Black History: "heroes And Martyrs" Version Not Enough

Barbara Ransby

FORMER CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST MARTHA NORMAN RECENTLY RECALLED, "WHEN WE WENT INTO RURAL COMMUNITIES TO ORGANIZE WE SOON RECOGNIZED THAT THESE PEOPLE WERE NO STRANGERS TO STRUGGLE. STRUGGLE WAS NOT SOMETHING THEY LEARNED IN AN TWO HOUR WORKSHOP ON NON-VIOLENCE. STRUGGLE WAS WHAT THEY LIVED EVERY DAY...AND THEY TAUGHT US WHAT STRUGGLE WAS ALL ABOUT."

BLACK HISTORY : "Heroes and Matyrs" Version Not Enough

Black history month was launched in 1926 by historian Dr. Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association tor the Study of Afroamerican Life and History. Black History month was started as a way to promote greater understanding and appreciation of the role and contributions of Black Americans to United States history and culture. Initially begun as a week-tong observance the event was expanded to an entire month. February was selected because it includes the birthday of the great anti-slavery activist Frederick Douglass.

Black History month was created to reinsert, into the picture of American history, the Black faces which have been distorted or sliced out. One unfortunate tendency has been for historians and educators to succumb to the "Heroes and Martyrs" version of Black history in an altempt to cram centuries into weeks. One period in which distortions and myths are rampant in our collective memory is the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. We must revise this view of Black history to include not only the Great Men and Women, but the anonymous historical actors and actresses who made their greatness possible.

Many popular accounts of the period suggest that the movement was singlehandedly constructed, directed and sustained by Dr. Martin Luther King alone. The reality is that, "it was not Martin who made the movement, but rather the movement that made Martin," as longtime civil rights leader Ella Baker once commented. It was the ordinary people performing extraordinary deeds that changed the political and social landscape of a nation.

Dr. King did not start the historic Montgomery Bus boycott of 1955, and compel the masses to follow him. A local Black women's organization, the Women's Political Council, under the leadership of Joann Gibson Robinson, was responsible. The group took advantage of Rosa Parks' arrest to launch a full-scale assault upon Jim Crow segregation on Montgomery buses. The boycott, originally scheduled for one day, lasted for over a year. Hundreds of Black women and men demonstrated their unwavering determination by continued refusal to ride the buses as long as their demand for equal treatment went unmet. It was these nameless but heroic people who walked, sang and fought their way into a relatively better place, and carved out the limited breathing space that this generation of Blacks now enjoys.

At no time in the civil rights movement was the heroism and determination of common Black people more evident than during the Freedom Summer voter registration projects of 1964 and 1965. Young organizers of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), many of them northern college students, went into the belly of the beast of American racism, the rural deep South. There, they confronted the political structures that had totally disempowered the Black population. What SNCC workers found in places like Rueville and Greenwood, Mississippi; Albany, Georgia; and Selma, Alabama, however, was not a docile, passive, impotent Black community. They found a poor but proud Black people, groping for new modes of struggle and greater resources with which to wage such struggles. Former civil rights activist Martha Norman recently recalled, "When we went into rural communities to organize we soon recognized that these people were no strangers to struggle. Struggle was not something they learned in a two hour workshop on non-violence, struggle was what they lived every day... and they taught us what struggle was all about. " The dozens of families that provided food, shelter and support to civil rights workers in the mid-sixties did so at great personal risk. Many had their homes shot into or firebombed, their children threatened and some, like Jimmie Lee Jackson and Herbert Lee, lost their lives. They received no medals for their sacrifices, no monument s built in their memory. Yet without their priceless and unheralded contributions the movement would never have existed.

The case of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) led by rank and file Mississippians, like Fannie Lou Hamer, Unita Blackwell, and Victoria Gray provides a final example of the impact of grassroots participation in the movement. The MFDP's disruption of the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in 1964 was a critical turning point in the evolution of the Civil Rights movement. While their attempt to unseat the all-white Mississippi delegation, unfairly elected in all-white primaries, was unsuccessful, the MFDP confronted northern liberals on their own racism. It forced the Democratic Party to deal with the issue of racism seriously, perhaps for the first time in its history. The MFDP was a people's campaign and elicited the support and involvement of thousands with no one single leader at its helm. The collective and radical spirit of the group was captured most eloquently by Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper from Sunflower County, Mississippi who was beaten, shot at and fired from her job because of her political activity. When the delegation was asked to accept a compromise of two convention seats, in lieu of unseating the entire white Mississippi delegation, she responded, "We've all come a long way, we're all tired and we all want to sit down." The unyielding position of the MFDP delegates was in direct defiance of more established and moderate national leaders, including Dr. King, Roy Wilkins and others who urged them to quietly accept the compromise.

These examples of the struggle and courage of otherwise average people during the period of the Civil Rights movement offers lessons for how we view history and our role in it. Common people and their will to influence change is "one of the hinges upon which history turns." We do not have to wait for Great Men to lead us to freedom. We are active players in that transformation ourselves. Ella Baker serves once again as inspiration: "To me, I'm part of the human family. What the human family will accomplish, I can't control. But it isn't impossible that what those who came along with me went through might stimulate others to continue to fight for a society that does not have those kinds of problems. Somewhere down the line the numbers increase, the tribe increases. So how do you keep on? I can't help it. I don't claim to have any corner on an answer, but I believe that the struggle is eternal. Somebody else carries on."