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NY Times Op-Ed, Nov. 21 2017
Colin Kaepernick and the Myth of the ‘Good’ Protest
By GLENDA ELIZABETH GILMORE
LAST week, the editors of GQ named the quarterback Colin Kaepernick its
Citizen of the Year for his work protesting racial injustice. Mr.
Kaepernick has been heavily criticized by people like President Trump,
who claims that an N.F.L. player who kneels during the playing of the
national anthem “disrespects our flag” and should be fired; others argue
that he is out of bounds as an activist who mixes sports with politics.
The problem is that Mr. Kaepernick’s critics, and most of America, don’t
really understand how protests work. Our textbooks and national
mythology celebrate moments when single acts of civil disobedience,
untainted by political organizations, seemed to change the course of
history. But the ideal of the “good” protest — one that materialized
from an individual’s epiphany — is a fantasy. More often, effective
protest is like Mr. Kaepernick’s: it’s collective and contingent and all
about long and difficult struggles.
Consider what most Americans would agree were two “good” protests: Rosa
Parks’s refusal to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala., and
the student sit-ins at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C.
Parks, the story goes, was exhausted from a day’s work and took a seat
in the “whites only” section. To the astonishment of onlookers, she
refused to give up her seat when asked. In Greensboro, black college
students decided to eat at the local five-and-dime and initiated the
first sit-in at a segregated Southern restaurant. They were idealistic
and perhaps naïve.
These stories follow a set narrative. They are “firsts”: the first time
a black woman refused to give up her seat or the first time students
staged a sit-in. They seemed to arise spontaneously when someone fed up
with unfair treatment couldn’t take it anymore. Good protesters act as
individual citizens, untainted by associations with suspect political
organizations.
The trouble is that these stories are historically inaccurate and
obscure just how protest in the 20th century forged a more democratic
country. A narrative with greater accuracy would allow us to better
evaluate protests against racial discrimination. Earlier protests,
similar to the one that Mr. Kaepernick started, sprang from protesters’
associations with activist organizations, were deeply political rather
than individual, and played out in unfamiliar venues in new forms.
Protests that change history have their own long histories. They are
almost never the first of their kind. Successful protesters plan
campaigns, rather than respond to oppression in a single, spontaneous
act. Protesters often belong to organizations that lend theoretical,
moral and logistical support. Protests don’t reveal previously hidden
wrongs to an unaware public. Instead, they cast those wrongs in a new
light. They fail, time and time again. When they succeed, they win only
partial victories.
Rosa Parks, for example, was a trained civil rights activist. She built
on efforts that started in the 19th century to desegregate
transportation and gained speed in the 1930s. In 1940, for example,
Pauli Murray, a black woman, refused to give up her seat on a bus in
Petersburg, Va.
Though most Americans today look back on the desegregation of public
transportation with pride, most white Southerners opposed it vehemently,
and many did so violently. During World War II, white passengers and bus
drivers beat uniformed black soldiers who tried to integrate buses.
A. Philip Randolph knew that the emergency of war meant that these
instances of discrimination ran counter to the nation’s interests.
Randolph drew on his long experience as a labor leader to found the
March on Washington Movement in 1941. The movement threatened to bring
millions of African-Americans to Washington to protest; when President
Franklin Roosevelt promised reforms, Randolph called off the march.
Throughout the war, the movement continued to train people who became
civil rights protesters in the 1950s, including Pauli Murray. This
pressure influenced the Supreme Court in 1946, which ordered
desegregation on interstate buses in Morgan v. Virginia. That case set a
precedent that Parks strategically worked to extend to local and state
laws in Montgomery.
Just as Parks had done, the students sitting-in at the Woolworth counter
drew from a long history of struggle. African-Americans had been “stool
sitting” since the early 1940s. Howard University students in Washington
staged some of the first sit-ins, which involved movement-trained
protesters led by Murray. Those sit-ins aimed at national chain stores
that operated outside the South, just as the Greensboro sit-ins
purposefully did later. The Greensboro students knew all of this,
because they were advised by the legendary organizer Ella Baker.
White Americans’ deep investment in the myth that the civil rights
movement quickly succeeded based on individual protests has left the
impression that organizations such as Black Lives Matter are
counterproductive, even sinister. The same things were said of the
N.A.A.C.P.
Just as football players kneeling during the national anthem today must
repeatedly insist that they are not protesting the flag, Parks and the
Greensboro students had to fight against efforts to play down the stakes
of their protests. Parks’s action was not about a seat in the front of
the bus. It was about Jim Crow, a legal and social system of
degradation. And as Baker argued in her speech “Bigger Than a
Hamburger,” the Greensboro sit-ins marked the beginning of a fight for
education, voting rights and economic opportunity.
Rosa Parks was a hero. So were the students who sat in at the Woolworth
lunch counters. But they knew that their heroism was possible only
because of decades of what Baker called “spade work.” They knew that
organizations to which they belonged and that gave them strength were
the most recent manifestations of decades of struggle.☐
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore (@GilmoreGlenda) is a professor of history at
Yale and a co-author of “These United States: A Nation in the Making,
1890 to the Present.”
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