When I plugged my network cable into the hotel jack in Nashville on the Civil Rights Bus Tour, I expected to make the usual e-rounds: email, Facebook, Twitter, and maybe the blog I was writing. I had only gotten as far as my email inbox, though, when I found a message from a publicist/personal assistant who had photographed me and other Tour participants at one of our meetings with a movement veteran.
September 4, 1957: Elizabeth Eckford – one of nine black students attempting to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Image - Discover Black Heritage.
She had gotten to my blog ahead of me and read the previous day’s post about my emotional encounter with her client, a big-time Civil Rights preacher. She thanked me for having an interesting enough experience with her client to want to write about it. She wrote that her client fervently hopes to be of ongoing use in society, and that she is trying to make him feel that he has an important part to play in motivating youth, such as myself, to start caring about their beliefs and to stand up for them no matter what. And, she requested that I change several of my blogged beliefs to match what she was about to tell me—and to do so very quietly, without acknowledging that she was the source of the changes.
[That bizarre email encapsulates a problem in Civil Rights Bus Tours and in Civil Rights memory on a larger scale: when the veterans and the tours merge history and ethical imperative in narratives of Civil Rights, calling for personal transformation and responsive action, they are seeking something that, if successful, will likely change the nature of the story, perhaps in a way that has an undesirable impact on the mechanisms designed to package that story for new generations.]
School Integration; Image - Discover Black Heritage.
I had read online journals from past Civil Rights Bus Tour participants. I knew that I was supposed to experience personal transformation, but the changes the email recommended weren’t the kind they advertised. On the tour, they said, you get to hear in person the individual voices of the veterans whose numbers are every year decreasing. You get to see in person sights that far surpass what youngsters encounter (or don’t) in grammar school. And, most importantly, they said, you get to feel: the trip becomes a pilgrimage, more or less, on which travelers can commit themselves—through conversion-type experiences along the way—to stand up for freedom. On the tour, movement veterans say that the real story of Civil Rights is expressed not in the soundbytes of King’s speeches, but in the myriad, sometimes conflicting voices of ordinary foot soldiers. These people, they said, are Americans turned from ordinary to extraordinary, heroes who can inspire today’s ordinary Americans to join the work of the contemporary Freedom Movement.
Up to this point, I’d found my eight-day, 2700-mile bus trip through cities and towns important to the history of Civil Rights a bit over-determined by the pressure of that expectation of emotional transformation. Don’t get me wrong, it was great. We’d see a memorial, an interpretive center, and a veteran in the morning, break for BBQ, and then tour a museum or church and hear from some foot-soldiers in the afternoon, before tramping to some photo-ops on our way to the next city.
The author at left, with other tour participants, and Vernon Winfrey (Oprah's father). Image - © Tiffany Kriner. All rights reserved.
We heard from former Freedom Riders and children of the organizers behind Briggs v. Elliott. We even met some bigger-name veterans such as Congressman John Lewis, one of the “Big Six,” who’d spoken at the March on Washington. It was great. But how was I supposed to feel the wonder of crossing over the river on the Edmund Pettus bridge and imagine being beaten and gassed for the right to vote when I’d been told to do so and when I was being distracted by an annoyingly talkative student walking behind me? I found myself waiting for an unscripted moment when the truth of the ordinary people becoming extraordinary would reveal itself and change me, a moment to which I could bear—or blog—witness.
The moment came on a hot afternoon after an already full day. Our tour leader gathered us around and said he had a surprise for us. He’d been to see a movement veteran friend of his, a preacher whose name we all knew. This hero had of late been suffering serious health problems and was therefore not making many public appearances, but he was going to make a special exception to see us. We gathered on the hot sidewalk, facing a huge statue of the very hero we were about to meet. His caretaker wheeled him slowly toward us.
Though a former preacher known for fiery confrontation, he was mostly silent and frail, his suit jacket slung over the back of his wheelchair. He mumbled a bit, and we leaned in silently, while his caretaker stroked his head, picking the lint from his hair and brushing imaginary dandruff from his shoulders.
U.S. Deputy Marshals escort 6-year-old Ruby Bridges from William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960. The first grader was the only black child enrolled in the school. Image - Discover Black Heritage.
His poor condition startled us, as did the caretaker’s manner, but the caretaker tried to calm everyone with stories. Like others, she smilingly corrected our Martin-mania; she told us that this hero’s part in the movement was much greater than has been acknowledged. She told us she was starting a foundation for aging Civil Rights veterans who don’t have health insurance or pensions despite their service to the nation.
During this time, I was increasingly uncomfortable. The hero’s caretaker asked us if we had questions for the hero, but there was no way to ask a question of a man who couldn’t speak and could barely sit up. Why, I thought, was he out in the sun doing educational work when he was so broken? Did they need the money that our tour leader paid them so badly? When the caretaker talked about her foundation, I put my sweaty fingers on the forty dollars in my wallet—all the cash I had—figuring I would put it in the plate right away if she decided to pass one.
Seeing the preacher, I felt ashamed that I was waiting for a man who could not speak, to preach to us when I had voice myself—a voice that might bless him and our nation. So, standing there, I gathered my courage and spoke up to that Civil Rights hero and blessed him. It was a pathetically small thing to do, I know. As I spoke to the frail hero, I felt very ordinary—misquoting the piece I’d intended to say and stuttering a bit—but I hoped it would encourage him and form the start of a political response. I had tried to do a small thing in responding to the call for speakers for justice. Afterward, I couldn’t wait to blog it up. I wrote in the white heat, raising questions and sharing a catty remark or two. The point of it, though, was the transformation: I suddenly believed the lesson of the ordinary person.
From Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Mountaintop Speech, April 3, 1968, Memphis. Image - Omid Tavallai.
And then I received the publicist’s email asking me to change what I’d written so that the thing that offended/motivated me toward the change wasn’t offensive anymore. That an acknowledged Civil Rights hero would have a publicist ought not to have surprised me. In 1944, Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal practically recommended it in American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, writing “To get publicity is of the highest strategic importance to the Negro people.” If Civil Rights leaders didn’t come to the fight believing that truth, they learned it without delay and would use it to their advantage throughout the movement. Myrdal believed what King, Lewis, and a host of others found true to their bloody, frustrating experience—that only undeniable, embarrassing awareness of the suffering of victims of color would raise the sympathies, and ultimately the energies, needed to bring legislative and social change.
Nowadays, the face of the contemporary Civil Rights movement is Facebook. The “race beat”—pioneered at mid-century by editors winning Pulitzers for writing it up—is best heard on the Afrospear blogosphere. My family blog didn’t seem to me to be anything so effectual as these. For a publicist to follow Google Alert to the extent that she did and interfere with a blog that on its best day gets 20 hits, is something of a reversal. Jim Crow managed the stories, big and small, of Civil Rights for as long as he could.
It may make sense to see Civil Rights veterans working to protect even the minutiae of their version of the story. But while the nature of this intervention seemed to the publicist to be about correcting facts—the hero wasn’t hot, he wasn’t fixated on the Civil Rights villain whose name he kept repeating, it was just advanced dementia and 14 prescriptions—to me, it seemed as much to be about controlling the expression of my experience, revising the conversion the experience had asked me to have.
In Memorium, Rosa Parks (1913-2005). Image - Shavar Ross (donated by Corbis-Bettmann).
That dominant message from Civil Rights veterans, that the ordinary person can become extraordinary by standing up for what’s right, and that individual stories are the truth of the movement, sounds similar to the idea behind Civil Rights Bus Tours that seek to empower individuals to follow the veterans’ examples. But my experience with the hero, to whose impact I tried to blog witness, seems to teach instead that the transformation into extraordinariness has become an ideology needing to be upheld. The ordinaries have to stay extraordinary for the rest of their lives—sometimes for the sake of financial security. Narratives of Civil Rights veterans’ strength and life-long heroism need to be maintained, even when individual witnesses to the memorializing of the movement would like to give heroes permission to be mortal again.
I took down my blog soon after, when the exchange with the publicist turned ugly. I didn’t want to jeopardize the income of a frail old man, even if I did feel hurt. I had written because I had just experienced a kind of Civil Rights conversion that I thought the tour and the heroes wanted me to have and was trying to apply it. Apparently, I didn’t do it very well.
I stand by the truth of that conversion anyway: that the truth of our ordinariness should free Civil Rights heroes to be ordinary again. They shouldn’t have to fit their story into some official narrative of heroism. We’ve seen our heroes crack, again and again, under the pressure, some very publicly. The application/take-away of the Civil Rights Bus Tour shouldn’t only be that people resolve to bring more friends and family on the tour to worship the heroes. The heroes shouldn’t be locked into lives they repeatedly relive and repeatedly retell. That wasn’t the goal of the movement, freedom was.
Tiffany Eberle Kriner is Assistant Professor of English at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.
