I was a high school kid in Denver when I first watched the documentary “Eyes on the Prize” about the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
That’s when I saw footage of the quarter million people gathered on the National Mall for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 63 years ago.
As the nation’s civil rights leaders spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that day, one was nowhere to be seen.
James Farmer, the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, should have been standing alongside the other architects of the march. Instead, he was behind bars in Louisiana, jailed with more than 200 other freedom fighters for protesting segregation and police brutality — unable to speak, but determined to be heard.
A colleague, Floyd McKissick, read Farmer’s message on behalf of the people imprisoned with him, carrying their voices to the hundreds of thousands gathered in Washington and the millions watching at home.
It was a message of defiance. And it was a message of truth, speaking directly of the brutality wielded by Southern authorities. From Jim Crow territory, at the mercy of the very system he was arrested for protesting, Farmer spoke out anyway.
He didn’t ask for permission, or for safety, before casting his vision. He recognized that chaos has always been fertile ground for transformation.
DOJ once went after the Klan. Now they’re coming for us.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
As I take the helm of the storied Southern Poverty Law Center — headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama, the cradle of the Confederacy and the birthplace of the modern Civil Rights Movement — I find myself thinking of Farmer’s cell in Louisiana and of the government that put him there.
I am reminded of the Book of Nehemiah, Chapter 4, Verse 17, where a people facing their own chaotic moment “did their work with one hand and held a weapon in the other.”
They fought and built simultaneously. That is what this moment requires of us.
We are as a nation once more at a defining moment, facing the most dangerous threats to our hard-won progress in modern history. The forces lined up against racial justice, democracy and the dignity of every person are real, and they are organized.
The SPLC — founded 55 years ago to dismantle white supremacy in America — is itself under attack.
The Justice Department, which prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan, has indicted our organization for carrying that work forward. Congress has opened a political investigation into our work, and financial institutions have cut off critical lines of support — even as the hate groups we exist to confront remain untouched.
More than 60 years after Farmer was jailed for speaking the truth about power in the Deep South, our organization faces its own version of that punishment, prosecuted by the same government whose founding purpose included protecting our right to speak and challenge injustice.
Some will say we invite scrutiny — that an organization built to name hatred should expect to be examined itself. Fair enough. But there is a difference between accountability and retaliation and any honest look at the timing, those targeted and the silence toward the hateful groups we’ve spent five decades exposing tells you which one this is.
That is why all of us are summoned now, like those brave freedom fighters before us, to fight the assaults on our democracy and to build what must come next — and history tells us there will be a next. It must be a bold, reparative system — one where this country’s vast wealth is no longer hoarded by a few but shared by the people whose labor continues to build it.
Credit: Associated Press
Credit: Associated Press
We must answer the call to hold power accountable
On Aug. 28, we commemorated the anniversary of the March on Washington, and I offer this challenge — not to recognize the march only as a moment in the past, captured in documentary film, but as a calling of the present.
We are asked to be truth-tellers who fight to hold power accountable and builders who make a multiracial democracy real — not someday in the future, but right now.
Here in the Deep South, which holds America’s deepest wounds and greatest promise, we are uniquely situated to answer that call.
It is a region that for centuries has propped up a racialized, abusive power structure that defies our nation’s promise of equal justice under law. And it is also the home of the Civil Rights Movement, which, through fighting and building, has moved us closer to freedom. We must welcome that same spirit of resistance now.
Farmer’s arrest in Plaquemine, Louisiana, came amid a protest campaign and voter registration drive he helped organize. After his release from jail, another march against police brutality was met with tear gas and violence as a mob searched for Farmer. Local residents hid him in a hearse and sped him out of town toward New Orleans.
After the events of that summer, voters in Iberville Parish, where Plaquemine sits, voted their longtime sheriff out of office. The registration drive also helped open new avenues for local representation: 12 Black candidates qualified for public office in the December primaries.
They fought, and they built.
We carry the courage of Farmer — and of countless people in Washington, Plaquemine and beyond whose names we will never know.
They finished what courage required of them. The rest is ours.
Ryan Haygood is the new president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Send letters to the editor of 250 words or fewer with your name, city or town and contact information to letters@ajc.com.
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