We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
Dr. MartinLutherKingJr.
With our current writing rotation, I will only get one shot to write a column in the month of February this year. And since it’s Black History Month, let’s delve into that a bit. Should be plenty to talk about.
Racial injustice writer and Pulitzer Prize-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones likes to begin in the year 1619, but I can’t cover 400 years in a single newspaper column. So I’ll start in 1965, as good a year as any, I reckon. Maybe, if we look for it, we can find some hope in a year so bleak.
On Jan. 10, 1965, 20 Black football players announced they would not play in the American Football League All-Star game scheduled for Jan. 16 in New Orleans. The players said they had been refused cab rides by white taxi drivers or taken to remote locations and dropped off. Others were denied entry to clubs and restaurants that white players were allowed to enter.
Following a meeting attended by both Black and white players who had received all-star invitations, the Black players decided to boycott the game, according to a story on buffalobills. com. Bills defensive back Butch Byrd, who had been refused service by white cab drivers upon his arrival at MSY, said the white players later decided to support the boycott as well.
“Ron Mix (San Diego Chargers) gave a little speech to the white ballplayers in the room and said, ‘Guys, I want to play the game; however, I respect what the Black ballplayers are going through, so I’m not playing.’ Then Jack Kemp [later a U.S. Congressman and vice-presidential candidate] said the same. So that turned the tide with the white ballplayers, so none of them would play, because of the leadership of Mix and Jack.”
The AFL then moved the All-Star game to Houston so everyone would play. Sound familiar, Atlanta?
On the day of that uprooted AFL All-Star game in Houston, a federal grand jury indicted 18 white Mississippi men on charges of violating the civil rights of three activists (two white and one Black), who had been murdered and buried in an earthen dam the previous year, according to a story entitled “Murder in Mississippi” found on pbs.org. Federal officials did not have the authority to charge them with murder because that was the state’s bailiwick. But Mississippi ficials said there was “insufficient evidence” to pursue the case.
On Jan. 20, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered an ambitious and optimistic inaugural address that included the following: “So, let us reject any among us who seek to reopen old wounds and rekindle old hatreds. Let us now ... transform our unity of interest into a unity of purpose. For the hour and the day and the time are here to achieve progress without strife, to achieve change without hatred.”
The response? More hatred, of course.
On Feb. 18, 1965, Black civil rights protestor Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot by an Alabama state trooper in Marion. He was unarmed. He died eight days later, and his death precipitated the first Selma to Montgomery march led by future Congressman John Lewis.
On Feb. 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in Harlem.
On Feb. 25, 1965, a federal judge dismissed the indictments against 17 of the 18 men indicted in connection with the murdered civil rights activists in Mississippi.
On March 7, 1965, Lewis led about 600 marchers down U.S. Hwy 80 from Selma toward the state capitol. They were attacked as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge (Edmund Pettus was himself a Grand Dragon in the KKK). Lewis suffered a fractured skull, and 17 marchers were hospitalized following what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
After a demonstration on Tuesday at the bridge, Pastor James Reeb of Boston, who had come to join with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the protests, was killed by a group of white men wielding clubs.
Three men were later indicted for the murder, but they were acquitted by an all-white jury after just 90 minutes of deliberation.
King called Reeb a shining example of manhood at its best.
“He was an attorney for the defense of the innocent in the court of world opinion. He was a witness to the truth that men of different races and classes might live, eat, and work together as brothers.” * Sure, all that was 58 years ago. But Black History Month is an opportunity we can take to make sure we don’t allow the hatreds of the past to transit the present and contaminate our future.
* From kinginstitute. stanford.edu