alabama city of Birmingham.

The title of the book of course is a contemptuous label that African-Americans gave to Birmingham during the movement, when the Black community was terrorized by Bull Conner and countless bigoted police gone out of control, by bombings and shootings and by the reality of twenty or more unsolved murders of Black folks in that community. Thesis Statement: But beyond that window of time in American history, "civil rights" should never become merely a catch-phrase that captures the dynamics of a period in American history, the 1950s and 1960s.

Yes, those terrible years were drenched with hostility, bloodshed and a horrifying hate that hovered over the Black community; and no, those times must never be forgotten. But indeed, civil rights should be an ongoing theme, a never-ending movement, a crusade for continuing the fight for justice, a powerful dream that needs to be instilled in cynical young people as well as skeptical older people, of all nationalities and income / social strata. Civil rights should flow through all conscious, fair-minded people, like a river of possibilities.

Meantime, what comes across in Grooms' book, in Magic City by Jewell Parker Rhodes, in the films - Rosewood and Four Little Girls - and in the literature from scholarly databases, is that "civil rights" generally alludes to discrimination against Black people.

And it certainly does, as surely as it alludes to discrimination against people of Mexican extraction trying to order food in a funky truck stop when they can't speak English and are bullied by rednecks in a conservative town in south Texas; and civil rights refers most assuredly to the man of Islamic faith and of Pakistani nationality, who has no civil rights as he endures hateful slurs cast towards him (unfairly) because of what bin Laden and his terrorist group did to American on September 11, 2001, and because he looks like "an Arab." Meanwhile, in Grooms' book, there are some interesting ironies regarding what is "justice" and who is making the decisions about what justice (or injustice) will be delivered.

On pages 3-4, Walter Burke, the novel's protagonist is in Vietnam and looking out at the rice paddies at a man in black pajamas, who might be the enemy (a Viet Cong), but he might also be a "papa-san" (a South Vietnamese civilian). "I ain't for capping papa-sans," one soldier says; "He's legal," another chimes in. "Legal my ass," the first one replies. "We had been told it was okay to shoot anyone in black pajamas," Burke, the narrator explains.

It appeared to be an old man, though from the distance it could easily have been an old woman with her hair up. I followed the figure with the point of the barrel," he continued. "I got 'im," Burke called out; his heart "fluttered" as he "squeezed off a round..

[and] the figure tripped and went down." When his fellow infantryman Haywood asked how many people Burke had shot, the narrator replied, "Who's counting?" Another soldier said that it looked like a "papa-san," and Burke replied, appropriately for the situation: "It wasn't your papa." And in a few minutes (6), heavy fire from the trees knocks down Haywood, right next to Burke. "Haywood was dead, as dead as any dead man I had seen.. And I thought that if I hadn't shot at the papa-san, then Haywood would be alive.

It should have been me," Burke continued, "since I shot at the papa-san, since I felt dead already, it should have been me." Civil rights, African-Americans and Vietnam: In hindsight, the soldiers in Vietnam were only doing what their military leaders, what their government had told them it was okay to do, and that is: if you're not sure whether the Vietnamese person out there in the rice paddies is the enemy or not, shoot to kill. Ask questions later.

The Vietnam war, now universally acknowledged as an enormous moral and strategic disaster for the United States, was a chaotic, maddening, terribly dangerous place for American soldiers to be. For Black soldiers, who were keenly aware of the injustices still existing for African-Americans back in "the states," there was some brutal unfairness about their role in Vietnam. According to an article in the Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History (Coffey, 1998), Dr.

Martin Luther King called the war "A white man's war, a black man's fight." There was unquestionably much validity in King's statement: Although African-American soldiers "made up less than 10% of American men in arms and about 13% of the U.S. population between 1961 and 1966," Coffey writes, those soldiers accounted for "almost 20% of all combat-related deaths" in Vietnam during those years.

In the year 1965, Coffey continues, Black soldiers represented "almost one-fourth of the Army's killed in action." Civil rights? Justice? We're talking the fact that Black citizens back in America were fighting for the right to vote, the right to ride anywhere they wanted on buses, to sit at lunch counters, to gain admission to the great colleges and universities, to be given fair employment opportunities; and meanwhile Black soldiers were used as canon fodder in Southeast Asia to justify President Lyndon Johnson's blatant error of judgment (fighting a jungle war with WWII training) and anti-communist obsessions; how about civil rights and justice for all Americans? Meanwhile, the proportion of African-American soldiers in 1968 in Vietnam was "roughly 12% of Army and Marine" units, but Black troops "frequently contributed half the men in front-line combat units," Coffey asserts; and those front line units were "rifle squads and fire teams"; in other words, these were men sent out as scouts to be fired upon so the rest of the troops behind would know where the Viet Cong and the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) were located.

Racial tensions existed in Vietnam as well as in America, Coffey continues, and the 1968 assassination of Dr. King exacerbated those tensions during the war effort. In fact, at the Cam Ranh Bay Navy base, in 1968, "white sailors donned Ku Klux Klan-like outfits, burned crosses, and raised the Confederate flag," according to Coffey's article. Elsewhere, a riot broke out among jailed African-American troops at the U.S. Army stockade in Long Binh, Vietnam, which resulted in the death of one white soldier and the wounding of several others, Coffey explains.

An article in the Oxford Companion to American Military History (Butler, 1999) reports that between the years 1965-1969, when Blacks represented about 12.6% of the U.S.

troops in Vietnam, "the percentage of black combat fatalities in that period was a staggering 14.9%..." Meanwhile, Grooms' book jumps back in time from Vietnam to when Butler was a little boy growing up in Birmingham (37-40); he and his sister are in a "whites only" park, looking for frog eggs, when confronted by a white man who demanded that Butler admit he was "black." What color are you, Walter?" he asked.

And when Walter used several other words but "black" to describe himself, the man said, "I told you not to get smart with me. Do you want me to kick your Negro ass into next week?" "I'm black," he finally stated. "That's right," the man said, "You are black. Black as tar. A little black Sambo... [and] this park is for white children..

[so] don't you bring your black ass back in here until the day your turn white." This part of the story of the Jim Crow south during the 1950s offers a taste of the bigotry and isolation that African-American kids did battle with daily.

Like the Vietnam scene earlier, when Butler was reminded that if the man is wearing black pajamas, it's open season on him, the man in the "whites only" park saw that Butler was black, and it was open season on the young boy innocently looking for frog eggs.

It seemed too that the man in the park with the straw fedora was trying to decide whether or not to physically attack the boy, just as in the Vietnam scene, Butler was trying to make up his mind as to whether or not to squeeze the trigger and take the life of someone that may not have been an "enemy" at all.

Civil rights in 2005: An article in the New York Amsterdam News (Watson, 2005) points out a new report titled "Democracy Unrealized," which raises questions about justice and rights for all Americans. The report indicates that notwithstanding the U.S. Census data - 32% of American citizens are "minorities" - only 16% of the "key appointed policy positions in state governments" were assigned to minorities (Latinos and African-Americans) as of 2004. African-Americans, who made up roughly 12% of the U.S. population in 2004, held only 10% of state government policy-leader posts last year, Watson reports.

The report took note of the fact that under the leadership of New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a Republican, only 4.8% of leadership positions were held by Blacks, albeit Black citizens make up 16% of New York State's population. In fairness, the report adds that African-Americans do hold an "equitable share of leadership jobs" in 11 of 29 states included in the survey. Those states included: Indiana, Massachusetts, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin.

In fact, in Wisconsin, where Blacks made up only 5.7% of the population in 2000, Blacks hold nearly 19% of state leadership posts. Civil rights in Wisconsin: That last statistic is not surprising, considering Wisconsin has a rich history of human rights, civil rights: "Wisconsin's progressive human rights history dates to the early 19th Century," according to the Web site, Wisconsin: Life's so Good. The state was very active in the anti-slavery movement, and offered jobs to African-Americans seeking freedom, "security, work, opportunities and a place to raise their families," the site continues.

In fact, Wisconsin's Underground Railroad - tied in with the national network under the crafty and competent supervision of Sojourner Truth - provided "safe harbor" for many men and women of African heritage who escaped bondage in the South. The Milton House, in Milton, Wisconsin, was built as an inn, but there was a secret underground tunnel from the inn to a nearby log cabin, where runaway slaves were given safe keeping until jobs and housing could be found for them.

Wisconsin, in fact, was the first state to pass legislation outlawing "bounty hunters" from coming into the state looking for freed slaves to put in chains and return to slaveowners for profit. Also in Wisconsin in the civil rights genre, the City of Milwaukee hosts "America's Black Holocaust Museum," which was founded by James Cameron, "the only living survivor of a lynching," according to the Wisconsin Web site.

Cameron, who was falsely accused of murder as a teenager in Marion, Indiana, was "chased out of jail by a mob and later saved." After becoming involved in the Civil Rights Movement and founding the Black Holocaust Museum in his home's basement years later, he got the attention of the City of Milwaukee; the city sold the current museum location in downtown to Cameron for one dollar.

Civil rights in the book, Magic City: On the subject of a Black man falsely accused of a serious crime, a la James Cameron, a similar scenario was the subject of Jewell Parker Rhodes' novel. On pages 67-68 of Magic City, Mary, the farm girl who worked an elevator in Tulsa, and was raped earlier in the day, collapses and the young Black man on the elevator at the time is seen immediately at a perpetrator, for no reason other than he's there, and he's Black.

"What have you done, nigger?" yelled Allen, a new friend of Mary. "What the hell have you done?" It might have occurred to Allen that Mary was not in the best of health, since he was just with her, and served her coffee in his store. But the immediate suspicion fell upon the African-American young man, who by custom and law should have taken the stairs up to the men's rest room, rather than the elevator.

Nigger, you're supposed to take the stairs," said someone in the crowd that was now pressing forward. "Get away from that white woman." Hands were "clawing at the Negro," and soon the young man was darting out of the hotel. The young man was Joe, the other main character in the novel, who was clearly innocent of any wrongdoing, but was certainly in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Rhodes paints a poignant picture of Joe's escape on pages 71-72: "...running like...so many others had from slavery, released him from his dread." One of his heroes was Houdini, and now he got to live out a real-life escape from the clutches of his own demise.

In the explanation among the onlookers back at the elevator as to what happened to Mary - whose underpants were gone, whose thighs were "pink," who had scratches on her legs and hands and bruises on her wrist - it was "just the nigger and her" and "a colored man, a white woman. Together. In Tulsa." Nigger better run. Better run good" muttered an old man (75). "Nigger's got to pay," said Bates, the building manager.

"The girl hasn't accused anybody," somebody else offered, to which Bates replied, "We all saw it, didn't we?" The story from that point is less unsettling as far as the unfairness, the injustice of the situation, but it's frustrating because nobody asks Joe if he really did it. Finally, on pages 107-108, he says to his father, "Don't you want to ask if I'm innocent?" And his father replies, "It wouldn't matter if you were.

Either way, I'm still going to pay." And when Mary tells the sheriff that "you're holding an innocent man...he never touched me," all the sheriff can say is that her screams convinced him she was raped by Joe. it's frustrating for a reader, who would think that some kind of interrogation, some real examination of the facts would take place. But it's difficult to remove one's self from 2005 and catapult back to Tulsa in the 1920s.

The "magic city" wasn't so magic, though Joe did pull a few Houdini-like tricks along the way. It wasn't so much racism as it was just full-on Jim Crow-saturated hatred of Blacks, and treatment of the African-American community as though they were animals, not people. Civil rights and the U.S.

Constitution in the 19th Century: According to an article in the Negro Educational Review (Cook, 2005), the Supreme Court declared in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 "that the Civil rights Act of 1865 was unconstitutional." That law (the equal protection clause in the 14th amendment) "banned racial discrimination in public accommodations such as public conveyances, hotels, and theaters and required equality in jury service," writes Samuel Dubois Cook, President Emeritus, Dillard University.

Oddly, Cook continues, "in its narrow, myopic interpretation of law, proclaimed that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment did not prohibit racial discrimination by private businesses or individuals" - but it did hold that racial discrimination by states was unconstitutional. (Go figure the logic in that.) Incredibly," Cook concludes, "the country had to wait until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to achieve in public facilities and accommodations" what the 1875 version of the Civil Rights Act had intended. Civil rights, HBCUs, Brown v.

Board of Education, Nixon, Reagan and Bush: In an article published by the Journal of Higher Education (Sissoko, et al., 2005), the authors follow the growth and development of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs); there are presently 103 HBCUs (50 public and 53 private), which represents about 3% of the total number of institutions of higher learning in the U.S. Also, those 103 HBCUs reflect around 2% of total enrollment in colleges in universities.

That sounds modest, but the number of Black students 14 to 34 years of age in "postsecondary educational institutions" has grown by 66% between 1980 and 1998. That said, it's also true, the article continues, that HBCUs' "relative share of the total Black enrollment in higher education...declined from 18.8% in 1980 to 13.70% in 1998. The article asserts that in 1954, "Brown v. Board of Education...found that state policies to segregate students on the basis of race were unconstitutional" - and "with all deliberate speed" authorities were instructed by the Supreme Court to integrate schools.

Despite this fact, "significant desegregation did not occur" until after Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The act gave the U.S. attorney the power to bring lawsuits "on behalf of Black plaintiffs, and prohibited the distribution of federal funds" to colleges and universities that discriminated based on race, color, or national origin. But Richard Nixon, the article continues, pursued a policy of "non-enforcement of desegregation laws and policies." Notwithstanding a U.S.

District Court judge's orders to enforce desegregation laws (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act), President Ronald Reagan, and later George Bush (senior) weakened the regulations again. Reagan even "attempted to seek tax-exempt status for segregated schools." Civil rights and a worn-out African-American community? An article in Black Issues in Higher Education (Malveaux, 2005) brings a focus on the Niagara Movement, founded by the legendary author Dr. Carter G. Woodson, who wrote the Miseducation of the Negro in 1933.

The Niagara Movement is given credit for being the forerunner to the NAACP, and was among the original protest organizations to promote justice and civil rights for Blacks. So, the author writes, why is there no protest now? "Racial bias in the workplace, the marketplace and the classroom has hardly disappeared. So why has protest?" Ground down and worn out, too many [African-Americans] seem to accept the unjust realities of our current situation as if there is no alternative," Malveaux writes.

"Too many of us have accepted the hype that race no longer matters..." Civil rights and the Voting Rights Act: The 40th anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is being celebrated this year, and the article in the ABA Journal (Grey, 2005), reminds readers what Thomas Paine declared during the founding of the young American nation: "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected.

To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery." How ironic, writes Grey in the American Bar Association's journal, that when he was growing up in Virginia, "nearly 200 years after Paine's declaration, 100 years after passage of the 15th Amendment, barriers still faced African-Americans wishing to exercise their right to vote." Those barriers, up until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, included literacy tests and poll taxes, and other forms of intimidation. He quotes Dr.

Martin Luther King as saying, "Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights." Civil rights and a million Black votes that didn't count in the 2000 election: Isn't it ironic - or is it simply the denying of voting rights, of civil rights? - that of the nearly 2 million "spoiled votes" (i.e., ballots that were not counted for a number of reasons) in the controversial 2000 presidential election, "half...were cast by African-Americans," albeit Black voters only make up 12% of the electorate? According to an article in the San Francisco Examiner online.