BLOODY VICTORY

A couple of months ago, up here in Sandisfield, Mass.
Bill Cohn, the local historian, asked me to prepare a talk
about black suffrage…..and while I was researching, the
world came to me…..blacks all over America were voting
their hearts out in great clumps…..for a skinny brown dude
from everywhere…Hawaii, Indonesia, Kenya, Kansas
and the south side of Chicago.

Have you ever been on the south side of Chicago?

I was struck dumb.

When it actually happened,; when Wolf Blitzer pointed
at a cinemascope screen that read “OBAMA CLINCHES
DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION” I was struck dumb.

All I could do was cry.

My God it had been (for me) 48 years…and we never
figured to win this big.

The first person I called was Marvin Rich……Marvin
had taken the tough shift…..those years before the
Sixties when he tended the CORE office, challenging
Jim Crow north and south long before the celebrity
of the “civil rights movement”.

Did anybody remember that almost no black Americans
at all voted in South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama,
Louisiana, Georgia and all those other Confederate states
as recently as 1960? Did anybody remember the
unfinished dam outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi
where in June of 1964 the bodies of Mickey
Schwerner, Jim Chaney andAndrew Goodman were found?
They had been ambushed after visiting a Philadelphia
church which had been burned to the ground because
it had conducted a voter registration service.

Chaney, a CORE field secretary, was beaten so badly that
the FBI told me the body looked like it had been found at
the site of an airline crash.

In 1964 there were six murders, thirty-five shootings, thirty
home and business bombings and the bombings of
thirty-five churches…

Most of this has become boiler plate…….printed but unread.

But it all came parading through my head when
Senator Obama got nominated….and my head
was so full of faces and names……

Bob Gore, one of our bravest black brothers, hero
of a half-dozen modern civil wars, died alone of
malaria in The Gambia, Africa last month.
He’d had enough, he wanted to go home.

And Rudy Lombard…..who walked alone at night
in the Louisiana country parishes trying to register
black voters with the Klan on his heels?

And Jim Farmer, my best friend, who has literally
vanished from the history he created …..the first
applicaton of Gandhi’s non-violent technique in
America…..when he and Jimmy Robinson sat down
and got thrown out of a segregated Chicago restaurant
in 1942…..when Martin Luther King was 13 years old.

Entirely forgotten are the hundreds of CORE chapters
in the north flailing away at the deep undramatic stuff
……segregated education, unspeakable housing,
segregated unions.

Herb Callendar brought a cage of Harlem rats to the steps
of city hall in New York.

In Cleveland, a young man lay down in front of an urban
renewal bulldozer and was killed.

I don’t want to disturb the Senator’s precious moment.

I just want to remind us that it has been 389 bloody
terrible years since Ameica’s first slave ship (a Dutch ship called
“The White Lion”) parked at Jamestown……

Bravo Barack! Now we can rest….just for awhile.