Lewis and Sanders-On Almost Going Viral Thanks to everyone who read & passed along my Feb. 12 post about John Lewis, Bernie Sanders, and the 1960s civil rights movement. To my great amazement, the post went, if not quite viral, then at least contagious: as of Monday afternoon, it has garnered almost 12,000 hits; the … Continue reading Lewis and Sanders-On Almost Going Viral
I remember Selma, Rep. Lewis, when they tried to kill you on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Whips, tear gas, clubs, horses. But you’re indestructible.
Yeah, I was in Selma too. In our ragtag civil rights army, you were a general. I was a grunt. So you didn’t see me, never met me.
That’s okay. It wasn’t about me. It was about you and Dr. King and the hundreds of heroes from Selma who made history there.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a pollster near,
To ask him one more time today
Which one he favors for this year.
He gives his harness bells a SNAP,
To see the woods fill up with CRAP.
Godawful noise across the land
From blowhard Chump & Bushie Clap
I was going to review Ari Berman’s book, “Give Us The Ballot” for this Dr. King Day.
But I can’t. I can’t bear to. It’s too awful. I’m Sorry, Ari. I’m sorry, Dr. King.
But wait — I don’t mean “Give Us The Ballot” is an awful book. It’s up for some awards, and probably deserves them. And the part I read was well-written, and its clear ‘s researched the hell out of the subject.
But that’s the thing. I only read one chapter: the last. It’s called “After Shelby.” As a writer, I have no complaints with Berman’s work. In fact, it’s a fitting counterpart to my book, Selma 1965: The March that Changed The South. He even cites mine a couple times.
But I could just barely get through that one chapter, “After Shelby,” even though I’m in it (not named, but still). My book shows how the Voting Rights act of 1965 was made possible. Berman’s book tells how the Voting Rights Act was destroyed.
“Shelby” is the June 2013 Supreme Court decision that cut the heart out of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Berman shows in careful detail how this decision came about. (I didn’t read those parts, but I know they’re there.)
The last chapter is about good ole NC and the NAACP’s Rev. William Barber and the Moral Monday protests in 2013. I was one of nearly a thousand who got arrested in that classically nonviolent “uprising,” and weren’t those the Good Old Days??
Well, yeah, but not good enough, if you know what I mean.
Adam Beyah, a senior member of the Fayetteville mosque, sent out invitations to persons of various faiths to come and stand with Muslims there.
One invitation came to me. And I went; was proud to go. On the way there from my home in Durham, almost two hours away, I stopped at Quaker House, where I used to be Director, and helped make a stack of signs. This project turned the morning into “Flashback Friday”: dozens of times in my eleven-year tenure at Quaker House, we had made signs and posters for peace vigils and other public actions. Most of ours were printed on the office copier, on ivory paper with a black border. Plain, but (we hoped) punchy and pertinent.
This time, we weren’t organizing, just helping out. I cleared the text for the posters with Adam Beyah, to make sure they were sensitive to the group’s outlook. Then we headed out.
Outside the Fayetteville mosque, named for an African-born enslaved Muslim, an older sign above is underlined by our new sign below.
As always, we worried about the turnout: we had made about thirty signs: would enough people show up even to carry them?
We shouldn’t have worried.