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Younger generation poised to bring change Later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in federal troops to provide the Little Rock Nine with an escort, drawing national attention to the civil rights movement. Racial animus was as common as breathing, but the murder of Emmett Till and the Sept. 15, 1963 murder of four little Black girls — Addie May Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Rosamond Robertson — in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., shocked the conscious of white America. For a minute. Lynchings were happening every day and night in 12 states. Civil rights leaders tried to work with President Lyndon B. Johnson on his War on Poverty and demanded both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But Jim Crow laws that denied Blacks an education, the right to vote, find and hold down employment had been chiseled into law in the post-Civil War era and remained in place in some white supremacist areas until 1968. Young civil rights allies and anti-Vietnam War movement activists had their racial consciousness raised. A common bond developed, a shared sense of community oppression at the hands of brutal authorities and cultural dictates. With young people leading the way, adorned with makeshift flower tiaras, colorful outfits and love and service spiritually tattooed everywhere, the theme of brotherhood dominated the era’s rebellion against ugly banal bigotry and conservative Red Scare conformity. Closeted white Rev. Malcolm Boyd, for instance, left his heralded career as screen legend Mary Pickford’s producing partner to join the Episcopal priesthood in the early 1950s. By 1961, he was immersed in the growing civil rights movement and participated in a Freedom Ride from New Orleans to Detroit to integrate bus terminals and restaurants. In 1964, he traveled through the Deep South working on voter registration in Mississippi and Alabama with four young black men from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. That Freedom Summer was a moment of loving radicalization, which infused the attendees with countercultural beliefs about coalition-building, personal liberation, empowerment, oppression and the embrace of difference. “Many movements besides civil rights were taking shape, and several of those movements found both their roots and their future leaders in Mississippi that summer [of 1964],” civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis wrote in his memoir Walking With the Wind. “The atmosphere of openness and breaking down barriers that we developed that summer extended far beyond issues of race. They extended into everything from sexuality to gender roles, from communal living to identification with working
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classes. And they live on today.” Lewis continued: “I have no doubt that the Mississippi Summer Project, in the end, led to the liberating of America, the opening up of our society. The peace movement, the women’s movement, the gay movement – they all have roots that can be traced back to Mississippi in the summer of ’64.” Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton recognized the intersectionality of oppression and liberation. “We have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing,” Newton said on Aug. 15, 1970 in a speech in New York City. “And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppressed people in the society.” That didn’t last. The liberation movements siloed and lost connection as the opportunistic religious right merged with conservative white America to form a loose coalition rooted in repealing Roe v. Wade and promoting Second Amendment gun rights that may have enabled the callous racial shooting spree of the past three decades. But like the Freedom Summer of 1964, this movement seeking justice for George Floyd and initiating real police reform feels different. It feels real, like something really is happening here, even if it’s not exactly clear. “The thing that is most obvious is that people are grieving and they’re mourning and they’re angry and they’ve been angry for a very long time,” BLM’s Cullors told KTLA after the first two nights of protest with looting and suspected agitators. “I just watched the 1992 footage [of the riots after the acquittal of four LAPD officers accused of beating black motorist Rodney King] and this idea that police brutality has ended in Los Angeles or any other city is a false idea. And it’s unfortunately because many of our elected officials are not holding law enforcement accountable so we just keep going through the same cycle.” Cullors said BLM has been working for seven years in LA County “specifically to challenge law enforcement -- both LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department -- for the hundreds of deaths that have happened since 2012. We’re interested in accountability and we’re also interest in a reprioritization of how dollars are spent in our city, in our county.” Indeed, every Wednesday, BLM has held protests outside DA Jackie Lacey’s office demanding accountability for numerous police shootings caught on tape and not prosecuted. (See Jasmyne Cannick’s op-ed on this.) On June 3, thousands joined BLM for a very long protest downtown. “I think that we were able to galvanize people seven years ago to challenge white racism and white supremacy, in particular. But I think in the last four years since Trump
LAPD Commander CORY PALKA, kneeling at West Hollywood/ LA protest June 2. (Screengrab from KABC reporter Veronica Miracle’s video)
has been elected into office, we’re seen the worst kind of white nationalism, the worst kind of white racism – I think that’s impacted people greatly,” Cullors said. “People are demoralized. People feel that they don’t have a leader in office that speaks for them. And this moment – this George Floyd moment — is actually the moment where folks cracked open. “And it’s not just Black communities,” she continued. “I think all communities right now are upset and suffering and I think that’s important because we didn’t have everybody on our side seven years ago. I think we have way more people on our side now. And now we need the elected officials to show up and we need them to do two things: we need them to hold law enforcement accountable and we need them to start prioritizing the