Thursday night was the opening reception at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Yes, that Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Afterwards I went downstairs to find a bathroom and I could help wondering: Where exactly did the four little girls die? Was it this hallway? How about this room? Maybe that corner?

John Lewis spoke at the reception. "We choose nonviolence as a way of life," he said. I didn't pay much attention otherwise. I have minimal interest in members of Congress, regardless of their history. I was annoyed when the Black Panther member on the program didn't speak. Later I found out that she had simply been a no-show.

The next day I went to a discussion about Civil Rights in Birmingham given by a professor of African-American Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. When he asked for questions I raised my hand. I said: "Growing up in Pennsylvania you learn about the Civil Rights movement in fifth grade and through PBS documentaries. Later if you read about it you learn that a lot of what you've been taught was wrong. What would you say are the major misconceptions that people who didn't have direct involvement with the Civil Rights movement have about that movement?"

The professor said that it was the extent of armed self-defense. Blacks didn't simply accept the bombings of their homes and churches. They posted armed guards at the houses of leaders, at their churches. Road entrances to black neighborhoods were watched by a man in a car with a gun. It wasn't a nonviolent movement. This was the response I'd expected, having done my own reading.

So why did John Lewis say what he did? He was there. It's impossible to believe that at the time he didn't know what was going on.

Perhaps the most benign explanation is that in the end it didn't matter. While there were black folks running around with guns, that activity wasn't really what brought an end to legalized segregation.

As strange as it might sound, I wouldn't rule out that John Lewis has truly forgotten. He's a politician, not an historian, so he isn't involved in trying to accurately represent past events. And like all of us he wants to believe that his participation was meaningful and so it's quite possible that he simply doesn't remember the extent to which armed self-defense was present or relevant in Birmingham. The misremembering is reinforced by mainstream presentations of the Civil Rights movement.

Or perhaps the explanation is less benign. Perhaps John Lewis consciously ignores the history of black armed self-defense because to speak about it would jeopordize his political career. After all, the writers of every fifth-grade history book and the producers of every eight-hour documentary on the Civil Rights movement aren't all incompetant. Certainly if they tried to look into the history they would find the history of armed self-defense. But it's never there. And if they can prevent every textbook I've ever read and every documentary I've ever seen from including that history, no doubt they can keep it out of John Lewis's mouth as well. The next question, of course, is why.


posted by weiss @ 10:30 AM