In May I joined a couple of classmates and cool folks in Jackson for a 50th anniversary commemoration of the 1961 Freedom Rides.
{Oh look! It's Charles, Lindsay and me with Joan Mulholland!)
But, as today is the 48th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, I will gladly leave reflections on the Freedom Rides themselves for future (well, and past) posts. I'll let the March get its due spotlight. It was, after all, a groundbreaking event.
I'll maintain, though, that while there were many singularly groundbreaking moments of the movement, no one moment stands alone.
(Anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to sell you a book...I'm looking at you, Ray Arsenault, Eric Etheridge, Andy Lewis). (They've each admitted it, I'm not just taking cheap shots out of nowhere!)
{you, too, are now looking at Etheridge and Arsenault}
Even the March on Washington relied heavily on much precedent.
Especially the March on Washington relied on precedent, really. (The history major in me really wants to expound on this assertion, but I'm doing my best to keep it simple stupid [per the advice of the great Michael Scott}).
I went as far as to say that the 1927 Flood of the Mississippi River helped pave the way for the Civil Rights Movement Proper (largely considered as lasting 1955-1968) in my senior thesis, so I'm big on credit sharing.
The marketing people for all the MLK, Jr. specials around this time don't have the liberty of sharing credit, as they-- much like the authors mentioned above-- have persuasive theses to put out that must come across clear and concise if they have a chance at an audience.
I have no standard of the sort to keep up around here-- clear and concise flew out of the window forever ago. Just ask any one of my professors. Given the implied trade-off (re:audience), they might be the only people left to ask, and only because they were paid to stick around.
The advantage of lower standards, in this case, is the opportunity to celebrate someone other than King for the achievement that was the March on Washington. (Which is almost blasphemous for a girl that pledge allegiance to his dream every weekday of my elementary career).
Oh, yes, I'll let the March have the spotlight today. I won't make it share with the flood or the Freedom Rides or anything.
King? He's gonna have to share. I'm able to live with my blasphemous self only because I think if he was alive-- the responsibility of remembering his involvement in the CRM left a little less to the in-need-of-a-simple narrative media-- he'd be the first to offer a speech acknowledging the others who made his success possible.
This is not just the anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech, after all. (Though how do I love thee? Let me count the ways...)
Today I'm remembering-- in addition to King, Randolph, Lewis, Wilkins, Young-- James Farmer.
If that seems like a contrived effort on my part to find a common denominator between the Freedom Rides and the March to focus on, then
a. there might be a little truth behind your accusation
b. joke's on you.
It's entirely to James Farmer's credit that there is such a common denominator. He did all of the work involved in being linked so closely to two of the greatest Civil Rights initiatives.
All of that work and yet, unlike King, so little credit.
Why don't you hear about Farmer in discussions on the March? So glad you didn't ask asked.
In short, Farmer was out doing the work necessary for King's dream to become yours and my reality. (Not that King didn't put in his own elbow grease, and not that Farmer was the only one getting work done that day).
(That last parenthetical disclaimer is why I'll never sell books or television specials).
On August 28, 1963, James Farmer sat behind bars in Louisiana.
An unwavering believer in the nonviolence model of Mohandas Gandhi, Farmer was in Louisiana leading peaceful protests. There, state troopers went door to door hunting down Farmer. He only escaped the city of Plaquemine by the kindness of a funeral home director friend, who smuggled Farmer out of town in a hearse as the oft-described "larger than life," deep-voiced Civil Rights leader played dead in the back.
"I was meant to die that night," Farmer later said. "They were kicking open doors, beating up blacks in the streets, interrogating them with electric cattle prods."
Out of that town and away from the immediate danger of mob violence at dark (a mob led by no less than the state troopers), Farmer was soon arrested for disturbing the peace. It was not, given the Freedom Rides (this is a contrived insertion of the Freedom Rides) and decades of experience, his first charge for breach of peace.
He refused the insistent advice of friends and colleagues that he should bail out early, in order to appear at the March. On the principle of "jail, no bail," he stayed to watch the March behind bars.
Floyd McKissick, a Congress of Racial Equality colleague read Farmer's speech aloud at the March. The protests would not end, Farmer wrote, "until the dogs stop biting us in the South and the rats stop biting us in the North." It might have been less overt, but racism in the north was no less biting. The assertions surely lost something without Farmer's booming voice.
Ultimately, his decision to stick to his guns and hang on to his pride cost Farmer a lot of glory.
(Unless you consider a bust in the center of the University of Mary Washington Campus the pinnacle of glory, in which case, the man has it made. Still, I can hardly consider it a due memorial, considering that 70% of people who ask me where I went to school also ask me if I mean "Martha Washington.")
We use an expression a lot in our family when a member shortchanges another of due credit-- "gimme back the glory." The phrase is accompanied by a waiting, outstretched hand.
The problem as I see it is that there's not really any one person from whom Farmer supporters can request his glory be returned. I mean, can you really fault King supporters? Do you blame elementary textbooks for giving kids a simple rundown of the CRM that necessarily excludes hundreds of important leaders? I guess you could blame the way of the South in the 1960s, but that's (mostly) passed.
I'm not really sure who took the glory, thus it's hard to know who carries the responsibility of handing it back over.
But I do know that on this day I can begin to give James Leonard Farmer a bit of the glory he's due by remembering his sacrifice-- the burden he bore of continuing the work of the dream through a life that long outlasted King.
(source)
{Farmer's on the far right}
One day in our commemoration of the Freedom Rides (the day I was covered in buttons and making a fool of myself to get people to come to an event), I stopped to talk to Dr. O'Donnell and a guest, who'd worked years ago as a student aide to Farmer at UMW. I told that man that I felt a bit foolish, and that perhaps our remembrance of Farmer bordered on irreverent (you know, since we dress up his bust and pose for silly pictures and have a good giggle [learned that expression from Prince William... I told you I'd find a way to use it, Em!] with the thing).
He said not to sweat it, certain that Farmer would've liked the laughter.
So today I remember the man who made serious business his business. I remember the agitator, the rebel-rouser. The conscientious objector, the student and teacher of nonviolence. The professor who patiently spent his final years teaching at the small university where two college girls (and surely others) challenged the legitimacy of his recollections. "Do you think that ever really happened in this Christian nation," one posed casually to the other. The so-called Father of Affirmative Action. The Medal of Freedom recipient (certainly a more fitting dedication than UMW's humble bust). The part of the Big Four (or Six. You decide). The man with a thunderous voice and a roar of a laugh.
Today I remember the man who, in the end, would've liked the laughter.
If you click here, Deirdre will tell you more about "our" man, our collective ownership symbolized in the following picture by a bowl of buttons ;)
