Mobilizing the Conscience of America

 

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 101^st 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.

A Memorial Day Reflection

By David K. Shipler

                Ronald Young died last year. He served his country for his entire adult life, not in uniform but in the ranks of those unsung Americans who campaign for peace, who use not lethal arms but the weapon of morality to call their country to its highest values. They should also be honored on Memorial Day.

For Ron’s memoir, Crossing Boundaries in the Americas,Vietnam and the Middle East, I wrote a preface from which this essay is adapted. It calls upon us to consider what lenses we use to see ourselves and our past.

History is written by the victors, as Winston Churchill observed. It is then interpreted by the powerful, and periodically reinterpreted as values mature and new voices are heard. In other words, history is malleable. Russians under communism used to joke about the disappearance of important figures from official recollections: “What is the definition of a Soviet historian?” The answer: “A person who can predict the past.”

We Americans like to think we’re more truthful than autocracies, and we are, but only to a degree. While no central government dictates what we learn about our history, we have multiple versions manipulated instead by a thousand points of institutional bias, from the Texas school board’s textbook requirements to the museums and monuments scattered across the country. In democracies, too, what is taught and known about the past is shaped by the cultural consensus of the present.

Not long ago, Native Americans (then called “Indians”) appeared in classrooms and films as ruthless primitives. If they were occasionally admired, it was only for their savage nobility—their exotic rituals and canny self-reliance—or as collaborators with the white man against their own. I went to school in the 1950s, and I cannot remember reading a line in a textbook or hearing a sentence from a teacher about the atrocities visited upon them.

Nor was slavery sufficiently woven into the American story. Not until the waning years of the twentieth century did visitors to Monticello, Mount Vernon, and other plantations see anything of the majority of residents who had lived there—the enslaved blacks who built and labored on the land. Tours concentrated on the owners’ elaborate mansions, furniture, silverware, and china.

That this has changed—that the powerless are now seen—is a tribute to America’s sporadic capacity for self-correction. We hail Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement that were so vilified and spied upon by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. What an FBI memo called a “demagogic speech” that made King “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country” we now celebrate as one of the most inspiring pieces of eloquence in our history: “I have a dream.”

Yet even this evolving self-portrait underestimates a whole subculture of America’s sons and daughters who struggled against established policies and norms. They include blacks who sacrificed to overturn segregation and whites who journeyed south to join them in the civil rights movement. They include those who defied the military draft to resist the war in Vietnam, protested United States aid for Latin American dictatorships, urged nuclear disarmament, demanded protection of the environment, and called broadly on their country to stand for peace and humane justice—not easy standards for a superpower to achieve, evidently.

These Americans have been the backbone of our conscience. If we sing of their achievements too softly, we miss essential ingredients of our country’s greatness.

Ron Young was one of those Americans. I first met him when he and his wife, Carol Jensen, visited Jerusalem, where I was a correspondent, from their home base of Amman, Jordan. Their task, for the Americans Friends Service Committee, was to cross the rigid boundaries that divided Israelis and Arabs—and the internal boundaries that divided Israelis and Arabs among themselves—so they could report to Quakers back home on the state of the Middle East and its faltering peace process.

Being a reporter was my job, too. But Ron and Carol seemed to be doing much more. In harvesting competing perspectives, they were also seeding a measure of interaction and dialogue. They were carrying the contrasting views across those boundaries and leaving them for contemplation by the other side. To believe that this would make a difference took enormous faith in people’s good sense and their capacity to listen, especially to voices different from their own.

Given the absence of Israeli-Palestinian peace nearly forty years after their efforts, you might conclude that their faith was misplaced. But they never struck me as naïve. They honored the decency in people, respected their need for dignity, and looked at hard truths with a clear gaze. We need more of this realistic idealism. Lofty goals cannot be reached by cynicism.

So Ron’s story was the country’s story—or, a part of the country’s story not usually told vividly. Because he came of age by following pathways that led through the most momentous protest movements in the nation’s postwar experience, his personal narrative filled in the picture of a turbulent society reaching for moral poise.

He told me little of this during our long conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during those years in Jerusalem. Perhaps I never asked—a grievous failing for a reporter. But he also never volunteered, a measure of his humility. He was not a man obsessed with himself.

But he was a man driven by the desire to see injustice made right—not with the flashing rhetoric of hyperbole, not with unprovable accusations of conspiracy or venality, but with the quiet assurance that understanding can be nourished from those seeds of listening.

At a time when organized religion is most publicized for its intolerance, Ron held regard for the clergy of diverse faiths as catalysts of change. That began at the height of efforts to topple Jim Crow segregation, when he dropped out of Wesleyan to work at a black church in Memphis under the Reverend James Lawson, Jr., who set him to reading and thinking about topics far beyond the immediate racial conflicts, including the threat of nuclear war.

Ron visited the Dominican Republic after the United States invasion, went to Uruguay for a conference on nonviolence and social change, and would have been drawn more deeply into Latin America were it not for the escalation of the war in Vietnam.

He worked for the religious and pacifist organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He burned his draft card, campaigned with the peace movement, and led a delegation including religious leaders for discussions with non-communist South Vietnamese who opposed the war. His anti-war credentials enabled him to visit North Vietnam in 1970 as part of a small group of religious figures to deliver mail to and from American POWs and their families.

In later years he translated those early contacts with religious leaders into a longterm effort toward Middle East peace. It’s hard to think of anyone else with his deep experience who could mobilize Muslim, Jewish, and Christian clergy in the way that he did, to keep pressing the United States to keep Israeli-Palestinian peace prospects alive.

Ron was 75 when he died of septic shock. I don't know if he would want a flag lowered to half mast, but he deserves the tribute as much as any soldier who falls in battle. If you are ever tempted to despair that Americans have lost their moral compass, look into Ron Young’s generous life of active idealism. And remember that he has not been alone.

"Have You No Sense of Decency?"

By David K. Shipler

            On June 9, 1954, in a highly charged Washington hearing room, the elderly attorney Joseph Welch, a man partial to homespun clarity, put to Senator Joseph McCarthy the stiletto question that has entered American lore. Responding to the Wisconsin Republican’s smear of a young colleague of Welch’s, the lawyer demanded McCarthy’s full attention and began with this:

            “Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy tried to persist, Welch cut him down: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

            In the old black-and-white film, McCarthy has a mean squint, a twisted look something like Donald Trump’s when attacked. Trump’s method is different, but he plays on the same ground of fear and demonization. So Welch’s question is relevant today, and it ought to be directed not only to Trump but also to the American people: Have you no sense of decency?

Or, to make a gesture toward hope: After many months of waiting, when will America’s slumbering decency awake?

            For that is what eventually happened to end McCarthy’s slimy innuendos that ruined so many lives with false implications of communist affiliations, based on scanty rumors, guilt by association, and fabricated evidence. Preceded by Edward R. Murrow’s devastating televised assault on McCarthy three months earlier, Welch’s rhetorical question hit home. Huge numbers of Americans, watching live on national television, knew the answer. Decency stirred.

            This episode remains as my first political memory. I was 11 years old. Coming home from school day after day, I saw my grandmother, a Southern-born, Eisenhower Republican who detested communists, sitting bolt upright in a straight-back chair in front of the TV, appalled by McCarthy’s vile slanders. She loved Joseph Welch. His gentle decency struck a chord with the decency she carried inside herself.

            So it was during the Civil Rights movement as well, as Americans saw in their living rooms the contorted, hateful faces of Southern white girls screaming racist epithets outside integrating schools, the burly white cops swinging truncheons at non-resisting black protesters, the dogs and fire hoses unleashed against peaceful citizens demonstrating for their basic rights. Segregationists played their role in a pageant of brutal injustice vividly enough to stir the decency that resides in most Americans.

            Where is decency now? Is it gone or just marginalized, merely dormant? For a long time, McCarthy got away with his witch-hunt as a sly weasel in an era of exaggerated fears about communist designs on America. Trump gets away with his bullying as a vicious Rottweiler in a time of real and fake fears about insecurity in all its forms. Many of his supporters are legitimately scared of their economic peril, unduly afraid of terrorism, and eager to accept the scapegoats he offers, which include the varieties of people who represent a diversifying America.

Even if Trump does not win the Republican nomination, or even if he wins that but not the White House, his supporters will remain a restive, fulminating force of anger. So he has offered the country a lesson in its failure to remember that tolerance, logic, and the acceptance of difference is not genetic but must be learned anew by each generation.

The society has failed those who accept him as he vilifies and ridicules vast groups of people, a whole religion, all who try to govern, all who disagree. It has failed those who give a Nazi salute outside his rally and shout, “Go to Auschwitz,” as one man did. It has failed those who shout, “Nigger,” and “Go back to Africa.” It has failed those who cheer his invitation to beat up protesters, the empty promises he cannot possibly fulfill, the coarse insults he levels at fellow candidates. It has failed those whose schools have not taught them to check facts, research reality, know history, follow public issues, and make decisions that are carefully informed.

            On his 1954 program, “See It Now,” Ed Murrow read from the script that he and Fred Friendly had written about McCarthy. It is worth listening to today:

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine—and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. … We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.

“We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear. He merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.’”

Murrow concluded with his traditional sign-off: “Good night and good luck.”

Good luck, indeed.