Reverse freedom rides
en.wikipedia.orgReverse freedom rides were attempts in 1962 by Southern segregationists to send African Americans from cities such as New Orleans to New York City, Chicago, and Cleveland by bus. They were given free bus tickets, and were told that there were high paying jobs waiting for them. They were given promissory notes that were worthless when they arrived. Some of those arriving were able to find work. (via sleevia)
The Truth about the Civil Rights Era
ew.comEven more troubling, though, is how the structure of narratives like The Help underscores the failure of pop culture to acknowledge a central truth: Within the civil rights movement, white people were the help.
The architects, visionaries, prime movers, and most of the on-the-ground laborers of the civil rights movement were African-American. Many white Americans stood beside them, and some even died beside them, but it was not their fight — and more important, it was not their idea.
Implicit in The Help and a number of other popular works that deal with the civil rights era is the notion that a white character is somehow crucial or even necessary to tell this particular tale of black liberation. What’s more, to imply that what the maids Aibileen and Minny are working against is simply a refusal on everyone’s part to believe that ”we’re all the same underneath” is to simplify the horrors of Jim Crow to a truly damaging degree.
This isn’t the first time the civil rights movement has been framed this way fictionally, especially on film. Most Hollywood civil rights movies feature white characters in central, sometimes nearly solo, roles. My favorite (not!) is Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning, which gives us two white FBI agents as heroes of the movement. FBI agents! Given that J. Edgar Hoover did everything short of shoot Martin Luther King Jr. himself in order to damage or discredit the movement, that goes from troubling to appalling.
“You'll get freedom by letting your enemy know that you'll do anything to get your freedom; then you'll get it. It's the only way you'll get it. When you get that kind of attitude, they'll label you as a "crazy Negro," or they'll call you a "crazy n*gger"--they don't say Negro. Or they'll call you an extremist or a subversive, or seditious, or a red or a radical. But when you stay radical long enough and get enough people to be like you, you'll get your freedom.”
—Malcolm X, Harlem, 1964
Maestra
you taught us about the civil rights era, you taught us about slavery, you didn’t cover it up or hold a sad little memorial service, you let us know how fucked up it was, in a way our fifth grade minds could understand.
why is it then, that even as ethnic studies major, i looked back at the struggles for freedom trying to hold back the emotions, weary and somber?
because i looked back. because i thought they were over. because we were taught that oppression was in the past, but every single poor child and every single child of color in that class lived it every day.
the freedom struggles aren’t over, the freedom struggles aren’t over.
why were we never taught that the freedom struggles weren’t over?
