As someone who was born in the middle of that tumultuous era, too young to know the challenges but now old enough to appreciate the sacrifices, I had to really spend time ruminating on the question: Fifty years later why do we still walk?
We walk to commemorate…to remember…to reflect.
Fifty years after the beginning of the civil rights movement we still walk because most of us believe, as our first Black president Barack Obama poignantly said, “this union may never be perfect but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.”
And we continue to walk every year because there remain important lessons to be learned from the strategies and tactics of those civil rights activists for social justice.
When you have some time, perhaps as part of your Black History Month activities this February, pick-up a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book David & Goliath and read Chapter Six on Wyatt Walker. The book is on the “art of battling giants” and the chapter on Mr. Walker paints the civil rights icon as a “trickster figure extraordinaire.” Mr. Walker, for those of you under the age of 50, was the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization led by Dr. King.
Mr. Walker was a Baptist minister from Massachusetts who joined Dr. King in 1960. Galdwell describes him as: Dr. King’s “nuts and bolts man”, his organizer and fixer. Dr. King was the prophet, gracious and charismatic. Mr. Wyatt was a mischief-maker – slender, elegant, and intellectual. Dr. King was the moral absolutist…Mr. Walker liked to call himself the pragmatist. Gladwell comments, Mr. Walker stayed in the shadows. He didn’t allow himself to be photographed with Dr. King. And when he was deployed to Birmingham, Alabama to lead the civil rights crusade in that city, many people had no idea what he looked like.
The year was 1963. The movement was in crisis and needed a major victory. Birmingham, nicknamed Bombingham at the time due to the Klan’s’ explosive crimes against Blacks, was considered one of the most racially divided cities in the nation. And the city’s chief law enforcement officer Eugene “Bull” Connor was a hard-line segregationist.
The goal of the Birmingham Campaign was to put America’s continued racial segregation in the spotlight by drawing consistent media attention. And Mr. Walker’s plan, he named Project C (C for Confrontation), was staged in three parts – all intended to built on the previous actions beginning with sit-ins at local businesses, then boycotts, then mass marches and mass arrests.
Once Mr. Walker’s plan finally started working, it was his idea to raise the stakes by using Birmingham’s children in the effort by staging non-violent protests that ended in the arrests of hundreds of school children. And while he and Dr. King were widely criticized for doing so, that was the very reason the campaign – and the inequality and racist laws it was fighting against – became a national and international media story.
So, how does that remembrance help us now? What lessons can we learn? What are we still determined to do? What giants are we continuing to battle today?
As long as 1 in 3 Black males are likely to be imprisoned at some point in their lives, then we need to walk. As long as Black students are 3 times more likely than Whites to be suspended or expelled, then we need to walk. And as long as Blacks have higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease than other racial groups, then we need to walk.
We need to remember. We need to reflect. And then we need to be like Dr. King and his trickster “nuts & bolts” mischief-maker and DO SOMETHING. Utilize the tools at your disposal much like they did with the children of Birmingham. Identify the problem, strategize the best solutions, and ACT.
When it comes to racism and racial disparities, will this country ever be perfect? No. But with each generation we can and must be determined to strive for a more perfect union, and that is why we still walk.