By David K. Shipler
My earliest
political memory is watching television film of Southern segregationists
screaming epithets at Black children as they integrated schools in the 1950s,
and police attacking peaceful civil rights demonstrators with truncheons, dogs,
and fire hoses. I remember not only my own revulsion but my grandmother’s.
She
had been raised in rural Maryland and had her streak of racial prejudice. But
as she sat upright in her straight-backed chair, she seethed with indignation
at the crude inhumanity unfolding on the screen. Her disgust became my first
lesson in the power of decency to honor nonviolence against violence, and to
generate reform.
The scenes eventually mobilized the
conscience of much of white America. A question is whether it can happen again.
This year’s holiday marking the
birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the architect of nonviolence in the
Civil Rights Movement, is a fitting moment to wonder if the furious episodes of
masked ICE agents shooting and brutalizing protesting Americans can activate—broadly
enough—whatever conscience has not been snuffed out by President Trump and his
collaborators.
We saw a moral uprising after a long history of
police killings of unarmed Blacks culminated in the videoed 2020 suffocation of
George Floyd in Minneapolis. That and other murders propelled demonstrations
across the country by millions of Americans—most of them white, significantly. And
since Trump’s inauguration a year ago, citizens not vulnerable to deportation
have rallied against the inhumane practices by ICE agents, especially in
Minneapolis, once again the center of conflict after an agent wantonly shot and
killed Renee Good, a US citizen and a mother of three; she posed no threat, videos
show, contrary to slanderous assertions by Trump and his subordinates.
In a current CBS poll,
61 percent of those surveyed said that ICE was being “too tough,” up from 56
percent in November. Among independents, 65 percent thought that protesters
were either doing things “about right” (33 percent) or had not gone far enough (32
percent). The remaining 35 percent blamed demonstrators for going “too far.” As
one might expect, Republicans and Democrats were heavily skewed in opposite
directions, but overall, 52 percent said that ICE was making their communities “less
safe.”
The numbers appear to show a
gathering storm of resentment. But how that might translate into the kind of moral
mobilization that produced the civil rights laws is a question. The parallels with
today are far from precise.
Civil rights demonstrators were trained
in the discipline of nonviolence, never fighting back when attacked as they marched
peacefully, illegally rode segregated buses, helped Blacks register to vote, or
sat in at segregated lunch counters. King, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, called
this the “love ethic.” He and others bet correctly that the Southern power
structure, through white thugs and cops, would play its role in the pageant,
revealing a cruelty that did, in the end, galvanize onlookers across the
country.
Anti-ICE protesters have no such
coherent training and no resonant voice of leadership, and while most are
peaceful, clashes with agents draw the most vivid videos. Those taken and
doctored by right-wing activists circulate on social media, which did not exist
sixty years ago, and influence policy-making in the White House, which had not
been captured back then by an authoritarian ideology of white supremacy.
Before the internet and cable news,
television was dominated by the three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, which
generally kept opinion out of their reporting. Today’s opinionated news
coverage, particularly on the right, has distorted much of the public’s
perceptions of reality. A side effect has been the erosion of public trust in
news organizations that strive for fairness and accuracy, including The New
York Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Opinion,
it seems, is alluring enough to attract people who want their views upheld—confirmation
bias, it’s called.
Right-wing “news” outlets have unquestioningly
conveyed Trump’s effort to discredit protesters as being paid by nefarious domestic
enemies, a smear from the top. In the fifties and sixties, that rhetoric came largely
from the bottom as local and state officials dismissed civil rights
demonstrators as “outsider agitators.”
The dynamic today has been
inverted, with Washington the enemy of peaceful protest and some state and
local governments defending that right, which is enshrined in the First
Amendment.
In 1957, for example, after Arkansas
Governor Orval Faubus called
out the state national guard to prevent nine Black students from entering Little
Rock’s Central High School, President Dwight D. Eisenhower acted. He pressed
Faubus to use the guard to assure peaceful integration, as the Supreme Court
had ordered in Brown v. Board of Education three years earlier. But when
Faubus withdrew the guard instead and rioting erupted, Eisenhower federalized
the guard and sent 101st Airborne troops to restore order and
protect the students.
Today, it is the federal government
that is trying to crush demonstrators and the state and local governments in
Minnesota that are trying to protect them. It is the White House that is
suppressing an investigation into the Minneapolis shooting and the state that
wants to hold the agent accountable.
The inversion of righteousness is
telling. America is a different country now. The threshold at which outrage is
triggered has risen very high as Trump and company have numbed us to violations
of ethics, laws, social norms, democratic processes, racial respect, and other features
of a pluralistic and orderly culture. He has created, in ICE, a national, paramilitary
force unlike anything seen before in the United States, unaccountable to the
law or to the norms of decency.
Seared in my memory is the
photograph, from Little Rock, of a white girl’s face twisted in hatred as she screamed
at a Black girl seeking to go to Central High. The country came to see itself in
this mirror.
My grandmother did not become a
flaming liberal, but she loved Eisenhower, and I think his actions affected her
views on race. She did not object on principle when my mother and I went to the
1963 March on Washington, where King declared, “I have a dream.” She was worried
for us, because violence was ridiculously predicted by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI
director. But in the end, the crowd was a sweep of massive friendliness and
uplifting harmony, a tribute to the conscience of America.
