Defending Black Lives Matter
History Is Being Distorted and Wielded as a Weapon Against the Latest Efforts to End Police Violence and Demand Justice and Equality
An essay by Brooklyn College political scientist Jeanne Theoharris in The New York Times today stands as an important counterweight to the mythologies we’ve used to make ourselves feel better about the slow pace of change on race across the 400-year history of settlement and colonization of the American continent.
Focusing on Rosa Parks, Theoharris outlines what she calls “the fairytale”:
In our collective understanding, she’s trapped in a single moment on a long-ago Montgomery bus, too often cast as meek, tired, quiet and middle class. The boycott is seen as a natural outgrowth of her bus stand. It’s inevitable, respectable and not disruptive.
Presenting her arrest on a Montgomery bus as a “single moment” severs her action from the larger movement, makes it seem as if she was a singular personality operating in a singular way. This misrepresents the efforts of hundreds of activists in Montgomery and thousands across the South who were putting their bodies on the line, often breaking laws and disrupting commerce. Protest, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made clear, is only effective if it creates tension, if it disrupts and leads to discomfort, if it afflicts the powerful. The powerful, of course, responded with violence, with aggressive policing, with legal assaults. But because the bus boycott was not just a reaction to Parks’s singular act, but a well-planned and well-thought out effort designed to shut the city of Montgomery down, it succeeded. It had the broad support and participation of the city’s Black community, which organized car pools and refused to bend to White Montgomery’s pressure.
Trapping Parks in her “single moment” also erases Parks’ own actual biography — more than two decades of activism before the bus boycott and more than three decades of activism after, including in Detroit during the time of the uprising in the late-‘60s. She supported the Black Panthers and demanded, like both the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, immediate justice and equality both racially and economically.
Theoharris quotes Parks: “I don’t believe in gradualism, or that whatever is to be done for the better should take forever to do.”
Parks and King are often pitted against Malcolm X and the Black Panthers in the American racial narrative. And there are differences. King was committed to nonviolence both on moral and pragmatic grounds, while Malcolm (“the bullet or the ballot”) and the Panthers embraced the notion that violence might be the only way to win freedom from a majority unafraid to use violence against Black Americans. But the differences are less important than what the activists share — a singular vision of immediate change based on both justice and equality.
The mythology is strong and it has political implications. Juliet Hooker, a professor of political science at Brown University who has studied Black social justice movements, says arguments that attempt to contrast the King-era Civil rights movement with Black Lives Matter misconstrue both. Echoing what Theoharris argues in A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misues of Civil Rights History, Hooker told an interviewer that Americans “have this romanticized memory of the Civil Rights Movement.”
We see it as this peaceful, non-confrontational movement that was immediately and widely embraced. But that’s not true. We all think that if we had been alive during that time, we would have been marching in the streets with Martin Luther King Jr., but a lot of people weren’t — many were very critical. King was called an “outside agitator” — people thought he was being too radical, that he wasn’t giving the system time to work. Ironically, a lot of the same critiques we’re making now about the current protests are critiques people were making then — some say the change being demanded is too much, too soon.
The violence that marred some of the protests this summer was neither indicative of the movement, nor exceptional, she says. Focusing on the violence and blaming the protesters obscures “the ways in which violence is pervasive everywhere in our society,” and that much of the violence was “prompted by police themselves.”
Parks understood this. So did Malcolm and the Black Panthers, who formed explicitly as a response to violence perpetrated by police. King described the violent response of some protesters this way: “Riot is the language of the unheard.” He was not endorsing it — on the contrary, he remained steadfast in his commitment to non-violence — but he understood it, was offering a plea, a warning to White America, to the White power structure that, if it continued not to take the demands for justice seriously, riot would grow more likely.
This is is the “dream deferred” as described by Langston Hughes, the dream that ultimately must “explode.”
“One of the things that is becoming clearer, perhaps,” Hooker says, “is that protester violence doesn’t erupt out of nowhere.”
It is the result of people who are continually subjected to violence and have tried to make change by playing by the rules — engaging in peaceful protest, attending city council meetings, writing letters — and not seeing change and getting frustrated. That’s the point at which people think, “If the system isn’t working, why work within the norms of the system? Maybe it doesn’t matter what I do.”
This is both resignation and simmering, smoldering anger. The heat gets trapped, grows and spreads, until it catches and the whole thing burns.
This is why pitting Civil Rights history against today’s activism misrepresents both the past and the current movement. Hooker describes the two movements as sharing “similarities between two key moments in the long history of the Black freedom struggle.”
All of these protests are part of a larger history, building on a long-held repertoire of strategies and debates — debates about violence versus non-violence, marching in the streets versus trying to work from the inside.
And, just as the earlier Civil Rights heroes were met with opposition by those in power, the current activists are finding themselves targeted by power and told what’s appropriate. That, I think, was the final message John Lewis left in an essay published in The New York Times upon his death in June.
“Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble,” the Civil Rights icon and long-time member of Congress offered. Vote, he said, and “learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time.”
Lewis, like King, was committed to non-violence. And like King, he was committed to “good trouble,” the emphasis shared equally — trouble implying impatience, tension, demand. Justice.