Been in the storm so long, children

"Don't say gay" photo credit: Jamie Hollin

First, let me say that the State of Tennessee is on the wrong side of history by foiling Metro Nashville's attempt to enforce non-discrimination and by even entertaining "Don't Say Gay" legislation to bar homosexuality from being mentioned in public school classrooms. Tennessee is expressing that which is ignoble about American history.

Those high school students who have shown up to protest the State of Tennessee at legislative plaza are not only on the right side of history (if progress still matters), but they are attempting to show the General Assembly the way to our future, when sexual orientation and gender identity will make no difference in employment in government or the private sector (save for those backwater, culturally-impoverished specks who are too needy of aliens to fight to value mutual respect with people different than them).

Ku Klux Klan attacks Freedom Rider

Having said that, I cannot agree with the way Civil Rights Movement history continues to be distorted to support the protesters in Legislative Plaza, at risk of minimizing the profound and rare sacrifice of the 1961 Freedom Rides. A few weeks ago Tennessean columnist Gail Kerr, who seems to take her editorial cues from opportunistic political insiders, started the strained analogy, comparing today's picketers with yesterday's Freedom Riders.

Last Saturday morning U.S. Congressman Jim Cooper seemed to echo Kerr in the Tennessean, “It reminds me of the Freedom Riders in the ’60s .... We haven’t had that kind of spunk and gumption displayed by a young person in Nashville in a long time, maybe half a century.” The Freedom Riders spunky? That is without a doubt as big an understatement, as huge a disservice as Rep. Cooper could pay them. They had the courage to brave beatings, police intimidation, arrests, imprisonment, abandonment and death threats. We usually don't associate these extreme conditions with "gumptious" picket lines in America's circumscribed freedom zones. My Democratic representative seems to be dumbing down the supreme costs of the radicalizing necessary to confront and expose the hatred behind discrimination.

That's not to say that today's non-discrimination protesters have no parallels with the Civil Rights Movement or any other social protest tradition in America before or after the 1960s. Like contemporary protesters, civil rights protesters marched in Nashville (Jefferson Street). Street protests and picket lines are an important part of any social protests, and they often require the gumption of youth.

Beaten when FBI gave the Klan 15 mins on a bus

But the scope, commitment, and discipline of the 1961 movement were much larger than today's protests. The Freedom Riders had spent months in trainings sponsored by movement halfway houses like Highlander Folk School, which coordinated meetings in Monteagle, TN and locally at Fisk University. The legendary Rosa Parks was trained at Highlander. Vanderbilt Divinity student James Lawson started organizing students across Nashville in 1959, training them in nonviolent tactics and organizing lunch-counter sit-ins in the face of humiliating and dangerous conditions. For his part, Lawson was expelled from Vanderbilt, and wrong not made right until 2006 when Vandy apologized and hired him.

So, when compared to the Civil Rights Movement, today's protests would have to be considered a first step in a long process rather than full-blown reincarnation. The Freedom Rides were not a spontaneous reaction to a single piece of legislation. They were inspired by an earlier 1947 staging designed to desegregate interstate travel. Then they were incubated and developed over years in places like Nashville by young, savvy students who committed to the discipline of nonviolent civil disobedience and who trained, drilled, and practiced as if they were conducting a war. It was that discipline that prepared Freedom Riders to endure the state-sponsored intimidation and imprisonment that I have yet to witness today's protesters face.

No doubt legislators like Stacy "Don't Say Gay" Campfield are on the wrong side of history. They are on the side of discrimination. Tennessee Republicans (and more than a few Democrats) are not much different that the pre-Civil Rights generation of Tennessee leaders who allowed or encouraged segregation. Jim Cooper's own father, former Governor Prentice Cooper, presided over a "separate-but-equal" school system that staked whites to an advantage over African Americans.

Fisk student John Lewis & other Riders

Republicans like Campfield are gearing the education system against GLBT students in the same way now. And students should be applauded and supported for protesting and attempting to change that.

But if they are going to follow the Freedom Riders, they need to be aware of the true costs: in discipline over time, in perseverance across a long arc of history, and in the risk that they may face harm and ill treatment rather than the mere inconvenience of choosing the picket line over the everyday diversions of youth. In the words of the old slave spiritual and freedom song, the riders were in the storm so long. Jim Cooper does not do these students a service by suggesting that they have attained the stature to which they may aspire. He should have called them to something even higher.

James Lawson on Non-violence

Non-violence tries to create a different configuration of power so that the opponents come to recognize that they can do nothing about the movement that is intervening with their daily life. In the city of Nashville in 1960, the incidents of the white thugs beating up on us, throwing rocks at us and all the rest of us, and all the taunting and the name calling we responded not with attitudes or behavior like that. We responded with our own dignity and with insisting that the problems needed to be faced and could be solved.

- - James Lawson, 12/26/2006 NPR Interview

Check out the Vanderbilt Professor's NPR interview on non-violence. The NPR reporter's conventional blinders on non-violent resistance are as interesting to me as James Lawson's view points. The mainstream media has a tendency to bifurcate responses to social conflict into either active or passive roles, and then to lump non-violence with the latter.

Advocates of non-violence, like Lawson and Walter Wink, tend to see it as more active, but unlike violent action, undominating. Wink himself argues that non-violent fighters are closer to soldiers than to pacifists; they are willing to fight strategically and tactically in order to win, but without resorting to actions that only beget a widening circle of domination among victors and resentment among the defeated.

Between active violence and passive submission, non-violence is more like the first, but it also a third way distinct from the dominating ways and goals of violence. Rather than actively pitting violence and brutality against violence and brutality, it is moral jujitsu: taking action that makes domination trip over its own clumsy weightiness.

The reporter's bifurcated bias shows in his loaded question to Lawson on why he thinks (which Lawson in fact does not) that the tactics of non-violent protests have seemingly been less effective in recent years. Lawson deflects the question and points out that it is academia and the media that have kept people from receiving the information about non-violent struggle.

Lawson also alludes to the irony of violence: in fact, the bloodiest century in history, the 20th, indicated the failure of violent action to bring peace and order to the world. At the same time, non-violent struggles just started to take off in the last century, in Eastern Europe (e.g., Solidarity), North America (e.g., the Civil Rights Movement), the Middle East (e.g., the Intifada--the non-violent wing; the media exclusively focused on the rock-throwing teenagers), and Asia (e.g., China's Tiananmen Square). Wink has an exhaustive chronology of non-violent resistance in Chapter 13 of Engaging the Powers.

Lawson effectively chides the NPR interviewer for journalism's failures to interrogate violent practicioners and "political realists" with the same skepticism and critical edge that it applies to non-violence. In the case of the application of non-violence to the current conditions in the Middle East, Lawson says:

All violence does is determine who gets killed and who may survive with enough power to take control of the situation and shape it .... why of all the power groups in the Middle East has there not been a call for all the parties putting down their weapons and declaring a moratorium on suicide bombing, on missiles being shot at people, at houses being destroyed, at people being killed?

Why? Because that would require that the dominant forces (including the Bush Administration) in the Middle East be put on an equal moral plane as every other party and be judged accordingly. The Powers will not stand for that.

However, it is fair to demand that journalists--who seem interested in embedding their own influence in halls of power--apply their skepticism to the failed policies of violence as quickly as they do to the relatively untried tactics of non-violent resistance.

Ideas for English-Only Civil Disobedience

Now that the English First Only Resolution has passed second reading and is more than likely destined to pass third reading, I think that opponents should start coming up with creative ways to challenge the law's lack of enforceability.

One idea that I had is for bilingual speakers to show up at any Metro Council public hearing and deliver their comments on the issue at hand in a language other than English before delivering them in English. A more modest approach might be for everyone who opposes English Only to close out any remarks on other subjects in public hearing with the words "Gracias. Adiós."


Update: So, I'm just wondering, if one did speak in a foreign tongue in a public hearing and was charged a fine, what if the speaker refused to pay the fine? Would they be sent to jail for speaking Spanish?