john mccain, george wallace and the nature of struggle in the 21st century

SATURDAY

hello all, found this piece interesting, obviously from a different perspective, some revisionism here
but as somebody who lived through a lot of it i found it interesting

im supposed to be doing a piece on race in the south for oxford american and i guess this stuff is on my mind,

i got to start drafting that soon, kinda holding off till i see how the election go

its damn near a done deal but forgive me if im still in combat mode, aint coming off the gun till its done,

the world i live in, an academic communty, dont really approve of the military headset my work reflect

sometime i get self conscious about it, feel archaic, out of step with the times

but i been a warrior all my born days, i think warrior i live warrior, just wouldnt know
what else to do, to be, thats my mythhead

the movement the almight movement

a civil rights southern bourgie, movement  black militant socialist hoodoo flower child vietnam vet in the literary line of o killens: a visionary line of ideological orchestrators: o i been down the road

rickydocs regulators, i got that from starship troopers, where the units were named after their leaders

rickydocs regulators i think of as partly a guerrilla unit but mostly intelligence/counterintell - hoodoo intell to be more specific, spiritworkers, destinyworkers

now obama he command legions but my crew a little more specialized

didnt plan it like that, i wanted legions too, hordes to be exact but  destiny
has not seen fit to give me legions -  you work with what you got

but my concept of being a warrior, a champion, a hero

i guess its evolved over the years, im very conscious that the nature of struggle has changed
im in process now of adopting my nephew in foster care cause i know looking out for family

is part of the nature of struggle in the 21st century, its gotten very self referential, we must save ourselves
and we must establish a culture so illuminated it becomes one of the definitive cultures of the world

the cultures that shape the future, and lo and behold
obama has moved the board, thats very difficult to do

i like to think of myself as prophetic, got the vision, can see generations down the line
but who would have ever imagined obama, he has thrown off my destinywork

what does this mean to the struggle, how do i get ahead of the curve, help shape its defintion, the
reality it conjures, its pertinent that obama has mastered universalization of the struggle

black activists have never been able to run exclusively black agendas in the modern ideological/policy marketplace, its counterproductive, the effective ones have always had to universalize the agenda, public schools, living wages, healthcare, etc, help everybody and assume the rising tide will help the least of us, the blacks

obama has mastered it, natural born player, its a new day
and i got to figure out how to leverage the energy unleased

define the reality, the future it shapes, elevate the game
i got to conjure

lets just say whatever i got to say about race in the south is not going to be what these folk
at oxford expect, got to say it so well they cant say no - and if they do thats the way it goes

aint got time to be writing for the sake of writing
not when you want to be a hero, a champion of the generations

obama has flipped the game, us wouldbe visionaries got to
step up, cause win or lose gon be struggle going on

thats opportunity i hear knocking

regulators: heads up

rdoc

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THE GEORGE WALLCE WE FORGOT: by Russ Rymer: NYTimes

JOHN McCAIN deplored them, Barack Obama distanced himself from them, but the comments that Representative John Lewis of Georgia delivered on Oct. 11 may turn out to be some of the most trenchant — and generous — of the campaign. Mr. Lewis charged Mr. McCain and Sarah Palin with “sowing the seeds of hatred and division” in their fervently red-meat rallies, not unlike “a governor of the State of Alabama named George Wallace” whose race-bating rhetoric, Mr. Lewis noted, contributed to the 1963 bombing of the Birmingham church in which four young girls were killed.

The context of Mr. Lewis’s critique is not as has been presented: a saint of the civil rights movement likening a decorated war hero to an infamous racist. Rather, it was a collegial (if rough) caution from one brother to another, about a third, politicians all.

Mr. Lewis’s authority to chastise Mr. McCain comes not from his Bloody Sunday stand on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965, but rather from his subsequent record on the hustings. His mettle was tested not only in Selma but also in three tough campaigns, characterized by tactics of personal destruction.

The first was his race in 1966 to retain the chairmanship of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. For three years, Mr. Lewis had used his office to promote SNCC’s early emphasis on black and white activists working hand in hand. But by 1966, that inclusive and nonviolent climate was under siege. Peaceful marchers found themselves shadowed by a volunteer bodyguard of shotgun-wielding black militants, and a group known as the Atlanta Separatists was demanding that all whites be expelled from the civil rights leadership.

Things came to a head at SNCC’s convention in May that year, when late-night, back-room maneuvering elevated Stokely Carmichael to the chairmanship, ousting Mr. Lewis. Whites were purged from the organization, and its longtime white supporters were vilified. Carmichael’s successor, H. Rap Brown, changed the group’s name to Student National Coordinating Committee and directly advocated violence. Mr. Lewis’s long labor for racial comity lay in tatters.

In 1982, Mr. Lewis, along with other newly elected black Atlanta city councilmen, faced sound trucks rolling through their neighborhoods accusing them of race treason for not supporting a major road project favored by Mayor Andrew Young. Mr. Lewis stood his ground. He confided to me, then a reporter for The Atlanta Constitution, how upset he was at some of the bullying aimed his way.

In his first bid for Congress, in 1986, the battle that counted was the Democratic primary, where he faced off against Julian Bond. Mr. Lewis was running behind, crippled, some said, by his lack of eloquence. Partisan portrayals (not necessarily perpetrated by Mr. Bond) rewriting his role in civil rights history angered him, and hardened his steel. He fought his way into office by outworking his opponent and — eloquently enough — outdebating him. He brought to Congress not only a visceral understanding of what it’s like to be clubbed into unconsciousness, but also a deep familiarity with the damage inflicted by take-no-prisoners political campaigning.

So to call Mr. Lewis simply a Freedom Rider is to give incomplete acknowledgment to his political struggles.

Likewise, to describe George Wallace as a simple racist is to give his biography short shrift. As a circuit court judge in the 1950s, Wallace was respectful toward blacks, and as a legislator from 1947 to 1953, he was a moderate. In 1948, when Strom Thurmond led the Southern delegations out of the Democratic convention to protest the party’s pioneer civil rights plank, Wallace stayed in his seat. Though no fan of the plank, he was yet more Democrat than demagogue, and was instrumental in rallying the other Southern alternate delegates to save the convention’s quorum, and pass its platform.

He might have carried a tolerant message into the Alabama governor’s mansion in 1958, but he lost the race after spurning the support of the Ku Klux Klan (which then backed his primary opponent, John Patterson) and being endorsed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Sadly for Wallace’s state, his region, his nation and himself, he did not respond as John Lewis did after his defeat by Carmichael. Mr. Lewis, whenever confronted with calls to divisiveness, chose to redouble his commitment to reason and tolerance. After his loss to Mr. Patterson, Wallace is said to have turned to an aide and declared, “I was out-niggered ... and I’ll never be out-niggered again.”

After Wallace finally won the governorship in 1962, his administration was never as race-hostile as his campaign appeals implied; black leaders found his office door open, and often his mind, too. But he would eternally pay the price for the methods he used to gain that office.

I once saw that price on vivid display, at a Wallace for president rally in downtown Boston. In 1975, that city was contorted by its own race war over school busing, and the enormous two-tier assembly hall was packed. It was an angry crowd — a black television cameraman was punched as he walked up the aisle. In the middle of Wallace’s remarks, there was a loud explosion, and Wallace, who had been paralyzed by a bullet three years earlier, fell forward from his wheelchair into safety behind the podium.

The noise was caused by a crashing klieg light, knocked over in a fracas as a heckler in the balcony was attacked by the crowd. As Wallace clambered back into his chair, his supporters beat the protester bloody and tried to dump him over the balcony rail. “Just an undecided voter, folks. Just an undecided voter,” Wallace pleaded into his microphone, but there was no quelling the fire. “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!” people in the hall thundered, until the man was rescued — barely — by Secret Service agents.

In the final debate of this presidential campaign, faced with John McCain’s demand that he repudiate Mr. Lewis’s analogy, Barack Obama said he didn’t think his opponent was another George Wallace, and that sounds reasonable if you assume Mr. Lewis was referring to Wallace the vile racist, not the more tragic Wallace, the one-time straight campaigner who bartered conviction for expedience when he thought a raw appeal to division could gain him crucial votes.

It would behoove everyone in the current race for America’s highest offices to pay attention to what Mr. Lewis was really saying, and judge it for its provenance in his long experience. Better than perhaps any living American, he knows that courage on the front line is one thing, and on the campaign stage quite another, knows how tiny and harmless the seeds of fanaticism can seem, how one cry of “kill him” can crescendo into a chorus that can’t be stifled. Mr. Lewis might be deemed generous in wishing on no other member of his profession the harrowed look I witnessed in George Wallace’s eyes as he struggled up off the floor in Boston and beheld what a hell he’d wrought.

Comments

[BuffaloSoldier]

I don't kown what URL means. Forgive the soldier folks. Just trying this
out. Art, Palin's a figment of Russian imagination. They look from
their porches and think they see her. Will have more to say in future.

[arthur flowers]

buffalo soldier

good to see you in the mix

let the party begin

arf

[BuffaloSoldier]

BuffaloSoldier salutes Conny Charles. Let's have a rousing IN THE 1800S
DOWN IN ARIZONA AND MEXICO, THERE CAME A BRAND NEW SOLDIER, THE INDIANS
CALLED HIM BUFFALO for Brother Charles. For those not familiar with his
story, during the Korean "conflict" he took out two enemy positions while
being mortally wounded himself. Arlington refused his body, although
they swear that wasn't their position, and in one of those better late
than never moves, they've interred him now. This plays directly into
what I have to say about BlackAmerica at a later date. Remember,
A BRAND NEW SOLDIER. The like of which the world had never seen.