1 Boring Old Man

I just watched Eyes on the Prize, that amazing documentary of the Civil Rights Movement. The episodes I watched covered Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1963 through the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965. So many memories. I’ve thought a lot about those days in this last year or so with the craziness in our government. Not only does it feel similar. Many of our current difficulties had their roots in those days.

When Kennedy was killed and Johnson took over the White House, the Democratic Party was thrust into the middle of things. It was the Party in the South in my childhood. In 1964, after the murders of Medger Evers in Jackson and Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner in Philadelphia, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party went to the Democratic Convention. Though Johnson didn’t seat them, after that, he became increasingly involved in the Movement, passing the Voters Rights Act and sending troops into the South to protect the marchers. I think he knew he was destroying the Democratic Party, at least their control of the South, and he either had no other choice, or rose the the call of history.

The great irony to me is that his opponent in 1964 was Barry Goldwater, the father of the Conservative Movement in America. I say ironic because Goldwater’s Conservativism had nothing to do with the Civil Rights Movement as I recall. But here we sit, decades later, with the Republicans in power in a Conservative revival that has crippled the country, aided in part by the solid Republican South.

But the biggest irony of all to me, obvious living it as well as looking at it on the television screen, was the placement of the religious leaders. It wasn’t only the Black Clergy that lead us back then. Bus loads of clergy from all over the country poured south to march with us. It wasn’t a "liberal" thing to do. It was the right thing to do. It’s memories of those days and the clergymen who helped free people that makes the shameful way the Religious Right and to a lesser extent the Christian population in America have allowed themselves to be incorporated into this Republican takeover of our government so painful – with goals that are so foreign to the ones from back then – goals that would have been foreign to even Barry Goldwater. The religious leaders talk about "values voters" and I just want to scream – What values? Hating Homosexuals, building walls to keep latinos out, abandoning pregnant women, torture, unlimited detention, domestic surveillance, unprovoked war, Congressional corruption.

Back then, things were mighty dark, but there was a spirit that was moving even as people were being bludgeoned on that Selma Bridge. I wonder where it is now…