'Power yields nothing without demand'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/apr/14/student-nonviolent-coordinating-committee
In 1960s Albany, death lay at every turn as brave volunteers of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee well knew
Clancy Sigal
14 April 2010
I wasn't at Valley Forge or Gettysburg or at other historic American
battlefields that we continue to venerate. But I was in Albany,
southwest Georgia, in the explosive 60s when, led by religiously
oriented, singing-and-shouting youngsters of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, an entire black community in Albany, hitherto
subjugated and (for good reason) afraid, rallied to find its own
collective voice in self-taught non-violent tactics that beat The Man
who had (literally) beaten them for so long. This week, a 50th
anniversary celebration of black and white "Freedom Movement"
veterans survivors, actually is taking place in Raleigh, North
Carolina. Without the incendiary, uncompromising, "jail, no bail"
militance of the SNCC volunteers I doubt if the battle for civil
rights would have prevailed as rapidly or as relatively peacefully.
SNCC didn't live very long a few years at best before fatigue,
stress, the FBI's spy-and-disrupt CoIntelPro and Black Power
swallowed it up. But not before it had accomplished its historic
mission which went way beyond even black voter representation and
desegregation of bus terminals and lunch counters. Under fire (of
real bullets), it lived its dream. "Power yields nothing without
demand!" was a favourite slogan. Unwilling to wait for a Promised
Land, the young women and men, black and white soldiers of SNCC
created their own transcendent personal relationships and, in a
system of workshops, developed leaders "from the bottom" among pool
hustlers and choir singers, delinquents and respectables. SNCC's
genius which set it apart from more conventional civil rights
groups like NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Core etc
was to have confidence in the capacities of previously uninvolved,
fearful, formally uneducated black people.
Death murder - lay around every corner. "If you're not prepared to
die here in Albany then you're not facing reality," a 19-year old
SNCC girl told me one day. (A little later, just across the state
line in Neshoba, Mississippi, three young Freedom Movement workers
James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, one black man and
two whites were savagely murdered by local law enforcement in
league with the Ku Klux Klan.) In the heat of battle beatings,
deliberate humiliation, terror, jail as a daily fact of life, legal
defeats, disillusionment with celebrated "leaders" a genuine
redemptive community was created. The "beloved community" was a fact
not a phrase.
I'd come to Albany in 1963, a lone white man toting a portable
typewriter in a racially tense town. My luck held, because a previous
visit by a sympathetic Guardian reporter, WJ Weatherby, had created
such good feelings in the aroused and suspicious black community,
that the positive energy he left in his wake automatically rubbed off
onto me. "He's English … feed the man!" was the welcome I got in the
first black household I called on.
Although I was on assignment there was no question of standing aside
from "the struggle". This meant sharing a floor in a sharecropper's
shack to sleep on, cleaning toilet bowls and cooking meals when asked
to, standing night guard at a firebomb-threatened home, riding
rattletraps deep into the rural backwoods to hand out voter
registration forms to people who had been prevented from voting for
generations, keeping nervous watch out the car's back window not
knowing if the dark trees sheltered a KKK-style shotgun blast, doing
all kinds of donkey work. Along the way we'd pass burned-out churches.
SNCC may not have invented the mass meeting and mass demonstration,
but I'd never before seen them employed so dramatically and
effectively. The mass meeting itself, often held in sweltering
country churches, was an exercise in pure communal power. Sitting
alongside semi-literate maids and farm labourers, children and
grandmothers, singing the old prayer songs now adapted to the
movement, you could hear the rhythm of the feet and clapping of hands
and feel the positive energy bursting from the throats of people who
were no longer waiting but affirming and demanding. In the name of
Jesus, a new south was being born amid Albany's cotton fields and pecan groves.
I always knew that like the Guardian's Bill Weatherby I'd be moving
on. Charles Sherrod, a young Baptist SNCC (currently chaplain at
Georgia state prison), took me down to the Trailways bus station.
Charlie shook my hand and looked me in the eye. "You should stay here
and fight with us. But if you can't, remember that we love you."
I was stunned. I'd been expatriated in England so long I wasn't used
to open emotion so openly expressed. I'm not a spiritual person. But
to this day I have carried with me that feeling, that sense of
transformative, redemptive and yes, angry love.
In those inflamed days, of lynchings and bone-breaking beatings
instigated by local white power structures, someone as
conciliation-prone and slap-my-other-cheek as Barack Obama simply
would have been trampled over by the thousands of impatient SNCC
volunteers who demanded their "Freedom - now!". President Obama is
too young to have been personally involved with SNCC. He is sending
his black attorney general down to Raleigh to speak to the 50th
anniversary conference. Yet somehow, he recently found found six
hours out of his busy schedule to descend on the troops in
Afghanistan. It's a pity he can't spare a little extra time for the
youngsters, now grey-haired, who were so responsible for making him
our first black president. If he came to Raleigh he might get taught
the SNCC lesson that power yields nothing without demand and the guts
to back it up.
.
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