Why America’s non-racist, humane culture must be solidified
[Editor’s note: Following the latest shootings in the United States, this column has been updated and republished]
Our homes were bombed and our jobs were threatened. Some of us were expelled from college or run out of town. Peaceful, nonviolent protesters were trampled by horses, struck with bull whips, beaten with nightsticks, arrested and taken to jail. Some were shot and even killed, but we buried our dead and kept on coming. We knew we would not stop; we would never turn back until we tore down the walls of legalized segregation. We didn’t have a cell phone. We didn’t have a website. We didn’t have a computer or even a fax machine, but we used what we had. We had ourselves, so we put our bodies on the line to make a difference in our society. We were just ordinary people with an extraordinary vision, imbued with the discipline and philosophy of nonviolence. We were convinced that if we adhered to the way of nonviolence as taught by Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, we could produce an all-inclusive world society — a Beloved Community — based on simple justice that values the dignity and worth of every human being.
Congressman John Lewis, Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968, High Museum of Art, Atlanta
I still remember the tears and the anguish I felt when I saw the exhibit, “Breach of Peace: Photographs of Freedom Riders,” by Eric Etheridge on April 2010 at the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles.
Included were photographs taken by Joseph Postiglione (1922-1995), an American born in Italy. He took photos of young black men and women inside a burning Greyhound bus on May 14, 1961.
That day, May 14, 1961, was a quiet Mother’s Day in Anniston, Alabama, described by the companion Road to Freedom book: “A Greyhound bus travelling from Atlanta to Birmingham, carrying fourteen passengers (including reporter Moses Newson, covering the Freedom Rides fro the Baltimore Afro-American) pulled in to the terminal, where the station doors had been locked shut. The bus was immediately set upon by a mob led by a local Klansman named William Chappell, its tires slashed and windows smashed. There were no police in sight. When law enforcement finally arrived (after approximately twenty minutes), they gave the bus a cursory inspection for damage and ordered the driver, O.T. Jones of Birmingham, to leave the terminal, escorting him to the town limits, where the vehicle was left to the mercy of the following mob. The bus limped along the highway for about six miles before being forced off the road on the outskirts of Bynum by a convoy of cars and trucks that had grown to forty or fifty in number. The bus was stormed by the mob, the passengers were trapped inside, and the bus was firebombed. It was a scene of carnage. Postiglione captured the drama in a shocking series of pictures that until recently was known only through a handful of photographs that he made available to the news services. Two pictures were sold to AP and UPI and seven were reproduced the following day in the Anniston Star.”
What happened next? A young 12-year-old girl Janie Miller offered water to these passengers, even as she was taunted by the Klansmen to stop. Her kindness was met by more threats, until her family had to leave and seek refuge elsewhere. When the black bus riders went to the local hospital, doctors refused to treat them.
“They were eventually rescued in the dead of night by a squadron of cars sent by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, pastor of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.”
I was more horrified when the exhibit’s photos showed dogs intentionally unleashed on African Americans, Clorox bleach intentionally poured into the swimming pool while an African American woman swam, and fire hoses collectively unleashed to brutalize these American citizens.
Many African Americans sacrificed their lives to obtain human and voting rights for us, folks of color. After all, only Caucasians were deemed American citizens until a series of case law broadened that definition. Blacks were lynched and hanged on trees pursuing freedom. Homemade bombs were commonly set off in black homes and churches by the Ku Klux Klan.
On Sept. 15, 1963, four girls were killed: Addie Mae Collins, 14 years old; Denise McNair, 11 years old; Carole Robertson, 14 years old and Cynthia Wesley, 14 year old and 14 injured in a bomb blast at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, as reported by CNN.com. Inside the church were some 200 church members with some attending Sunday school classes before the 11am service.
The bombing of the Baptist Church was the third in 11 days. Alabama George Wallace sent out 500 National Guardsmen and 300 state troopers to this city joined the next day by 500 police officers and 150 sheriffs’ deputies.
It was not until May 16, 2000, when a grand jury indicted Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton with eight counts each of first-degree murder. Cherry was found guilty after two years and was sentenced to four life terms. On Nov. 8, 2004, he died in prison.
The images of the Skirball Museum disturbed me and to this day, I vividly remember them. A week after seeing that exhibit, I went to the California’s African American Museum. There, I saw a facsimile of a boat that carried the slaves, packed like sardines in the lower deck of the ships. I went inside to feel what it was like and saw the chains and the dog collars used.
It was a feeling of horror — the same feelings triggered when I saw another exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum. There, different colors of sand were on display, symbolizing the different internment camps in the West, where over 127,000 Americans of Japanese descent were imprisoned during World War II.
Their crime? Nothing. Their common feature: all were American citizens of Japanese ancestry, suspected of being WWII enemies. In fact, the 442nd Infantry Regiment became the most decorated platoon of the war, with eight Presidential Unit Citations and 21 Medal of Honors. With a theme of “Go for Broke,” the fighting unit was almost entirely comprised of American soldiers of Japanese descent who proudly and valiantly served.
Back then, Voting Rights were not recognized for all Americans, and for a long time, only white Americans were considered citizens. A 1790 Naturalization Act defined American citizenship as limited to only “free, white persons.” Armenians who came in this early period were designated whites and gained citizenship with the help of anthropologist Franz Boas.
But, in 1922, Takao Ozawa could not become an American citizen, though he was born in the U.S., as he was not considered legally white, but a Mongoloid, according to Race: the Power of an Illusion by PBS.
Yes, for a long long time, Americans born here in the USA, with Japanese ancestors, including African-Americans were treated with disgust, animosity and inhumanity, yet their responses were the opposite, dignify themselves even more.
The Myth: “all that is white is right, black is wack” to #Icantbreathe
On August 26, 2014, OWN aka Oprah Winfrey Network televised the intervention done by Iyanla Vanzant. We must interrupt the pattern, Eric Garner of Staten Island. John Crawford of Ohio. Trayvon Martin in Florida. Dante Parker of Victorville, California, Michael Brown of Ferguson. And two days later after Michael Brown was killed, Ezzell Ford of Newton in Los Angeles, California. The worst part of these unjustified killings was that they were done by police officers in uniform.
In Eric Garner’s case, he was unarmed, selling cigarettes by the unit. Instead of the police talking him down and diffusing the incident, they all decide to march in on him and with a tactical maneuver, put him in a chokehold that ultimately killed him as he kept saying, “I can’t breathe.” This was all documented on videotape, yet the grand jury decided no indictment for the policemen. No indictment for an unjustified killing of a citizen in plain sight?
Michael Brown, an 18-year-old unarmed African American bound for college, was killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., while Michael’s hands were up. His death, while unarmed, at the hands of a police officer, sparked nationwide protests of young folks with hands up in the air and placards: “Hands Up, Don’t shoot!” Iyanla interrupted a man, with a placard, which read: “Do not affirm what you don’t want to happen,” she said. Instead, “Hands-Up, See Me.”
Most recently in the past month, the nation again witnessed killings at the hands of police officers: Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota.
Hands-Up, See Me
At the Beverly Hills Farmers Market, one morning, I saw a Latino American record producer shooed away and told not to sit next to a white elderly man. The white guy said, “This is my chair,” when he was sitting on one already. I saw the hurt in this Latino man’s eyes. I waved at him and loudly, “Here, please sit next to me.” I wanted to neutralize the bigotry and it resulted in me getting the most profound spiritual lesson of all times: “That when you are born and survived the first year even without your parents nurturing you, the Universe’s angels were taking care of you.”
At the same market, I saw a white volunteer stop an African American man from gathering recyclables in a trash container. The white guy said, “This is my trash can. Stay away from here. Go back to your neighborhood.” I was sitting next to the trash can. I stood up and said, “Listen, this trash can belongs to the City of Beverly Hills. It is for all of us to use. You both can gather recyclables from this trash can. You do not have to dehumanize him and pointed to the black man.” The white man was perturbed but the rest of the folks sitting in the tables clapped. They said, “thank you for standing up for that poor fellow.”
On Facebook, Third Paran posted this: While watching the Ken Burns documentary on jazz, I couldn’t help but be struck by the following quote from Wynton Marsalis and how it applies to what is happening now, after the non-indictments in the #MichaelBrown and #EricGarner cases. There’s a long way to go yet in the struggle, and sometimes there’s a stubborn refusal to go at all where we all feel we must go. And you wonder why.
“Race is … for this country, the thing in the story, in the mythology, that you have to (address) for the kingdom to be well. And it’s always something you don’t want to do–it’s always that thing that’s so much about you confronting yourself … And the question of your heroism and of your courage and of your success in dealing with this trial is ‘Can you confront it with honesty?’ And DO YOU confront it and do you have the energy to sustain an attack on it? … The more we run from it, the more we run into it.”
Not all white folks are racist. They are too, good people. We must all reject racist, inhumane behaviors! We must remake America into a non-racist, caring America with the likes of the Freedom Riders and Congressman John Lewis. We must include a full measure of respect for the first African American President, Barack Obama.
With many lives gone, we continue to say #blacklivesmatter and #notonemore.