Conventional View of the Civil Rights Movement

¶ … conventional view of the Civil Rights movement is considered highly suspect in Timothy Tyson's non-fictional account, Blood Done Sign My Name. What is significant about the author's viewpoint is that he dedicated several years' worth of erudition to studying the lack of efficacy in the Civil Rights movement that became quite lucid -- to him -- following the brutal slaying of an African-American Vietnam War veteran in the author's hometown. As such, Tyson's opinion on the subject, which is only aided by the fact that he is not a partisan African-American, contains a fair amount of subjectivity as the nature of his scholarship in this subject includes interviews with local participants in the aforementioned slaying as well as careful consideration of the national repercussions that the incident catalyzed. An analysis of Tyson's book and other important socio-economic and cultural factors of the United States reveals the fact that most people within the country prefer the lies regarding the Civil Rights movement to its truth, as well as crucial reasons why and the repercussions of those beliefs.

The book is also important because it elucidates what the conventional views of the Civil Rights movement are, which, in combination with the author's findings and even a cursory examination of U.S. history proves, is ultimately a lie. The deeply rooted prejudices that fostered the Jim Crow movement and the need for Caucasians to implement segregation and violent racist actions to keep the majority of the country that way, particularly in the South, cannot be easily dismissed with the signing of legislature or even the concluding of a historical epoch such as the turbulent 1960's. The murder of Marrow alone is indicative of this fact. Nor are such events anomalies in the history of the United States following the conclusion of the Civil Rights era. Marrow's murder (allegedly spawned from the pretext of flirting with a Caucasian) shares parallels with that of Emmet Till, as well as with other racially charged acts of violence inflicted upon African-American men such as the well publicized 1992 beating of Rodney King and the 2006 murder of Sean Bell. These parallels are completed by the fact that in all of the original trials regarding these instances, there were no convictions -- despite the presence of video surveillance in some of these cases.

Therefore, anyone who believes that the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960's neatly ends the era of racist violent enacted upon African-Americans in the United States has chosen to believe the lie that is propagated in a variety of history texts and commercially relevant propaganda. The more interesting question, of course, is why people prefer to believe the lie that full civil rights have been attained by African-Americans in all situations, and that the question of race in this country has long ago been decided in the universal parity signified by the passing of the Civil Rights act of 1964. One of the answers to this question, of course, is at the heart of Tyson's book and is the elaborately designed cover-up in which acts that are indicative of the truth -- that racial violence and racist ideology is still highly tolerated and practiced in the United States -- are glossed over in favor of the lie.

This fact is convincingly proved by a look at the town of Oxford's reaction to the murder of Marrow. As the veteran's slaying indicates, the town was still highly segregated despite whatever legislation had been passed on a national level to mandate otherwise. And it would remain that way for some time, as newspaper records and Gibson's graduate school work on the incident conveniently disappeared and certain segregated facilities (such as public recreation buildings and parks) closed rather than face the threat of integration. The most convincing evidence for propagating the lie, however, was all of the typical ills condemning such acts of racial violence -- while quickly and quietly, the murder suspects were all acquitted. People, in effect, said all of the right things to condemn this travesty while their actions suggested otherwise. Those who choose to believe the lie simply refer to the abundance of rhetoric that is agreeable to all and quite popular in contemporary and even in historical times as indicative of the fact that some fundamental change has occurred in the country due to the Civil Rights era. They also commonly refer to tokenism -- such as the fact that since the current president has African or African-American blood inside of him, racism is long gone in the country. Gesture of tokenism and empty rhetoric are far more preferable to the truth: that for many of 7 the nameless, voiceless denizens within the country that racism is still as large an issue as it ever was.

Another principle lie associated with the Civil Right movement is the notion that it was primarily non-violent in nature, and largely won by copious amounts of hand-holding, speech-making, and spraying people with water hoses. Gibson's narration shatters this myth quite well. He devotes a fair amount of it to explicating the acts of violence and destruction that occurred as a result of Marrow's slaying. He interviews some of the people who burned and looted throughout the town of Oxford, he details the thinly veiled threats of the Ku Klux Klan which responded, and, most importantly, he alludes to the fact that it was the former militant displays of destruction and violence that significantly changed, Oxford allowing for the degree of integration that it currently has. These acts of belligerence are not so different from those that accompanied many of the racial riots during 1976 and 1968, nor those that accompanied the verdict of Rodney King's initial trial. Yet these facts are seemingly exchanged for Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech ad nausum, and to the general largess of Caucasians who suddenly saw the error of their ways, passed a few laws, and ended the threat of racism altogether.