The Civil Rights Movement was
made up of people whose names never made it into the history books.
Representative Lewis,
Last week, you stated the
following about Bernie Sanders’s record on fighting for civil rights in the
1960s:
I never saw him. I never met
him. I was chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for three
years, from 1963 to 1966. I was involved with the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides,
the March on Washington, the march from Selma to Montgomery and directed (the)
voter education project for six years. But I met Hillary Clinton. I met
President (Bill) Clinton.
We are going to ignore the
fact that Hillary Clinton was a “Goldwater Girl,” or that you once stated to a
Clinton biographer that “[t]he first time I ever heard of Bill Clinton was the
1970s,” or that it has already been well-established that Sanders worked with
the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) at the University of Chicago in the
1960s. We are also going to leave aside the fact that every mention of Bill
Clinton in your book Walking With the Wind described an instance that he
opposed some policy that you cherished. Instead, we are going to talk about
another person that you never saw or met.
Dorothy Marie Boone-Anderson
was born in Gates County, North Carolina in 1935 as one of seven children. She
left formal schooling in the eighth grade to go into the fields and work to
support her family. Times were always hard for the Boones, and the lack of
educational prospects for the family meant that times would always be hard.
That was a legacy of a segregation that always kept Black families at the edge
of the American Dream: close enough to be eternally tortured by a success that
was constantly visible yet always elusive. In early 1953, Dorothy became pregnant
by a man named Douglas Washington Williams. Her son, Luther, would be born on
September 21, 1953.
It was the birth of my father
that spurred my grandmother into organizing within the Civil Rights Movement,
determined that her children would never have to live in a world where economic
and political opportunities were denied to them because of their race. She
organized alongside Haywood Riddick at the Nansemond County SNCC and
organizations like the Wilroy Civic League, which acted as a locus for social
and political activity in the neighborhood that they lived in.
As I am sure you know, it made
sense for them to focus on integrating the public school system. My father went
to Wilroy
School, an elementary school that was built with $900 from the Rosenwald Fund.
This fund, set up by Sears and Roebuck executive Julius Rosenwald, was
necessary to ensure that Black children received education in areas where the
state refused to provide them. It stood as a testament to the disregard that
the Commonwealth of Virginia showed to its most vulnerable populations.
The fight was long and hard,
but in the fall of 1965, the Nansemond County School System finally integrated.
The photo above shows my father (in the middle) and my grandmother (to his
right) standing in front of Driver Elementary School, the first school in the
county to be integrated. The 1970-1971 school year, my father’s senior year,
would finally see all schools in the county integrated. He would graduate from
John F. Kennedy High School in Suffolk.
Presidential politics might be
the backdrop for this story, Representative Lewis, but this has nothing to
do with Bernie Sanders. The hurtful nature of your comments has to do with your
erasure of the people who worked outside of the spotlight and the national
press to make sure that the Civil Rights Movement touched every corner of Black
America. As I said earlier, you did not know or meet my grandmother. Your lack
of acquaintance with her does not counterfeit the work she put in, like it does
not counterfeit the work of any other person you did not know and yet sought to
bring to birth a better world than the one they came into.
The limited amount of freedom
that we Black Americans enjoy today is due in large part to the rallies
organized, the meals cooked, the plans conceived and the bravery shown by
organizers whose names we will never know.
Believe it or not, our freedom
was not won by the Big Six alone.
When you use your history as a hero of the Movement to disparage others because
you never personally knew them, it is a slap in the face to all those people
who fought hard and never made it into the history books or into Congress. It
is a slap in the face to people like my grandmother.
The movement that you, my
grandmother, Senator Sanders and countless thousands were a part of
was the largest grassroots movement for social, political and
economic change that this country has ever seen. It was a movement that was
bigger than any one participant in it; a movement that, at its best, was
unapologetically radical and driven by the Black working class. We should live
every moment in awe and praise of all of those people and not sweep them under
the rug when it is politically expedient.
Hillary Clinton ain’t worth
that. Not to me, and not to millions of others who owe everything to the
Dorothy Marie Boone-Andersons of this world.
Sincerely,
Douglas Williams
Douglas Williams is a doctoral
student in political science at Wayne State University in Detroit, where his
research centers around public policy, disadvantaged communities and the labor
movement. He blogs at The South Lawn.
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