Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social class, means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle with the world such as few of the more favored classes know or appreciate.
-W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
A society’s past never sleeps, but a society can fall asleep to its past, only to be revisit the past in dreams and nightmares. The history of the 20th-century Civil Rights Movement (The Black Freedom Struggle) painfully revisits America in the 21st century. This week I had the privilege of attending a Leadership Journey sponsored by Teach For America-Metro Atlanta in the town of Albany in South Georgia, and again awakening to the urgency of the civil rights struggle.
On the trip, participants first explored their personal leadership, their values and their limitations before connecting leadership to the ongoing struggle for civil rights in the United States. In the exploration of Albany’s civil rights history, Albany’s education system and the examples of past civil rights-era icons, I witnessed the clarion call of equity to a slumbering country. Albany offers a case study of the effects of history on our present attitudes, and how we can use the story of the past to illuminate the freedom struggle of the present.
Freedom Fighters in Albany, 1960-2011
A tremendous account of the freedom struggle I would recommend to interested readers is Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America by Wesley Hogan. In the account of the struggle in Albany, Hogan describes how in 1961 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee led by Charles Sherrod, “moved from voter registration to complete desegregation of this small, semi-rural city.” SNCC workers directly challenged the segregation of public places and as a result “within a week of the first arrests, the SNCC workers had seven hundred people in jail.”
In the Albany Civil Rights Institute which preserves this history, described how photographer Danny Lyon captured the inhumane conditions of SNCC workers and community members once they had been jailed. The police herded women and children to rural jails with no food or running water without due process. Lyon’s national publication of the photographs and the multiracial coalition of SNCC workers drew a national audience to the civil rights struggle in South Georgia. Charles Sherrod believed segregation could be destroyed only “if they see white and black working together, side by side, the white man no more and no less than his black brother, but human beings together.”
After the victories of major civil rights legislation in the 1960s, the struggle lost traction as national attention shifted away and the pieces of the movements began to fracture. But the problems did not disappear. As John Perdew, a civil rights veteran who accompanied our trip, said, the problems did not vanish but only became “sneakier.” During an hour-long chance to explore Albany, I spoke with a white church employee in Albany who described her upbringing and the changing “color” of the school system. The Albany area resegregated beginning in the 1970s, as public institutions in Albany weakened and white residents moved from Dougherty County to Lee County. I also discovered public records of a 2011 lawsuit under Section 5 of the 1964 Voting Rights Act claiming Dougherty County’s redistricting was racially discriminatory.
Freedom fighters today in Albany defend the equity of the school system, the fairness for voters of all races and access to housing. In the public library I found a report on fair housing in Albany, which described the long waiting lists for affordable housing and the rising cost of living which leaves a quarter of the city’s population at risk of homelessness. The following two figures show how fair housing in Albany disproportionately breaks down by race:
Figure 1: Eligibility for Public Housing in Albany, GA
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Figure 2: Demographic Breakdown of Albany, GA
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
History Lives, 2012-future
The struggle for freedom does not look like it did during the Albany Movement of the 1960s, but the imperative is no less strong today. Charles Sherrod remains active in civil rights work in South Georgia today, starting with his wife Shirley the New Communities at Cypress Pond project on an old plantation site. The New Communities project reconnects people with agriculture, preserves the African-American rural culture documented by W.E.B. DuBois in his ethnography The Souls of Black Folk and offers a chance for reconciliation in a still-fractious Southern society.
Sit-ins, confronting county sheriffs and marches on Washington may not be the face of the freedom struggle today, but the history lives in the same places that it did before. Where before activists resisted Jim Crow, today they resist the breakdown of public schools, white flight, gentrification, reductions in social programs, lack of access to housing and food and the erosion of the mindsets of freedom and fellowship which took root in the 1960s. The Moral Monday movement in the South is one example today.
April 10th, 2014 was the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act passage. President Obama spoke in Austin, Texas on the significance of this anniversary, in words that hold truth across America and in the little case study of Albany, GA:
If some of [this social inequality and legislation] sounds familiar, it’s because today we remain locked in the same great debate about equality and opportunity and the role of government.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
