Beyond Ideology

Whole Earth,  Summer, 2000  by Julius Lester

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But as I stood there reading those telegrams, I recognized for the first time in my life that white people were not an undifferentiated mass, an unfeeling negative Other. There were whites who cared, and who did not think of segregation as a Negro problem, but who knew it for what it was--an American problem. For the first time in my life, I felt that I was not alone in America.

That is why the "New Community" of the early Movement tried to be--had to be--black and white together. The Old America had been one of black and white forcibly kept apart by segregation, economics, and prejudice. In 1960, most states had laws forbidding interracial marriages, and the southern states had additional laws forbidding social relationships between blacks and whites.

"Black and white together," we would sing in one of the choruses of "We Shall Overcome." What a revolutionary statement it was! Black and white together on such a scale was unprecedented in American history because black and white together was not how the nation had ever perceived itself. It was not surprising, then, that during demonstrations, it was the whites who were singled out for the most vicious beatings. They were traitors to America's conception of itself as a white nation. William Moore, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, Jonathan Daniels, Rev. James Reeb, and Mrs. Viola Liuzzo were made to pay the ultimate price: they were murdered. Others, like James Peck, suffered for the rest of their lives from the beatings they received. Some committed suicide. Others paid and continue to pay psychically.

We did not know that America would extract such a price to maintain the status quo. We did not know that the Justice Department of Robert Kennedy would not be eager to use the power of the federal government to protect civil rights workers. We did not know that seeking the end of segregation and disenfranchisement would lead the liberal press to accuse us of wanting too much too soon. Above all, perhaps, we did not know that the values we sought to embody--the values of nonviolence and the beloved community--were not values that America wanted for itself.

One can live in the valley of the shadow of death only so long before asking, why am I doing this? I lost fifteen pounds in two weeks that summer of 1964 in Mississippi. The body is an organism with an intense awareness of itself. It knows when its existence is being threatened, even when the mind claims there is nothing to worry about. My mind thought the long and desolate highways of Mississippi beautiful; my body knew that southern trees bear a strange fruit. At night my mind would tell me that the house I was sleeping in might be bombed while I slept, but, it would add blithely, "Everybody has to die sometime." My body, trembling with incredulity, would say, "Sometime ain't this time," and refuse to fall asleep.

Faint whispers of second thoughts like those of the witches in Macbeth disturbed a lot of us that summer of 1964. Trying to register blacks to vote was not worth risking one's life for, especially when one walked into the voting booth and had to choose between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater. And as Navy men searched the swamps and countryside of Mississippi for the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, our own mortality stared at us with its hollow eyes and we wondered if America really cared.