Levees Not War

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Another Sweltering Summer of Legitimate Discontent

In this disheartening summer that has seen the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—because, the chief justice tells us, its protections are no longer needed—amid vigorous rollbacks of voting rights and access in states with Republican-controlled legislatures; and that has seen a shockingly unjust verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, the moderate-to-liberal American majority that believes in “liberty and social justice for all” sorely needs uplifting, inspiring. These dispiriting events, along with the 50th anniversary in June of the assassination of Medgar Evers, call to mind King’s reference to “this sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent.”

So it is no wonder that many of us look with a kind of hungry, yearning nostalgia to the idealism and promise signified by the great 1963 March on Washington that took place 50 years ago today. That march, with its hundreds of thousands of peaceful marchers of all colors—the largest demonstration Washington had ever seen—would have been an historic event anyway, but it was lifted to majestic heights that will be looked to for decades, centuries to come by the exalting oratory of Martin Luther King Jr., in a speech whose original script did not include the words “I Have a Dream.”

Why We Still Need the March on Washington

The general American public—those who are not right-wing reactionaries putting party before nation and ideology above party—has elected an African American president by strong majorities in two straight elections. We can all take pride in this fact. In five of the last six presidential elections (counting 2000) the popular vote has gone to the Democratic candidate. And yet it seems that the election of our first president of color has also pushed a certain kind of button, activating some rather scary retro-reactionary machinery that would drag the nation backward, ever backward into a darker and less civil and humane society. Since late 2008—when, you might recall, the entire economy was in free fall—the forces of extreme, radically conservative reaction (with help from one very influential cable news network) have shifted into overdrive to resist and revoke rights and protections hard-won by minorities over the past decades—indeed, they seem to be trying to roll back the entire twentieth century.

Although this chief executive has endeavored to be a president of all Americans, of whatever complexion or political orientation, and though he has tried time and again to accommodate the opposition’s concerns, the Grand Old Party’s “massive resistance” to even the simplest and most routine bills and nominations, and even to legislation originally proposed by Republicans, has strangled and poisoned the body politic to the point of paralysis. Every initiative proposed by this president and his party is stonewalled, achieved only through protracted struggle and deal-making, and then, even after passage, is vilified daily, as though expanding access to health care or investing in the repair of roads and bridges is a betrayal of the public trust.

Energetically and as secretively as possible, a well-organized and richly funded minority is busy revoking or strangling minorities’ and women’s rights while the rest of the population—those paying attention, anyway—watches in horror and disgust. Some protest, while most of the public is simply trying to survive or hold on to the job (if any), or is so exhausted or beaten down by hard luck and grim times that they can’t stand up to fight.

But times have been hard before, and these storms, too, the republic shall survive, if enough of us work together. And for an example of how we can work together for a better society and economy, and get results, we look to the words and actions of those who brought us the 1963 March on Washington.

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Tomorrow we’ll look at some of the similarities between 1963 and 2013, and at the socialist and labor union origins of the great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of August 28, 1963.

Conservatives’ rejection of all things “public” as “white flight”

“The gifts of God . . . should 
be enjoyed by 
all citizens in Mississippi.”  —Medgar Evers (1925–1963)

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Fifty years ago today, Medgar Wylie Evers was killed in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, after returning from an NAACP meeting at a nearby church. Evers, a graduate of Alcorn A&M whose application to the University of Mississippi law school was rejected on racial grounds, had served as the NAACP field secretary for the state of Mississippi since 1954. One of his tasks was an investigation of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. He was one of the first members of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC, est. 1957). The assassination of Medgar Evers was commemorated in Bob Dylan’s song “Only a Pawn in Their Game” (1964) and more recently in season three of Mad Men. Evers, who had served in the U.S. Army in France in World War II and was honorably discharged as a sergeant, was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

It was late on the night of June 11, and the killer was hiding behind a bush. Myrlie Evers found her husband on the front steps where he had managed to drag himself after being shot in the back. His car keys were still in his hands, and in his arms was a stack of T-shirts reading JIM CROW MUST GO. For thirty years the murder went unprosecuted (a trial in 1964 ended with a hung jury), until Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murder in 1994. Throughout the 1994 trial De La Beckwith wore a Confederate flag on his lapel.

On the night her husband was assassinated, Mrs. Evers and her children were watching a televised address to the nation by President John F. Kennedy in response to recent civil rights events, including Alabama Governor George Wallace’s refusal to allow two black students to register at the University of Alabama. (The president announced, “I am . . . asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments.”)

In an excellent 10-minute overview of the Jim Crow (segregated, apartheid) South into which Medgar Evers was born, and of early civil rights protests such as the lunch counter sit-ins, Rachel Maddow last night mentioned that, rather than cooperate with the legislation that ordered integration of schools and other public facilities, many white southerners opted to withdraw from desegregated public society. (“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” as George Wallace put it.)

Rachel explained:

The southern part of the United States was forced to abolish its segregation laws. But it was a bloody, bloody fight. Throughout the old Confederacy, white people were asked, first as a matter of conscience, and then finally they were ordered as a matter of justice, to integrate on racial lines. And when the white people who had control of the laws and the government and the schools and the businesses, when the fight to hold on to segregation laws was a lost fight, and they knew they had no choice but to integrate the society they lived in, in many cases, instead of going through with that and living through that kind of change, a lot of them just decided to quit that society, they gave up public pools and public schools and in some cases movie theaters. They gave up whole cities and moved away. They called it white flight. The census from 1960 records a Jackson, Mississippi, that was majority white, almost two to one. By 1990 Jackson’s population had made the turn toward getting much smaller and it was much blacker. By 2010 Jackson, Mississippi, had become the second most African American city in the nation. White people in the previously legally segregated South, and really across the nation, abandoned places rather than see them change. [bold = LNW’s emphasis]

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