Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

The refrain "Keep your eyes on the prize" in the well-known freedom song means one thing to me: don't let anybody distract you from who we are and what we are about.

The Selma Voting Rights Movement went on in the face of beatings, arrests and murders -- not for the weeks covered in the film "Selma," but for two years, from 1963 to 1965.  Dalles County, Alabama was a majority-Black county which had for decades prevented African Americans from registering to vote.  Young activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee joined the local Black leaders from the Dalles County Voters League who had been conducting voter-registration drives since the fifties.  Bernard Lafayette, now of Emory University, and Colia Liddell, now of the NY Green Party, were the SNCC organizers.  Lafayette was severely beaten by the Klan to stop their work.  They did not stop.  They were replaced by Prathia Hall, who was later a professor of womanist theology at Boston University who kept up the pressure.  Dallas County fired 32 African American teachers for attempting to register.  The county clerk kept three hundred prospective voters lined up outdoors in the sun an entire day while arresting SNCC workers who brought them water or carried signs saying "Register to Vote."  The attempts to register and the arrests went on for two years until a judge issued an order enjoining any gathering of three or more people to discuss voter registration!

Right after New Year 1965, the DCVL and SNCC were joined by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in a mass meeting at Brown Chapel AME Church in violation of the injunction.  More groups of prospective voters walked to the courthouse and were arrested.  That month three hundred new voters successfully registered while three thousand were arrested.  Who knows whether the enemy understood these numbers as a loss for them?  What we do know is that the enemy is devious and wanted to distract people from registration.  On February 18, in Perry County, next door to Dallas County, the Alabama State Police turned off all street lights during a night march, probably so that they could attack Reverend CT Vivian in the dark.  A state trooper shot a man named Jimmie Lee Jackson to death while he protected his mother from assault of the State Police.  People were enraged and ready to retaliate.  Reverend James Bevel came up with the idea of marching to Montgomery and dumping Jimmie Lee Jackson's casket on the steps of the State Capitol.  It was a way to deal with people's anger without it devolving into a cycle of revenge violence against the state power.  Note here that this police murder did succeed in getting people angry enough to shift their attention to white supremacist violence.  For the previous two years, in the face of all those arrests and beatings, they had kept a laser focus on the vote.  And then came the attack on that march to Montgomery.

When the march kicked off on March 7 almost two weeks had passed since the police murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson so his body was not being carried.  The marchers crossed Edmund Pettus Bridge and out of the city limits and were immediately and viciously attacked by the Alabama State Police and Sheriff Jim Clark's posse.  National TV covered the beatings at the bridge but did not capture the mounted possemen riding people down in the streets of Selma or following them home and clubbing and knouting them in their front yards and the doorways of their houses.  Sitting at hospital bedsides that night, pulling guns from closets and getting ready to offer some payback to troopers and possement, going over the horrific events of the day in church meetings, nobody could have known that in eight days President Lyndon Johnson would call a joint session of Congress and demand that the House and Senate pass a Voting Rights Act.  Nobody knew that two days later when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led 2500 people out onto the bridge and then turned them around in compliance with a federal court order, enraging huge numbers of people who felt he had sold everybody out.  Nobody knew that later in the day when white ministers James Reeb, Clark Olsen and Orloff Miller were beaten in the streets of Selma -- in Reeb's case, beaten to death -- for supporting African American rights.  All these provocations fueled responses, including demonstrators throwing bricks and bottles at state police in Montgomery.

I will never make the argument that the loud sit-ins at the White House or the threatening demonstrations in Montgomery did not contribute to President Johnson's immediate demand for a Voting Rights Act.  I will make the argument that provocations like the beatings at the bridge and the murders of Jimmie Lee Jackson and James Reeb were calculated to divert the people's attention from the vote and into retaliation.  I have been working for the last few weeks on a chapter of my sequel to my short story collection Stones from the Creek.  This chapter addresses the so-called "Redneck War" or "Battle of Blair Mountain."  This was an armed conflict in the hills between Logan and Boone Counties.  In 1921, coal miners in southern West Virginia were striking for union recognition and for collective bargaining.  They were supported by coal miners across the rest of the state and the nation. The coal operators used gunmen hired by the Baldwin-Felts "Detective" Agency to intimidate the miners and their families. (I put the word "detective" in quotes because these were not Sherlock Holmes-type detectives.  They were company thugs.)  These gunmen launched sniper attacks on the tent colonies of strikers who had been evicted from their company-owned housing.  In the town of Matewan, the Baldwin-Felts tried to run roughshod over the elected mayor and his police chief and they got the worst of a gunfight with that chief.  The miners did arm themselves against these attacks and did retaliate, but throughout these months their attention remained on the strike.

Finally, the operators and their gunmen launched a provocation that succeeded in fully capturing the attention of the workers.  They assassinated the Matewan police chief in broad daylight on the step of the McDowell County Courthouse.  That prompted a march by thousands of armed miners from all over the state of West Virginia toward Mingo County.  To inflame them, Logan County sheriff Don Chafin armed thousands of middle-class "deputies" with state-of-the-art military weapons paid for by the coal companies.  US Army General Billy Mitchell arrived in the state with a squadron of bombers and threatened to drop gas and explosive devices on the workers.  Mother Jones, the early 20th century labor organizer, unsuccessfully tried to turn the marchers back with a fabricated telegram, purportedly sent by President Harding.  The following day, though, the United Mine Workers district officers were convinced by US Army General Harry Hill Bandholtz to turn the marchers back, which they did.

But is that what the coal operators and their allies in the state government really wanted?  The subsequent events suggest that it was not, that they wanted the violent confrontation in the hills.  As soon as the armed miners began boarding trains to return home, the West Virginia State Police along with Sheriff Don Chafin began a night-time raid through mine camps in a hollow near Sharples, arresting and killing striking miners.  When the survivors got out and spread word of the murders, the homebound strikers turned their trains around and began the march on Logan County again.  And, apparently to ensure that the firefight would not break off, Sheriff Chapin had his own planes drop bombs on the miners.  The fight was broken up by the arrival of federal troops.  The union lost members all over the state and didn't get its strength back for over ten years.  The corporate press was able to stigmatize the miners as hillbillies and imply that, somehow, their battle for collective bargaining was nothing more than a continuation of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud.

In the heat of a difficult and dangerous struggle for our humanity it is all too easy for our enemies to divert us with murder.  After all, they demonstrate their contempt for our lives all the time and they murder us slowly with starvation and poisonous food, water, and air.  How hard is it for them to get one of their hirelings -- uniformed or not -- to shoot us or run us down or beat us to death?  Arguments that we have to be "better than them" feel weak and meaningless when we are mourning an immediate loss and when there is no end in sight to more such losses.  I think, though, that we have to remind ourselves that our enemies' desperation can be a sign that we are actually stronger than we think and that some victory may be closer than it appears.

Keep your eyes on the prize.