It’s been half a century since Freedom Summer civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney vanished in rural Mississippi, triggering a long search by the FBI to find them and determine exactly what happened.
Suspicion was validly high that they’d been killed by local racists.
A number of totally unrelated black bodies were initially found instead, which raised no special alarm because murders of African Americans in the Deep South commonly occurred during that benighted era.
The three young men were finally discovered within an earthen dam, martyrs to a cause that bore fruit in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act a year later.
Decades of incredible oppression and sacrifice, from slavery to the barbarism committed during the KKK/Jim Crow decades, would become remembered aspects of a dark past that everyone thought could never happen again.
How wrong we were.
Consider recent developments shamefully intended to return black and brown Americans back to the tail end of the not-so-metaphorical bus:
Following on the heels of its profoundly damaging scuttling of the aforementioned Voting Rights Act last year, the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court has now kicked the legs out from under affirmative action via its precedent-setting Michigan ruling.
This means that our poorest, most opportunity-bereft citizens will first face huge obstacles to using the ballot box for improving their deteriorating lot in our nation’s life.
Blatantly discriminatory gerrymandering, photo ID encumbrances, outrageous suppression methods such as closing public restrooms in locales where hours-long voter lines exist, etc., are all maliciously designed to diminish participation in elections by minorities.
Once they’ve been stripped of their franchise, and policies can freely be implemented by political reactionaries to totally sacrifice the impoverished and dispossessed while a white corporate/financial elite thrives, that slammed door will then be bolstered by blocked avenues for affirmative-action advancement possibilities.
In ghettos, barrios and reservations across the land, where few jobs exist, schools steadily deteriorate, and gang culture fills a vacuum created by unrelenting despair, how will escape to fairer possibilities—already very hard—now be achieved at all?
Look for even more incarceration of minority youths, rather than the plainly needed true liberation from dead-end lives cruelly imposed by still deeply institutionalized U.S. racism.
Tragically, the same right-wing policies harmfully impacting the darker-hued among us also take a toll, albeit not as acutely, on low-income, marginalized Caucasian folks, whether they’re trying to eke out a living in Appalachian hollows, or in dying small towns on our central prairies.
The stark reality is that everyone other than a tiny yet powerful and prosperous elite is watching their lives go to hell in handbaskets, while profiteering hierarchs transfer suitcases of money (made by ripping off the masses) to offshore havens, where it’s safe from appropriate taxation.
Oligarchic excess and plutocratic plunder are killing all chances for many millions of us to have anything even remotely like the reasonable security that was common four or five decades ago, when strong labor unions gave us basic rights, and multitudes prospered . . . excluding our racial minorities.
Now we’re pretty much in the same sinking boat.
It’ll take each of us bailing together to stay afloat.
Then we’ll need to jointly transfer to a new societal vessel that can carry us to mutual betterment impossible under the existing, irreparably and unacceptably flawed monopoly-capitalist system.
Dennis Rahkonen of Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the ’60s.
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Freedom Summer 50 years on
Posted on June 20, 2014 by Dennis Rahkonen
It’s been half a century since Freedom Summer civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney vanished in rural Mississippi, triggering a long search by the FBI to find them and determine exactly what happened.
Suspicion was validly high that they’d been killed by local racists.
A number of totally unrelated black bodies were initially found instead, which raised no special alarm because murders of African Americans in the Deep South commonly occurred during that benighted era.
The three young men were finally discovered within an earthen dam, martyrs to a cause that bore fruit in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act a year later.
Decades of incredible oppression and sacrifice, from slavery to the barbarism committed during the KKK/Jim Crow decades, would become remembered aspects of a dark past that everyone thought could never happen again.
How wrong we were.
Consider recent developments shamefully intended to return black and brown Americans back to the tail end of the not-so-metaphorical bus:
Following on the heels of its profoundly damaging scuttling of the aforementioned Voting Rights Act last year, the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court has now kicked the legs out from under affirmative action via its precedent-setting Michigan ruling.
This means that our poorest, most opportunity-bereft citizens will first face huge obstacles to using the ballot box for improving their deteriorating lot in our nation’s life.
Blatantly discriminatory gerrymandering, photo ID encumbrances, outrageous suppression methods such as closing public restrooms in locales where hours-long voter lines exist, etc., are all maliciously designed to diminish participation in elections by minorities.
Once they’ve been stripped of their franchise, and policies can freely be implemented by political reactionaries to totally sacrifice the impoverished and dispossessed while a white corporate/financial elite thrives, that slammed door will then be bolstered by blocked avenues for affirmative-action advancement possibilities.
In ghettos, barrios and reservations across the land, where few jobs exist, schools steadily deteriorate, and gang culture fills a vacuum created by unrelenting despair, how will escape to fairer possibilities—already very hard—now be achieved at all?
Look for even more incarceration of minority youths, rather than the plainly needed true liberation from dead-end lives cruelly imposed by still deeply institutionalized U.S. racism.
Tragically, the same right-wing policies harmfully impacting the darker-hued among us also take a toll, albeit not as acutely, on low-income, marginalized Caucasian folks, whether they’re trying to eke out a living in Appalachian hollows, or in dying small towns on our central prairies.
The stark reality is that everyone other than a tiny yet powerful and prosperous elite is watching their lives go to hell in handbaskets, while profiteering hierarchs transfer suitcases of money (made by ripping off the masses) to offshore havens, where it’s safe from appropriate taxation.
Oligarchic excess and plutocratic plunder are killing all chances for many millions of us to have anything even remotely like the reasonable security that was common four or five decades ago, when strong labor unions gave us basic rights, and multitudes prospered . . . excluding our racial minorities.
Now we’re pretty much in the same sinking boat.
It’ll take each of us bailing together to stay afloat.
Then we’ll need to jointly transfer to a new societal vessel that can carry us to mutual betterment impossible under the existing, irreparably and unacceptably flawed monopoly-capitalist system.
Dennis Rahkonen of Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the ’60s.