Sherrilyn A. Ifill: Standing Up for the Extraordinary, Ordinary Civil Rights Protesters Who Didn't Fight Back
[Sherrilyn A. Ifill, who teaches at the University of Maryland, writes about the law for The Root.]
I haven't yet read Condoleezza Rice's memoir about her parents, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family. But already I'm annoyed. I'll admit that I'm discomfited by all of the figures from the Bush administration who have managed to emerge unrepentant, their records unexamined by independent prosecutors, some hawking books and all displaying a kind of smug sense of their own invincibility....
But it's not Rice's role as national security adviser during the heyday of Bush WMD fabrications and torture policy that rankles these days. Instead it's her evident pleasure in telling a story that she says explains why her father -- a schoolteacher in Birmingham, Ala., during the most volatile days of the civil rights movement -- didn't march with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
It's a story Rice tells with a certain relish, in every interview, whether on Fox News or Jon Stewart. She can remember it like it was yesterday, Rice says, hearing her father explain that he wouldn't march because he knew that if police officers responded violently toward him, he would fight back -- "and then his daughter would be an orphan." Rice tells the story with pride. Her father was "a big man," she says, and did not believe that nonviolence was the appropriate response to violence. In fact, her father "had some questions about the nonviolent part" of the movement, Rice says. Interviewers have responded in lockstep to this story with a kind of awed admiration for Condi's badass dad....
But Rice's story about her father's self-described unsuitability for nonviolent protest carries with it a kind of unpleasant undertone. Accompanied by her smug laugh, it's as though Rice suggests that her dad was a real man. He would have hit back. It's as though her father -- not the nonviolent protesters who ultimately broke the back of segregation in the South -- represented the strength of black manhood in the South during that period....
In fact, the ability to meet violence with nonviolence required extensive training and discipline on the part of civil rights protesters. Nonviolence was a philosophy, not just a reaction. Meeting opposition with nonviolence allowed protesters to release the satyagraha, or "truth force," of the movement. The spirit of truth, they came to believe, would ultimately prove more powerful than any billy club or police dog. Those who practiced nonviolence -- from King to the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee -- were required to suppress their natural responses to the threat of violence....
Read entire article at The Root
I haven't yet read Condoleezza Rice's memoir about her parents, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family. But already I'm annoyed. I'll admit that I'm discomfited by all of the figures from the Bush administration who have managed to emerge unrepentant, their records unexamined by independent prosecutors, some hawking books and all displaying a kind of smug sense of their own invincibility....
But it's not Rice's role as national security adviser during the heyday of Bush WMD fabrications and torture policy that rankles these days. Instead it's her evident pleasure in telling a story that she says explains why her father -- a schoolteacher in Birmingham, Ala., during the most volatile days of the civil rights movement -- didn't march with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
It's a story Rice tells with a certain relish, in every interview, whether on Fox News or Jon Stewart. She can remember it like it was yesterday, Rice says, hearing her father explain that he wouldn't march because he knew that if police officers responded violently toward him, he would fight back -- "and then his daughter would be an orphan." Rice tells the story with pride. Her father was "a big man," she says, and did not believe that nonviolence was the appropriate response to violence. In fact, her father "had some questions about the nonviolent part" of the movement, Rice says. Interviewers have responded in lockstep to this story with a kind of awed admiration for Condi's badass dad....
But Rice's story about her father's self-described unsuitability for nonviolent protest carries with it a kind of unpleasant undertone. Accompanied by her smug laugh, it's as though Rice suggests that her dad was a real man. He would have hit back. It's as though her father -- not the nonviolent protesters who ultimately broke the back of segregation in the South -- represented the strength of black manhood in the South during that period....
In fact, the ability to meet violence with nonviolence required extensive training and discipline on the part of civil rights protesters. Nonviolence was a philosophy, not just a reaction. Meeting opposition with nonviolence allowed protesters to release the satyagraha, or "truth force," of the movement. The spirit of truth, they came to believe, would ultimately prove more powerful than any billy club or police dog. Those who practiced nonviolence -- from King to the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee -- were required to suppress their natural responses to the threat of violence....