A split within the movement
The Freedom Rides were fifty years ago this month.
They weren’t universally seen as a good idea within the movement at the time – many people thought they were too much: too much of a deliberate provocation, too likely to trigger violence, too risky.
Well – they were a deliberate provocation, made by doing something that was entirely legal, and unexceptionable (to wit, making use of a public commercial facility). They did trigger violence, but the violence finally, after a lot of chickenshit footdragging by the Kennedy brothers, in turn triggered a federal response: when a mob attacked a church full of civil rights activists in Montgomery and pinned them inside, in fear of being burned alive, martial law was declared and federal troops arrived to prevent a mob victory.
The tame safe moderate unprovocative quiet thing is not always the best thing to do.
Channeling Rosenau.
Anecdotes, bah!. Where’s the scientific evidence that this actually helped? Where is the evidence that the civil rights movement would not have occurred and been successful without such incidents?
Astounding to think that just riding a friggin’ bus could be so offensive to certain interests, and thus be such a huge political act. And within my lifetime! (Though I was about 1000 miles north, and too young to be paying attention)
Makes one realize how far we have come — and yet how close to the surface those attitudes must still be, and will be until all those who held them have died off, and maybe their children, too. In proof of that I give you: birthers.
Belatedly, it occurs to me I should acknowledge the fact that you were actually taking about something else ;-).
@Eamon Knight
Considering the current reaction to purchased advertisements on the sides of buses, there should be no surprise that the same folks would be offended by “colored” riding in the wrong seats. Religion(of the common type) and racism have in common the idea of in-groups and out-groups, and out-group expression always creates serious and often violent reactions from the in-group types.
I wasn’t really talking about something else, Eamon. The two are connected.
And, I know, and that partly proves my point. We find it hard to imagine now. Well – that’s because things change.
The Freedom Riders directly challenged “beliefs” that people held very strongly and that were part of their identity. The FRs certainly didn’t change those beliefs directly and instantly…but nevertheless, things did change. Circumstances, political arrangements, “facts on the ground,” alliances…and some minds, to some extent. Plus the conveyor belt of time dropped people off it, as it does.
Rosenau and Mooney (like everyone else) just don’t know what will happen in the future. That means they don’t get to tell everyone what to do based on their conviction that they do know.
The Freedom Riders raise a lot of good questions. As Deepak pointed out, science can’t help us, at least not in the strictest sense, because there is no way to create a test case or repeat the experiment.
More important, what do we do now to prevent similar incidents? Do we wait for the Muslim mothers to kill their daughters as in the previous post and then demonstrate the consequences of that action? Or do we enter the mosques in India and interrupt whenever the relevant Koranic passages are spoken? I think we are seeing that going into countries and trying to force democracy on them is not working.
It is easy to say that the tame and safe options aren’t working, but what does work?
The accommos would shrug it off, but there is a hard-to-get-around point here, which is that, extending the logic of the accommodationist philosophy, they would have told black protesters to be less confrontational. White racism, after all, was a “deeply held belief,” not to mention profoundly wound up in people’s “sense of personal identity.” So how ever are you going to change those minds, the accommodationist circa 1960 would say, with aggressive tactics like sit-ins and bus boycotts? Presumably, the thing to do would have been to find common ground—look for ways that white racism and full rights for black Americans are “compatible” and build on that.
Andy – right – that was my point. I see now that I forgot to spell it out!
Andy,
You’re basically talking about the difference between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Which of those leaders do you think was more effective in implementing change in our society?
I was too young to be aware of what was going in the 60’s. Looking back, it seems to me that both were needed and necessary.
I’ve never felt comfortable comparing the gnus to the civil rights movement. I understand the confrontational aspect, confrontation gets results. That’s pretty much where it ends though. Which one of us wouldn’t want to go into a Walgreen’s and be told that we could only sit with the other rational thinkers? You’re not allowed to attend social gatherings with christians (who wants to?). You can’t marry a christian (I for one am glad I didn’t). All the freethinking rational people have to attend separate schools (wait to you see those scores on standardized tests). The gnus have to sit in the back of the bus (the safest place in the bus) with the rest of the atheists (sounds good to me, I’m sick of getting on mass transit and having to sit next to morons with their jesus talk). Well, I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Btw, I’m not suggesting that any of you are talking about anything but the confrontational aspect. Oh, and the christians haven’t lit any of us on fire lately (though a lot of them would like to).
Beth, read King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and see what he had to say about accommodationists.
I’d do it. Are you saying you wouldn’t?
And really, it isn’t necessary for Levels of Oppression to be exactly compared between oppressed groups before one notices and remarks on the similarities among outspoken movements that demolish that oppression.
Josh, I think that’s a great point. This isn’t the Oppression Olympics, we don’t have to compete with the civil rights movement, or, say, the fight for gay marriage equality today, for our plaint to be considered valid.
I personally have not been discriminated against for not being religious, but friends in America have been and are. One good mate of mine is a closeted agnostic; she currently lives with a family member and cannot afford to “come out” in case she is left destitute. This is a real concern, and has big parallels with my own, and many of my queer friends’, experiences of coming out in a different way.
@Beth: IMO, not a good analogy, and I’m not sure there really is one (who is the Gnu equivalent to Malcolm X? Someone who advocates burning down churches and/or starting an atheist enclave?).
MX and MLK differed in their specific goals and methods, but both held the enemy to be racism, and were uncompromising about it. That MLK advocated non-violent means did not make him any less confrontational, as the Freedom Rides showed. Indeed, the ludicrous overreaction of racists to innocuous acts by peaceful people was what publicly discredited the Southern status quo and shamed the federal government into acting. It was radically confrontational, both towards Southern racism and Northern look-the-other-way-ism and the-time-is-not-right-ism — which was the “accommodationism” of that situation, if anything is.
Mordacious–
No, it’s not analogous. But I do want to attend social gatherings with Christians and Jews and Buddhists and witches and other believers. Not because they’re believers, but because they’re my friends, and talk about things we both care about (like science, and politics, and people we know, and books). I don’t want my girlfriend’s congregation telling me she has to break up with me. (I am fairly sure that once she picked her jaw up, she would walk out of that place, not leave me: but not everyone makes that choice.)
And I wouldn’t want anyone with a bible to be able to order me to stand up so they could have my seat on the bus. (The back may be safest in case of accident, but it’s less comfortable in terms of fumes and motion sickness the rest of the time.) People seem to have forgotten that what Rosa Parks did wasn’t to insist on sitting in the “white” section of the bus: it was to keep her seat in the “black” section when a white person demanded it, because whites had the privilege of claiming all the seats if there were a lot of white riders.
I also don’t want a society where it’s considered a radical act to hire a nonbeliever for a job s/he is qualified for. Or one where the children of theists won’t be exposed to atheists.
Beth – no, Andy isn’t talking about Malcolm X at all. Didn’t you read the post? The “radical” branch in this case is the Freedom Riders, not Malcolm X at all. That’s my point. A dissent and a method that are now seen as obviously reasonable were then seen by some in the movement as too much in various ways. This could happen to the “don’t talk about it” atheists of today.
So are we going to start an Atheist bus tour/protest this summer?
:- )
Well that’s where the analogy falls apart. There would hardly be an equivalent of the firebombing in Anniston. And if I thought otherwise, I would stay home – I’m no Diane Nash.
Diane Nash is amazing.
Grendel’s Dad: Thanks for the suggestion. I had never read that letter before. It was quite interesting. However, there was nothing to speak of about ‘accommodationists’ in that letter. The analogy would be to the ‘complacent negros’, but he says very little about them. I think you may have been thinking of his references to the moderate whites, but they would analogize to the moderate theists rather than the atheists labeled ‘accomodationists’.
Eamon: I agree the analogy has it’s limitations, but there are similarities as well. It seems to me that Malcolm X and MLK Jr. differed primarily with regard to tactics. They both worked to eliminate the same wrongs and injustices they perceived in their society. I think this is analogous to the similarities and differences of the two groups of atheists under discussion here.
Ophelia: I realize you weren’t talking about Malcolm X. The comparison occurred to me because my recollection (I read his autobiography over twenty years ago, so my memory is hazy) was that he felt towards Martin Luther King Jr. and other blacks who advocated non-violence and allying with like-minded whites which seems similar to how gnu atheists feel about the atheists they term ‘accomodationists’ and allying with like-minded theists. My recollection is that he had a change of heart in that regard toward the end of his life.
Beth – but you said that was what Andy was talking about – and it wasn’t.
It’s true that it could have been. Who was “moderate” and who was “extreme” gets carved up in a lot of different places on this issue (and on others). But still – this particular post is about a different one from the King-Malcolm one.
Eamon sez:
Absolutely. Non-violent protests work when the political/societal will to keep oppressing violently falls short, as it did for India’s independence movement, our civil rights movement, the fall of the communist states in 1989, and most recently in some of the “Arab Spring” (or whatever they’re calling it now) revolutions. The images of the South’s reaction to peaceful protest sickened a lot of people; even people who were opposed to the goals and/or methods felt sympathetic. If it hadn’t, of course, it likely would have failed. There’s an interesting alternate history story (can’t recall name) where Germany wins WW2 (I forget how, not important) and occupies India. Gandhi’s non-violent activism fails as the story unfolds, because the Nazis have no problem responding with disproportionate force. It’s really depressing, actually, and I’ve been thinking of that story while watching the clusterfck that is Libya…