*From The Archives Of The Black Civil Rights Struggle-Bruce Watson's "Freedom Summer"- A Guest Interview

Click on the headline to link to a Boston Sunday Globe, dated August 8, 2010, interview with noted history writer Bruce Watson (Bread and Roses, Sacco and Vanzetti, both reviewed in this space) about his new book, Freedom Summer.


Markin comment:

No question that those who went South in the early 1960s, especially into hell-hole Mississippi to register blacks to vote, were in the vanguard of the civil rights movement (except, of course, the real vanguard, those home-grown civil rights fighters who had to stay and fight the rearguard actions after the student volunteers left). As noted here, many of those civil rights fighters of the time, including this writer (although my time was spent in hell-hole Alabama) went on to fight other social battles elsewhere.

But here is my problem with this mist of time thing although the book is a very worthwhile read, and I think that it epitomizes what was, in retrospect, the limitations on that struggle. It was never just about the simple democratic question of voting, important as that was for those who were forcibly not permitted to do so, and placing that in the center those other issues jobs, land, equal access, legal justice, etc. were not addressed. Or worst, after the heyday of the civil rights movement when our eyes turned to the Vietnam anti-war struggle the black liberation struggle in the South was placed on the back-burner, way on the back-burner.

And it has never, in a positive way at least, gotten back to center stage. Oh, except for that coterie, that rather large coterie as I have become aware of lately and was confirmed by some of the remembrances here, of those who went South (or did the important support work in the North and West) who now, in a self-satisfied manner, assume (still, if you can believe it) that the election of one Barack Obama put paid to the question. At one point I avoided such people, some of them friends, purposefully. Liberals, blah.