If you want to make sure that no one challenges your backward policies, keeping young people away from knowledge is the best way to do it. Especially since the things that scare you most were the result of the work of a multicultural coalition of college students.
By Denise Clay-Murray
A couple of weeks ago, I went to Birmingham, Alabama for the National Association of Black Journalists convention.
When you’re in a city like Birmingham, as you are in most cities, you’re surrounded by history. Every town has a story, and those stories are told through buildings, street names and artifacts that are unique to the town.
So, while I was in Birmingham, I checked out the scene of one of those stories. Sitting on the corner of 16th Street and 6th Avenue North in Birmingham is the 16th Street Baptist Church. It was a gathering spot for Civil Rights campaigners, as was the park across the street from it, Kelly Park.
But in addition to being a gathering place during the Civil Rights Movement, it was also a place of worship. Which is why people from as far away as Wales were angry when the church was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan, killing four little girls in the process. The incident was among the things that spurred people from around the country to come to the South in the name of making change.
The Civil Rights movement was just one of the many uprisings from the 1960s that brought America the closest it has ever been to fulfilling the meaning of its Constitution. Through the efforts of a multicultural, mostly young, mostly educated coalition, marginalized communities were able to demand, and receive in many cases, their rights.
That said, those who didn’t want these communities to prosper even a little bit had children.
And those children have grown up to lead the current movement toward making sure that the multicultural, young, mostly educated coalition that eventually made it possible for a guy named Barack Obama to spend eight years in the one place that was never intended for a Black family to occupy never happens again.
Right now — especially in states like Arkansas, Iowa, and, most notably, Texas and Florida — folks are initiating ‘The Miseducation Of America’s Children’. Books such as “The Hate U Give,” “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and even “Catcher In The Rye” are being banned from schools. Black history students in Florida are being taught that slavery was a means to provide Blacks with skills. Libraries in mostly Black and brown schools in Houston are being turned into “discipline centers” and denying students access to any books at all.
And then there’s so-called “mothers” groups that believe that posters depicting multicultural harmony are subversive. A Salon.com article published this week, speaks about the so-called “war on woke” and how it manifested itself at a school board meeting in Conroe, Texas in the form of a group called Mama Bears Rising, and its complaint about a classroom poster depicting children of all races getting along.
The Horror!
The intentionality is so blatant that even Stevie Wonder could see it.
Now, this has all been in the works for a while. Like I said, the people who didn’t want to see the changes brought forth by the multicultural movements of the 1960s didn’t sit idly by as more Black people voted, women chose birth control rather than children, and members of the LGBTQ community started exerting itself.
They planned. They formed think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute, the organization that’s supporting the so-called “Mama Bears.” They fielded political candidates and gave them the money to win races. They put themselves in a position where they could control as many branches of government as possible, including the judiciary.
And by calling anything that doesn’t portray slavery as a job training plan Critical Race Theory — something your preschooler would never learn unless they happen to be in law school — and getting away with it, they’re trying to make sure that students don’t learn the truth of America because the last time that happened…well, you know.
Because I’m not a total philistine, I get it on some level. I get the fear and how longstanding and instilled it is. When you’ve been trained to believe that society is yours and yours alone, and yet you see all of these people you perceive as beneath you prospering, you want the scales to balance in your favor.
But here’s the thing about fear. It makes you do things that, if you took a moment to think about them, wouldn’t make sense.
For example, let’s go back to the corner of 16th Street and 6th Street North in Birmingham.
That intersection houses not only the 16th Street Baptist Church, it also houses the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum and Kelly Park, where statues portraying the Birmingham Children’s March and the dogs and water hoses that police trained on the young people protesting take center stage.
The church is on the National Registry of Historic Places and the park and museum are run by the National Parks Service. None of these things are going anywhere. Which means that students can access them and learn the stuff you’re trying to get them to avoid whenever they want to. The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where marchers including the late Congressman John Lewis were beaten as they tried to cross into Montgomery to register to vote is still a working bridge, so it’s definitely staying put.
After all of the work that’s gone into the museums on Washington’s National Mall, those are permanent fixtures too. And I’d leave Philadelphia’s President’s House alone if I were you. The Avenging the Ancestors Coalition would probably make your life miserable if you tried to get rid of that monument.
And we’re not even going to talk about the Internet, which is where most of America’s young people go for information anyway. As long as Google exists, finding out that slavery wasn’t a job training program, reading about the Stonewall Inn and why it’s important, or getting access to Ken Burns’s informative documentary on the Holocaust and how Jim Crow played into some of Adolf Hitler’s thinking, is as close as your fingertips.
While I don’t see a ’60s style protest movement in the offing because, let’s face it, the motivation for it isn’t there, I’m hoping that people realize that the threats we face as a nation and a democracy are real enough for us to consider talking about what’s next.
Because while many of the history hiders would like for you to think that a lot of the issues that have been coming up regarding marginalized communities are centuries old and don’t need to be discussed anymore, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing happened in 1963.
I wasn’t born yet.
But my husband Chris was a year old. And he just turned 61 this year.
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