
          Democracy Demands Memory
          By Bond, JulianJulian Bond
          Vol. 19, No. 1, 1997 pp. 3-4
          
          
            "I tell my children today they don't know
anything. You know, when I hear young folk talking about what they
ain't gonna take, and I like to sit down and tell 'em, 'You haven't
seen anything. You just don't know what it's all about. I don't know
what it is you can't take.' And when I go back telling them some of
my history, you know, they perk up their ears."
            Mary Sanford,
a tenants rights and housing activist in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1992
          
          Mary Sanford's words and the reminiscences of other Southerners, black and white, about the civil_rights movement ought to be required listening, because few Americans have heard them.
          You can hear them in Will The Circle Be
Unbroken?--a landmark radio documentary on the civil_rights
movement. The radio programs tell the story of how Sanford and
hundreds of other people in five southern communities watched,
made--and sometimes tried to stop--one of America's most powerful social movements.
          Ordinary Americans who witnessed and participated in the movement explain what we Americans have done so far in closing the racial divide; they explain what else needs to be accomplished.
          They help explain why we still argue over whether racial minorities ought to be elected to public office; whether merit was ever really the test for getting a job or a seat in a university freshman class; whether children should be bused to schools.
          For much of the twentieth century, an interracial
black-led movement fought against white_supremacy. That after nearly one-hundred years the job remains undone is not a testimony to the movement's failure; it is a measure of how great the odds were, and how difficult the task is that remains.
          Mis-memory of this movement threatens to erase the reality of the often brutal past, the class divisions evident in every institution from church to school, the failure of civic institutions to service black communities, and most of all the cruelty and harshness of American apartheid.
          A survey of racial attitudes by the seventy-eight-year-old Southern_Regional_Council demonstrates that while Americans do not place reducing racial inequality high on their list of priorities. few Americans really believe they live in a color-blind society.
          One-third of the public has no idea what "affirmative_action" is, and makes no connection at all between those two words and race and gender. But, a majority think qualified minority and female applicants deserve it. Three out of four believe our elected_officials ought to reflect the diversity of the electorate, and if eliminating majority black_districts causes a decrease in black representation, a majority favors drawing such districts 58 to 29 percent.
          The more poll respondents knew about our history, and the more the likely results of ending race-specific remedies to discrimination were explained to them, the more likely they were to respond thoughtfully, rather than with bumper-sticker answers.
          In more and more schools, students learn about the democratic civil_rights movement of the recent past. They learn that ordinary women and men were moved to extraordinary acts of courage. They learn that Ozell Sutton (now with the Justice_Department) risked his job as a journalist when he challenged a newspaper's policy that discriminated against black_women. They learn that when Rosa Parks refused to stand up on a bus in Montgomery and when Martin_Luther_King, Jr., stood up to preach, mass participation came to the movement for civil_rights. They learn that most presidents had to be forced, by public pressure built by the movement, to make the weakest gesture toward insuring freedom for all citizens.
          And they learn that what was done once may well be done again.
          At the end of Will The Circle Be Unbroken?, former Arkansas governor Sid McMath says:
          "I think you've got a need for continuing a civil_rights movement,
that's not just the blacks. Of course the civil_rights movement wasn't
restricted to blacks. There were a lot of good white_people in
there. And you need a civil_rights movement for everybody. Women need
a continuing civil_rights movement and the blacks and the
Mexicans. They should all join together in the civil_rights movement
to see that the rights we have are protected and that the laws we have
on the books are implemented and that the Bill of Rights is recognized
in spirit as well as in the letter of the law. So there's a continued
need for the civil_rights movement. Civil rights education. Human
rights."
          
            Julian Bond is a professor at American University in
Washington, DC and the University of Virginia. Since he was a college
student leading sit-in demonstrations in Atlanta in 1960, he has been
an active participant in the movements for civil_rights, economic
justice and peace, and an aggressive spokesman for the
disinherited.
          
        
