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A Symbol of Progress and Hope
In a historic event that marks a significant shift in the cultural landscape of Dekalb County, Georgia, a statue of the late civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis was unveiled. The ceremony, which took place on Decatur Square, was poignant. The statue replaced a Confederate obelisk that had stood for over a century before the DeKalb County courthouse.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA, CASCADE PRESS (CP)
Bernie Sanders vows to win the Georgia Presidential Preference Primary which will be held on March 1. Sanders made his pledge to win in Georgia during a campaign stop on his Historical Black College and Universities (HBCU) Tour on Tuesday at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Students from Georgia Tech, Georgia State University and other Atlanta University Center schools joined students from Morehouse College and other interested supporters in a packed Forbes Arena. The arena is named “in honor of the legendary Morehouse coach and administrator, Franklin LaFayette Forbes” and has a seating capacity of 6,000. Every seat in the house was full and practically every inch of the basketball court held an overflow crowd in the neighborhood of 4,000 more supporters.
The Georgia primary is part of the so called SEC primary, which draws its name from the fact that several states holding primaries that day are members of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Southeastern Conference.
Sanders spent much of Tuesday in South Carolina shoring up his support among leaders in the African American community. South Carolina will hold its primary on Saturday. Recent polls show that Sanders has cut into the 30 percentage point lead that Hillary Clinton has held much of the polling season. Polls from South Carolina now have Clinton with only a 19 percentage point lead.
On Tuesday, Sanders began his address by telling his audience that when he began his campaign he was “50 points behind in Iowa” and that the “Iowa Caucus ended in a “virtual tie.”
He basked in the glow of the his recent thumping of Clinton in New Hampshire and said, “the run to the White House doesn’t seem so impossible now.”
Then Sanders said that “I started out way, way, behind in Georgia, but I think we will win in Georgia.”
Forbes Arena exploded in applause.
In recent days, several key African American Democrats in Georgia have thrown their support behind Sanders. Among them is State Senator Vincent Fort, a 2017 candidate for mayor of Atlanta and a former supporter of Clinton.
Fort, introduced Sanders. He told the crowd, “We have to make Bernie Sanders the next President of the United States.”
Also sharing center stage with Sanders was Dr. John Eaves, who is serving his third term as Chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commission, and prominent attorney and former Fulton County Commissioner Gordon Joyner.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and Fifth Congressional District Congressman John Lewis leveled sharp criticism against Sanders last weekend alleging that Sanders was not a bona fide civil rights activist. Lewis quickly backtracked a day later after intense national outrage over his dismissive remarks about Sanders’ involvement in the civil rights movement.
In spite of this criticism, Sanders was upbeat in what Morehouse students and alumni affectionately call, “The House;” and in the style of football legend Joe Namath, predicted a win in Georgia in two weeks.
Harold Michael Harvey is an American novelist and essayist, the author of Paper puzzle and Justice in the Round. He can be contacted at haroldmichaelharvey.com.
I am not saying that John Lewis is a sellout, or that John Lewis is an Uncle Tom for “dropping the mic” on Bernie Sanders. Neither am I suggesting that Lewis is a liar as some have strongly intimated over recent comments he has made in support of the Clinton’s involvement in the civil rights movement during the 1960s. However, I do believe that John Lewis does not get to define who was or was not an active participant in the civil rights movement.
So what if Lewis did not meet Bernie Sanders on the civil rights trail? There are countless men and women, black and white, all over this country who participated in that movement for social justice who are faceless and nameless to history and to John Lewis.
Can Lewis rattle off the names of the women who stood over hot stoves to prepare meals for the marchers from Selma to Montgomery? Would Lewis even recognize any of them if shown a picture of them ? If by chance he could do either of these things, then, why has he not used his considerable clout to bring recognition to these people without whose support, the movement would not have received the success that history records.
Countless people who have never had their names in the press or whose deeds will never be recorded in history books participated in that glorious movement to weave Black Americans into the fabric of civil American society.
In 1962, my family and several other families in our church ( Bethel Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Macon, Georgia), each hosted a Jesuit priest and a nun in our humble homes during the summer months. They were in Macon doing civil rights work.
Each family did so in spite of threats that their homes would be bombed. I dare say Lewis has no knowledge of the names of any of the people who opened their homes so that the work of the civil rights movement could be successful. Nonetheless, their contributions are just as important as the contributions of those persons that Lewis knew.
In 1965, I, along with several other Black young men integrated the Lanier Jr. High School in Macon, Georgia. All those lonely days, I never saw John Lewis. During all of the taunts, spit balls, and pushing and shoving, I never once saw John Lewis. When the white boys wrote on the walls of the military science building, “Niggers Go Home or Die,” I did not see Lewis. Yet, we had to find the courage to carry on in the face of this threat, if this grand idea of integrating American society was going to work.
Did I not have this experience because John Lewis was not there to witness it?
In 1986, John Lewis won a seat in the United States House of Representatives by eviscerating the civil rights legacy of the late Julian Bond. During that campaign, Lewis argued that he was the best Black person to represent Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, because he was a harder worker than Bond back in their Students for Non-Violence Coordinating Committee (SNCC) days.
Lewis said that Bond was lazy, always late for civil rights activities and that they often had to rouse him out of bed in the morning to go stir up civil rights trouble. This was too much inside baseball. Bond had been a popular state legislator in Georgia politics and was nominated to run for Vice President at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He was loved by Atlantans. Lewis destroyed him, sending Bond’s life into a tailspin; only Bond’s strength of character pulled him from utter failure. He rebounded, no thanks to Lewis; and served the civil rights community well as Chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and as a college professor lecturing on the subject of the civil rights movement for many years prior to his death last year.
Bond’s ashes were scattered in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico in a private ceremony that did not issue invitations to Lewis or any other of the so called Atlanta civil rights elite.
In 2014, Lewis had an opportunity to help elect Georgia’s first Black senator, former State Senator Steen Miles. Miles would not only have been Georgia’s first Black Senator, she would also have been the state’s’ first woman of any racial hue to be elected senator. Lewis opted instead to support, Michelle Nunn, daughter of former Georgia Senator, Sam Nunn; in spite of the fact that Nunn had virtually no ties to Georgia and preached an ultra conservative Democratic platform.
Lewis, along with several other prominent civil rights icons flooded South Georgia with robocalls during the closing days of the Democratic Primary battle. Miles, operating on a shoestring budget succumbed to the sheer weight of those robocalls.
Miles grew up in South Bend, Indiana as the walls of segregation started tumbling down. Her role in the movement was to apply for careers that to that point in time, had not been charted for Black Americans. She rolled up her sleeves and muscled her way into the news industry, first as a reporter and eventually becoming a News Producer at WXIA-TV in Atlanta. An investigative piece of journalism she reported in 1976 about a grocery store in the Chicago area selling spoiled milk, led the Food and Drug Administration to require date labels on all perishable food items.
So what if Lewis had not met Steen Miles back in 1976? He would probably argue that back in the day, he met the conservative Democrat Sam Nunn.
It was a big movement, John, and you sir, do not get to define who is worthy to speak about contributions which did not occur in your presence.
SOURCES:
http://chicagodefender.com/2016/02/11/john-lewis-called-sellout-and-uncle-tom-for-endorsing-clinton-over-bernie-sanders-video/
Harold Michael Harvey is an American novelist and essayist, the author of Paper puzzle and Justice in the Round. He can be contacted at haroldmichaelharvey.com.
It won’t stop racists from hating. I am sure we all can agree the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capitol in South Carolina will not, as Nikki Giovanni rapped in the 1960s, “stop chickens from laying eggs or Crackers from hating.”
However, it will usher in a new day in 20 years, when babies born today, will have reached adulthood, without a daily reminder of a painful period in southern history.
Today’s news out of South Carolina causes me to reflect upon two events in my life.
First, the day in 1971 when I drove down to Ozark, Alabama with two of my classmates at Tuskegee Institute for the kick-off rally of George Wallace’s second run for President.
We were the only black people at this campaign rally, except the black Secret Service agent who appeared out of thin air, just in time to protect us from mob violence at the hands of Wallace’s male supporters.
What I remember most about that night was the large number of newborn babies wrapped in Wallace bumper stickers which read, “WALLACE! SEGREGATION FOREVER!” It was a very frightening experience. We were fortunate to get out of town with our lives.
What disheartened me the most was the fact that white people in attendance at this rally seemed to be breeding hatred from the cradle. I wrote about this night in my new book Justice in the Round.
A few weeks ago, when the white supremacist Dylann Roof, massacred nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, it caused me to realize my fears that night had come true: In 20 years, South Carolina white supremacists had successfully raised a progeny from the cradle into young adulthood who hated black people so much, that after getting to know their humanity for an hour, he resorted to the racist propaganda taught through his heritage about black people, then pulled out his gun and opened fire on people far superior than himself.
The second event that the flag removal brings to the forefront of my mind is my active participation in 1994-95 as one of the counsels of record in Coleman v. Miller, 885 F. Supp. 1561. In this case James Andrews Coleman brought suit against Georgia Governor Zell Miller “seeking the removal of the Georgia flag from all state office buildings.”
Coleman grew up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. When he moved to Georgia and encountered the “Stars and Bars,” in the Georgia flag, he felt that the state of Georgia was requiring him to advance a political philosophy he found repugnant.
His suit advanced the argument that “the [Georgia] legislation establishing the flag and the flag’s design are discriminatory and racist in nature.”
Coleman filed the suit pro se. The case was assigned to District Judge Orinda D. Evans. She believed that this case was too important to get bounced out of court because the plaintiff was a non lawyer and not familiar with the federal rules of procedure, so she appointed Bruce Harvey, no relation, and myself to assist Coleman in the prosecution of his claim for removal of the Confederate battle flag in Georgia.
What stands out in my mind about this legal challenge to the Confederate flag in Georgia is that shortly after receiving my appointment, I ran into Congressman John Lewis at a Neighborhood Planning Unit meeting. After Lewis addressed the gathering, I stood up and asked him if he would support the lawsuit to remove this flag in Georgia. I was stunned by Lewis’ reply: “No, I certainly will not.”
I sat down.
After the meeting, I drove back to my office in downtown Atlanta, where I received a late night telephone call from a racist who threatened to string me up by Bruce Harvey’s ponytail if I did not get off that case. I was as fearless in ’95 as Lewis had been in ’65. I pressed on.
Coleman’s suit failed on several technical grounds, but I can not help but think that if members of Atlanta’s civil rights community had been courageous enough to support the suit, Bruce Harvey and I would have brought that flag down five years before Governor Roy Barnes pushed through legislation that caused it to be replaced.
No, bringing that flag down will not stop “chickens from laying eggs,” or the Klan from recruiting other white domestic terrorists, but it will severely limit the genetic pool of race haters in years to come.
Harold Michael Harvey, is the author of the legal thriller “Paper Puzzle,” and “Justice in the Round: Essays on the American Jury System,” available at Amazon and at haroldmichaelharvey.com. He can be contacted at [email protected]
