What is it that impels people to become involved in movements for social change? That they feel strongly, it goes without saying. But what makes them What is it that impels people to become involved in movements for social change? That they feel strongly, it goes without saying. But what makes them choose to get involved? What makes them decide that this is the moment to take a stand? Breach of Peace seeks to address that question, reproducing the mug shots taken of the Freedom Riders - the Civil Rights activists who descended upon Mississippi in 1961, determined to integrate bus and train stations - who were arrested and convicted of the charge of "breach of peace," and who spent time in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman state prison. Taken by the anti-integration Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and preserved in the state’s Vital Records Center, these photographs only saw the light of day again after a protracted legal struggle on the part of the Mississippi ACLU.
Paired whenever possible with a current portrait, taken by photographer Eric Etheridge, as well as basic biographical information and brief personal statements, these mug-shots have been used to create a unique oral history of a great (and terrible) moment in our nation’s history. Here the reader can witness the senselessness of segregation, and the brutality of its defenders. But this is mainly the story of the quiet courage and principled strength of the ordinary Americans - black and white, male and female, Christian and Jew, Northerner and Southerner, experienced activist and previously uninvolved citizen - who chose this moment in history to stand up against injustice, and put their lives on the line for the ideal of equality.
In the pages of this book the reader will encounter Jean Thompson, born and raised in Louisiana, whose parents always taught her that the injustice of segregation couldn’t last forever: ”They raised us to be ready. I remember my dad saying the day will come, and when the day comes, you should be ready.” Here too is Alexander Weiss, whose family escaped from Europe in 1940, and who was determined not to be one of those ”good Germans who just looked the other way;” or William Leons, who felt that in confronting the evils of Jim Crow he was living up to the example of his parents, both of whom were sent to concentration camps for their role in the Dutch Resistance during World War II.
Many of those interviewed felt that they simply did what “needed to be done,” while others seemed to be conscious at the time that they were participating in extraordinary events. Claude Liggins, twenty years old at the time of his arrest, had always wondered what it would have been like to participate in the Boston Tea Party, and used to imagine himself ”being in that kind of thing, wanting to know how it felt to be part of some historical thing.”
Some of the Freedom Riders were longtime members of the Movement, while others seem to have just “stumbled” into it. Most of them were organized through C.O.R.E. (Congress of Racial Equality), but some - such as Canadian Michael Audain - simply answered the call of conscience, and came on their own.
These vignettes - sadly incomplete, as some of the Freedom Riders have since died, and others could not be found - are also a timely reminder that "the more things change the more they stay the same." Many of those chronicled here have stayed active in politics, and are still fighting for "the dream" of a just society. It is a sobering thought that Joan Pleune, arrested on June 20, 1961 as a Freedom Rider, is still being arrested, these days as a member of the Granny Peace Brigade, protesting the Iraq War. Or take the case of Theresa Walker, arrested June 21, 1961. Her most recent "criminal" activity was her participation in a NYC protest at the police killing of Amadou Diallo. Do you even need to inquire as to whether she was arrested?
Finally, I should note that I tend to go through phases in my reading, whether intentional or no, and it struck me, upon completing Breach of Peace, that I seem to be drawn to portrait collections of late. First it was Kiviat and Heidler's Women of Courage and Logan's Unveiled, both of which offer portraits and brief autobiographical snippets by Afghan women. Then it was Taryn Simon's The Innocents, which profiles 47 people who served time for crimes they didn't commit, before being freed by the Innocence Project. Most recently it was Rosann Olson's This Is Who I Am, in which modern American women discuss their bodies and self-image...
Is this some new trend, or is it just coincidence that I keep running across photography/biography collections of this nature? Whatever the case may be, Breach of Peace is a powerful record, one that made me think about the intersections between national and family history. I recommend that every American citizen take the time to read it - not just for its depiction of a crucial moment in our nation's history, but for the portrait of true heroism and strength that it offers....more
NEWSFLASH: Americans have some very strange ideas about race! (If you're not American, this may not be news to you). We define black and white in waysNEWSFLASH: Americans have some very strange ideas about race! (If you're not American, this may not be news to you). We define black and white in ways unlike any other country or culture on earth, often happily oblivious to our singularity, and we often react with puzzlement or even anger when our definitions are challenged, or we are confronted with other ways of looking at the matter. That this is true of both the white and black communities in the United States is no doubt puzzling for people from abroad, but acceptance of the "one drop rule" - known also as hypo-descent, the one-drop rule is the idea that anyone with any amount of African heritage is black, regardless of the amount of said heritage, or of other factors such as culture or appearance - is widespread, making it one of the unchallenged orthodoxies of modern American life. Professor F. James Dixon, who taught sociology for many years at Illinois State University, sets out to document the history of the rule - how it first came to be, and how it came to dominate our culture - and its application in contemporary American culture and politics in this excellent study of the subject.
Examining the history of miscegenation in the early English colonies in North America, Dixon documents the varied approaches to racially mixed people utilized by authorities in different locales, from Virginia, which passed the first anti-miscegenation law in 1662 – initially, racially mixed children of black mothers became slaves, while racially mixed children of white mothers were born free, until the law was revised in 1681, penalizing white mothers of racially mixed children with six years of indentured servitude, and their offspring with thirty (the status of black mothers and their racially mixed children remained unchanged) – and which came eventually to embrace the one-drop rule; to South Carolina, which was founded in 1670 by immigrants from the Barbados, who brought with them Caribbean (and also Latin American) ideas about mulattoes – a racially mixed group that traditionally acted as a buffer between black and white, with a higher status than the black community, and a lower one than the white. South Carolina did not pass its first anti-miscegenation law until 1717, and mulattoes were allowed to vote in colonial affairs until 1721. Unlike so many of the other states in the south, South Carolina and Louisiana resisted the one-drop rule until the time of the Civil War, something which can be seen both in the legal cases of the time – records show a number of trials to determine racial identity, in which persons of known African descent were declared white, because they were recognized as such by the white community – as well as statutes such as the Louisiana Civil Code of 1808, which established a tripartite definition of race (ie: black-colored-white), and prohibited colored people from marrying either blacks or whites.
According to Dixon, these different approaches to defining racial identity were eventually erased by the coming of the Civil War, as slave states sought to shore up the legitimacy of the peculiar institution. The one drop rule began to receive increasing support in the white community because it was perceived to defend the idea of slavery, with the notion of “black blood” being some kind of taint (and all those possessing any such blood being by definition black) dovetailing perfectly with the view that all blacks were naturally slaves. It also served as a convenient way of sweeping the double-standards that pertained in the south, vis-à-vis miscegenation – ie, the fact that it was considered acceptable for white men to have sexual relations with black women (something that often involved exploitation and coercion), but was utterly anathema for white women to have sexual relations with black men – under the carpet, as the racially mixed children of white fathers could be relegated to the black community, serving as no threat to the dominant white community. In the face of this shift, and the resulting loss of in-between status, those mulatto groups that had existed as separate communities, with their own separate identities prior to the Civil War began to self-identify more and more as black, something that only accelerated after the war ended, and the white and black communities became true economic competitors for the first time.
With the end of the military occupation of the south in 1875, and the subsequent rise of the Jim Crow system, in which separation of the races was strictly enforced, both legally, through segregation statutes upheld by the Supreme Court - the doctrine of “separate but equal” being established in 1896 through the Plessy vs. Ferguson case – and extra-legally, through the activities of such racial terror groups as the KKK, whose lynching campaigns remain a blot upon our national history to this day, acceptance of the one drop rule continued to grow in America. As the white community became obsessed with issues of racial purity in the early years of the twentieth century, living in fear of “invisible blackness” – the presence of blacks passing as whites, and the secret black heritage of some members of the white community – the black community began to embrace the diversity of their own group – as Dixon points out, the “black” community in the United States embraces individuals whose appearance ranges from very dark to very light - building, through movements such as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, a distinct African-American ethnic identity, one that was neither African nor Euro-American, but a distinct mixture of the two, and one built implicitly upon acceptance of the one-drop rule. This orientation toward the rule in the black community was further buttressed by the pride-building of the 1960s, with any orientation away from African heritage, by those of mixed ancestry being seen as betrayal.
Who’s Black?: One Nation’s Definition is a fascinating book, one which answered questions I didn’t even know that I had. I originally sought it out in order to better understand the history of the one drop rule, as I am working on a paper about a trilogy of young adult novels, published from 1909-1912, that references issues of racial passing, and the notion of black blood as a “taint” in otherwise “pure” white people. But Dixon’s work provides more than just a history of how the rule came to be – it also offers a detailed comparison to other racial identity schemas throughout the world, from those that pertain in South Africa (the book was written in 1991, when Apartheid was still in effect) to those seen in Latin America. The book demonstrates that the definition of black used in the United States, which denies the existence of mixed race people and creates a black-white dichotomy, is the product of a particular set of historical circumstances, rather than a self-evidently correct way of looking at the matter. It also very clearly demonstrates how race is often more of a social construct, rather than a biological one. Finally, it shows how this idea is still very much with us, how it is often still vigorously enforced, particularly within the black community, how it often causes problems for people of mixed ancestry, and how it has come into conflict with other definitions, as the population of the United States has become ever more diverse.
This last is particularly interesting, I think, as it highlights some of the underlying causes of incidents I myself have witnessed in the past, and which have puzzled me. I vividly recall an argument between an African-American and a Latino co-worker of mine, in which the former claimed that a dark-skinned Panamanian woman (who clearly had some African ancestry) was black, while the latter vigorously objected, saying that she was mulatto, and a Latina. There was anger on both sides of that argument, as I recall, and looking back on it now, with the benefit of Professor Dixon’s analysis, I see that my African-American co-worker was operating from the assumption that anyone with black ancestry who didn’t self-identify as black was denying who they “really” were, probably for racist reasons; while my Latino co-worker was operating from the assumption that a mixed person was neither black nor white, and that their ethnic identity as a Latino was more important, in any case. My Latino co-worker was probably also irritated at the feeling that racial definitions that were not part of his culture were being forced upon him, something I have also seen expressed by Native American peoples. That’s certainly the impression I got, when watching Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s PBS documemtary Black in Latin America, which examines communities with African heritage in a number of Latin American countries, from Cuba to Peru. I recall being vaguely uncomfortable with the way Gates framed his entire investigation, and how he set up his interviews, and came away with the impression that he was being a little blind to his own very American assumptions about race. It’s only now that I can put my finger on the specifics: like so many other Americans, Gates assumed his own cultural definitions – in this case, the “one drop” definition of blackness – were self-evidently correct, and proceeded to investigate why other cultures didn’t conform to those definitions. Rather than starting with open-ended questions – what does having some African ancestry mean here? why do some mixed-race communities in Latin America identify with certain aspects of their heritage, such as their native identity, rather than others? Why do some mixed race communities identify as something separate from either “parent” community? – his questions came from a place of judgment – ie: why don’t people here define themselves as black, if they have African heritage? Why do they deny their identity?
Informative and thought-provoking, this book gave me far more than I was expecting, clarifying some of my own confusion on how race is defined here in the United States, and giving me the opportunity to ponder my own opinions on the subject. The author has no strong editorial stance on the issue, although I think he probably hopes the nation will go in the direction of Hawaii, with its acceptance of people of mixed racial heritage. For my part, I’m moving toward the idea that our definition of race in this country is akin to our definition of gender or of sexual orientation: we’re far more comfortable with dichotomies involving discrete oppositional categories (so much easier to think about, and to organize) than with the chaos of multiple groups and identities. I think the reality, however, is that race (like gender and sexual orientation) is probably more of a spectrum, with few people on one pole or the other. Recommended to readers interested in the definitions of race that pertain in the United States, and for a history of the "one-drop" rule....more
In his introduction to this horrifying photographic record of racial terrorism, historian and professor Leon F. Litwack writes: "Obviously, it is easiIn his introduction to this horrifying photographic record of racial terrorism, historian and professor Leon F. Litwack writes: "Obviously, it is easier to choose the path of collective amnesia, to erase such memories, to sanitize our past. It is far easier to view what is depicted on these pages as so depraved and barbaric as to be beyond the realm of reason. That enables us to dismiss what we see as an aberration, as the work of crazed fiends and psychopaths"(33-34).
For anyone so inclined, for those who long for "the good old days," wax nostalgic about the "gallantry" of the Old South, or generally feel that racial oppression "wasn't that bad," this gut-wrenching record of brutality and savage inhumanity must surely function as a corrective. For my part, this book came upon me, as Kafka would have it, "like ill-fortune," and I found myself both fascinated and repelled by the record of human depravity that it chronicles. It prompted me to begin reading more about the history of lynching, an interest that culminated in a research project I undertook in one of my college classes on African-American history. I can honestly say that it was one of the most difficult experiences, both intellectually and emotionally, of my academic career.
Without Sanctuary provides a photographic record of the phenomenon of lynching, reproducing 98 images, many of them from postcards made as commemorative souvenirs. In addition to the brief foreword by Congressman John Lewis, a historical overview by Litwack, and a short personal reaction by Hilton Als, the book contains explanatory notes for each of the plates, and an afterword by James Allen, the man who amassed this most disturbing collection.
The extreme savagery of lynching may surprise those who had assumed that this activity involved "mere" hanging. The ways in which the victims' bodies were mutilated, both before and after death, makes for sickening reading and viewing. The hacking off of fingers and other body parts for souvenirs reads like some ghoulish detail of a horror novel. As always, fact is stranger and stronger, than the most bizarre of fictions. The very existence of these photographs, the fact that they were taken at all, is evidence of the almost pathological depravity of those who committed these terrible crimes. Not only were they not ashamed of their deeds, they recorded them for posterity, complete with "humorous" comments about "barbeques."
The only book I can think of, that comes even close to this in its up-front and photographic depiction of human evil, is The Auschwitz Album, which reproduces photographs that the Nazis took of Hungarian Jews as they arrived at the death camp. But even these photos do not depict the actual murder of the victims, the gas chamber, and the crematorium.
There can be no doubt that this book is deeply disturbing, traumatic even, to the reader. But as has so often been observed, it is necessary to arm ourselves with information about the atrocities of the past, in order to prevent their repetition. To that end, I recommend this to everyone. As William Pickens wrote in Lynching and Debt Slavery, an ACLU report published in 1921: "To cheapen the lives of any group of men, cheapens the lives of all men, even our own. This is a law of human psychology, or human nature. And it will not be repealed by our wishes nor will it be merciful to our blindness."...more
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