Reminiscing about Civil Rights
I see in the papers that Edgar Ray Killen, 80, has been sentenced to 60 years in prison for his part in arranging the deaths of three civil rights workers more than forty years ago. Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman stand as martyrs for all of us who believe in equality, the pursuit of happiness, rights and freedoms–whatever one calls it.
Killen was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter, one suspects, because of the outside chance that a jury in Philadelphia, Mississippi, might not have found the former Ku Klux Klan member guilty of murder. Whites have a history of walking free on murder charges involving African Americans.
The long, sordid history of lynching in America, also much in the news in recent weeks, brought the U.S. Senate to a collective apology a week ago. There is no Federal law against lynching, despite the deaths of 4,749 Americans during a period when the Senate failed to act on more than 200 anti-lynching bills. What the apology means remains to be seen, as the Senate and House both appear to have little interest in tweaking those social, cultural, and economic problems that so beset American urban ghettos. Window dressing, I call it, similar in nature to the minorities who serve very visibly in the Bush cabinet. We had a phrase for it a number of years ago, “company” or “token” being the adjectives preceding the noun. Withal, the Bush administration could shift its focus from the war on terror to education–real education–for the hopeless of the republic. But this will never happen. Bush simply lacks brains to go with his mean streak. Perhaps the latter shortcoming is a good thing.
The perception of how the United States is doing on questions of race in the world is of course marred–and epitomized–by the Iraq War, where those young Americans who have no hope of escaping vicious cycles of poverty and degradation in places like Appalachian West Virgina, choose to be “all they can be” with the U.S. Army. Faux heroine Jessica Lynch and Lynndie Englund (she of the dog-chained Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib Prison) provide two examples of this hope. Minorities (women count as a minority in today’s volunteer army) comprise a large part of the military contingent in the Middle East–as they did in Vietnam.
And what does the rest of the world thing of America–and its attiudes globally? Not a pretty picture for the parochial puritan in Babylon, or Baghdad.
As for the place of race in very early 21st century culture, including the incredibly slow recognition of the developed world’s responsibilities in Africa, to do something positive about HIV/AIDS and genocide, as well as to do something about opening trade on fair terms to developing countries (“that will be the day”). Don’t hold your breath.
So Edgar Lee Killen will die in prison, sooner than later. One recalls the sadness upon hearing of those murders so long ago, and one recalls the anger in watching “Mississippi Burning,” the film that gave the FBI far too much credit for bringing a few of the participants in that killing and other killings and bombings to justice. “Mississippi Burning” was great theatre, but it did not do justice to the field workers in the black belt who worked so hard to register voters, and who worked so hard to contest the Klan, White Citizens’ Leagues, and other troglodyte organizations bound a determined to protect the central theme in Southern history–white supremacy.
Yes, we have come a long way from those days. Yet we have many, many miles yet to travel before we achieve some semblance of racial justice. I really wonder whether we have it in us, collectively, in Canada as well as in the United States.
And, of course, ready for the next act, slightly off stage, China–the economic behemoth of the coming decades. Stay tuned.