Reflections/Jonathan Gramling
Celebrating Black History
When I was two years old — totally unbeknownst to me — they modern Civil Rights Movement began when the Warren Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Plessey vs. Ferguson was unconstitutional in its Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Segregation was now illegal.
This important ruling did not just appear. For a couple of decades, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund under the guidance of Charles Hamilton Huston and Thurgood Marshall — who later became the first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice — leading the way.
Of course, it is one thing for the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional and for people — especially in the South — to respect the ruling and follow it as the law of the land. To say there was massive resistance is an understatement.
The next year, in December 1955, a young Bpatist minister by the name of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a community-wide bus boycott when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. It was the will of Montgomery’s Black community and its solidarity — which was kept strong through weekly Mass Meetings — that led to the end of Montgomery’s segregated buses in December 1956.
While Dr. King spearheaded the national movement and its visibility through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, it was groups of people in individual towns aand cities across the South who fought to end de jure segregation.
Back in the early 1970s, I was active in Project Self-Help and Awareness, through which predominantly white college students would stay with rural Black families and help with chores or at places like Head Start. At night, we would sit around the fireplace to stay warm and I would listen to the people who hosted us. They talked about the Civil Rights Movements in their communities and what they accomplished together.
I would say that these local movements were just as important as the national marches led by Dr. King in eliminating segregation and how Black people were treated in their hometowns. And I would contend that the results were mixed. If there was an effective local movement, then the national movement solidified those gains. In areas where there wasn’t an effective movement — in large part due to an active KKK presence — what came down nationally was muted because of local conditions.
Our Urban Treasure in this issue is Charles Brown who was active in the Civil Rights Movement when he was a teenager growing up in Greenville, Mississippi. He came to UW-Madison in 1970 around the time when I was getting active in Mississippi.
I went on to attend Alcorn State University in Lorman, Mississippi from 1975-1977. My time at Alcorn, an HBCU, was very impactful for reasons I have stated in earlier columns. Mississippi could be a very violent place I learned when my friend’s — Eddie Young — and my house was burned down to the ground without any fire or police investigation taking place.
And later in 1978 when I was working on the Congressional campaign of Evan Doss, an independent candidate, the RV I was living in was vandalized — with me in it — and then the front window to our campaign headquarters was smashed. Again there was really no police investigation beyond them investigating who I was and what I was doing there in Jackson.
While I was going to Alcorn, I was invited to dinner at the home of the mother of one of the white instructors who taught at Alcorn. She had real Southern charm and was quite hospitable. And she was curious about me. And over the course of the evening, in her own charming way, she wondered why I wasn’t doing what I did back in Wisconsin. Weren’t there enough racial problems there for me to get involved in? Why did I have to come to Mississippi to “cause trouble?”
Over the course of the next few years, I thought about that and on some levels she was right. There was plenty of work to be done in Madison. And so in 1982, when fate brought me to the Madison Urban League, I took full opportunity to become engaged in Madison’s civil rights struggle and remained at the Urban League for 12 years, spending eight of those years working as the vice-president of operations for the late Betty Franklin-Hammonds who was the Urban League president. And so here I am, 44 years later, still doing civil rights work in some capacity or another.
What is encouraging is the level of Black History Month recognitions and celebrations that are going on in Madison and across the country in small and large ways, whether it is through social media, at libraries and public functions. It is the people who own Black History and Black History Month.
While the Trump Administration is working hard to erase from public memory the contributions of Blacks to America either as enslaved Africans or free Americans, it will never work. Just like those civil rights struggles in every hamlet across America, Black History is embedded in the hearts, soujls and minds of every African American and every community in the United States.
As Jamala Rogers, one of our columnists points out, people don’t need Trump’s permission to celebrate Black History. It is a celebration that breaks out simultaneously across this great land.
And those displays, references and statues about the contributions of Black people that Trump has had removed? Mark my words, they’ll be back. The truth shall set you free. Celebrate Black History!