Oak Creek Blues

Oak Creek Blues

by Courtney Baker | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

Writing this hurts. As I have been reading the reports coming out of Wisconsin, following the tweets (@sepiamutiny has been an exceptionally good source), and watching (barely tolerable and woefully meager) television coverage of the mass shooting of a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, my heart has been breaking.

I simply cannot fathom how another mass shooting could break out less than a month after the country was collectively horrified by the killings in Aurora, Colorado. My stomach seized up when it dawned on me that the Oak Creek shooter—and in all likelihood others as well—felt something other than raw disgust and shock about Aurora’s misery. Some one out there must have thought something along the lines of, “That looks like a good idea,” or “I could do better,” or “Ok, so that’s what I need to do,” or—and this is the one that truly chills me, as a black woman—“That guy in Aurora picked the wrong targets.”

That is when it hit me: That despite the denials of the tweeters and the pundits and of the CNN reporter who deliberately cut off the Sikh interviewee who was historicizing violence against Sikh’s in America, Oak Creek is different because of the way that race figures in.

I am not saying, here, that white people are not victims of gun violence. Of course they are, and that’s a reason that, in my opinion, we need to have a serious conversation about gun control in this country. (I hope that it isn’t the case that we can only talk about gun violence when white folks are involved, though.)

Even if the shooter did not turn out to be white supremacist, we should still have been able to read the event through the clarifying lenses of race. Even before Wade Michael Page’s card-carrying membership member of Wage Apathy (a skinhead band, according to Huffington Post) was exposed, we could already recognize patterns that made it most likely that this was a racially-motivated killing spree. He clearly had an intention to kill a group of people, not an individual, and he didn’t show up at a white church service which, presumably, would have been closer to him and easier to infiltrate).

What I am saying is that acknowledging the reality of race helps us to make sense of this tragedy.

Race is not intrinsically evil. When race is celebrated as a feature of one’s individuality and identity, it can be a wonderful thing. But race is a double-edged sword. Just as we use race to understand ourselves, so too do we use race to understand the world around us. In the worst instances, this plays out as racism—when we make assessments of others based on superficial observations that serve no other purpose than to elevate our own identities over that of others.

When I think of the congregants of the Oak Creek gurdwara (“gurdwara” is the name of the Sikh temple of worship) who were hiding for hours upon end, listening to the moans of those who had already been shot, fearing that another shooter or shooters would strike, I have to imagine that they were recruiting all of their analytical skills to help think them out of that dangerous situation. I have to imagine that they were seeing this white guy, with a gun, in their house of worship, and thinking not, “Who among us is he looking for?” and “Why is he so angry?” but, “Oh my god, they are trying to kill us. Again.”

Because it has happened before that Sikhs were killed just for being Sikh. Or, to be more precise, Sikhs were killed because racists only “know” that the Ayrabs responsible for 9/11 are brown and dress “ethnic.” It was that state of affairs that resulted in the death of Balbir Singh Sodi, a gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona who was shot dead on September 15, 2001 by a white man named Frank Silva Roque who was seeking retribution for the 9/11 attacks. Similar retributive murders followed in New York and Texas, and there were numerous threats issued against Sikhs in the days that followed 9/11, and threats are continually renewed.

All of this is bad enough, and convincing enough to me to disqualify all of the race-deniers calls that we shouldn’t discuss what happened in Oak Creek in terms of race and to ignore all of the insults and threats that they hurled against anyone who did. Not only is the recent record of anti-Sikh hatred (I refuse to that condescending term, “sentiment”) pretty damning, there are also major historical precedents in the U.S. that demonstrate exactly how racist violence operates.

The six murdered Sikhs in the Oak Creek gurdwara got me thinking about the four murdered African-American girls who were blown to pieces in their church by a white supremacist’s bomb in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. I fear that the gall, the misdirected fury, and the heretical disregard for human life was on vivid display that September day was on display again in Oak Creek, Wisconsin this August. I weep at the prospect that this country might arrive on September 15^th in 2013, at the fifty-year anniversary of the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing not having learned a damn thing.

From Birmingham. From the Pequot Massacre. From the Holocaust.

We are truly in a worse place today than we were then if we can’t even talk about racism and racialized violence. We simply cannot turn a blind eye to what is going on. And the deniers cannot gaslight me into thinking that what I and my Sikh brothers and sisters have experienced of hatred is not real.

My experiences arereal, and no one can shut me up or shame me about it. Call me an embedded journalist or a field anthropologist: I knowwhat happened because I was there. This is the skin I live in.

I am so unspeakable tired of those I love and of myself being identified as practice targets based on our non-whiteness. I refuse to hear that that statement is racist because if I didn’t inhabit the world watching my back, being mindful of how I might be perceived at any moment by anyone, you would call me a fool. Emmett Till got killed in part for “foolishly” acting like that target wasn’t always pinned to his back.

We can’t live like this anymore. We need to talk about racism in America. If we don’t start talking now, pretty soon nobody will be left.

***

Courtney Baker is Assistant Professor of English at Connecticut College. A graduate of Harvard and Duke universities, she researches and writes on African-American visual culture and literature, death, and ethics. Her book, entitled Human Insight: Looking at Images of Black Death and Suffering, is forthcoming.

Two Protests Which Changed the Course of American History: Flint 1936, Birmingham 1963

Two Protests Which Changed the Course of American History:

Flint 1936, Birmingham 1963

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

Flint 1936

It’s December of 1936. America is now 7 years into the worst Depression in its history. At its peak over 1/3 of the labor force was unemployed, 1/3 working part time, and millions of people were without food and shelter. People all over the country rose in protest against forced impoverishment. There were hunger marches, strikes, protests against evictions and foreclosures, many of them organized by Socialists and Communists. but change came very slowly. It wasn’t until 1933, after the Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, that the first federal relief dollars came pouring into the states, and slowly began to reach individual families, allowing at least some of them to remain in their homes and apartments. This was soon followed up by programs of work relief, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, and later the WPA, which created millions of jobs for unemployed Americas, many of them building roads and bridges, creating national parks in rural areas, even creating dams which gave people in poor rural area electricity for the first time in their lives.

On the labor front, though, things were still extremely tense. When the Depression began, only 3 million workers were members of unions, and none of the nation’s largest industries were unionized. The big steel, auto and electronics companies all had been successful in keeping unions out. After FDR passed the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, unions all over the country began to organize again, a major strike wave broke out in 1934, leading to a significant growth of unions in transportation, particularly trucking and the mining and garment industries, but the nation’s biggest companies General Motors, Ford, US Steel, Westinghouse, General Electric, still refused to accept collective bargaining.

In 1935, John L Lewis of the United Mine Workers left the American Federation of Labor to form a new federation, the Committee for Industrial Organization, aimed at organizing workers in the biggest companies across lines of craft and skill, and FDR and Congress passed the Wagner Labor Relations Act aimed at providing for workplace elections which could confer union recognition, but not one major companies targeted ended up granting union recognition to its workers. The stalemate continued into 1936 even as organizers were sent into the nation’s biggest factories. Executives in those firms held out, hoping the Wagner Act would be declared unconstitutional and that all the tactics that they had used in the pasty to keep workers from organizing--including spies and private police--would continue to be effective.

One of the companies most infamous for use of spies and informers was General Motors. The newly formed United Automobile Workers decided to target GM by organizing its plants across the country, in cities ranging from Cleveland to Detroit to Atlanta, but much of its effort was focused on Flint, a General Motors company town, where the infamous Black Legion, Ku Klux Klan type organization had some influence in the plants. The organizers the UAW sent in first decided to create a secret organization of workers they could trust and then began doing actions in the plant to show workers that they could stop foreman and managers from intimidating workers on the job.

Then, after they built a following with small actions, the workers decided to do something dangerous and dramatic to force General Motors to come to the bargaining table. They seized and barricaded two plants and refused to leave. General Motors tried everything to evict them. They used private guards, they organized vigilante groups, they called on the local police. Nothing could get the workers inside, who had thousands of supporters outside, to leave. They even drove off the Flint police who refused to use guns, and when the police finally used guns against picket outside, it backfired. The occupation went on for several weeks.

General Motors asked the newly elected Democratic governor to send in the national guard, which he did, but he refused to use them to pull the workers out. He, and President Roosevelt, who refused to send in federal troops, thought the country would be better off if GM recognized the union. Then, at the fifth week of the Occupation, the Governor finally told workers in the plants he was going to use the guard to take the workers out. But the workers instead of leaving the plants, decided to up the ante. After half of those occupying the factories signed “Ready to Die” agreements, a phalanx of workers seized yet another factory in the 9 Plant General Motors complex and barricaded that.

The Occupation had now lasted six weeks, shutting General Motors production down almost completely on a national level. Half of the country wanted the workers in the plants taken out and shot; another half supported what they were doing. Finally, just as it looked like there was a bloodbath on the horizon as the National Guard prepared to take the plants, General Motors decided to negotiate with the UAW and give collective bargaining rights to workers in the occupied plants. Within two years, General Motors, the nation’s largest industrial corporation was completely unionized

But that wasn’t all, US. Steel the nation’s second largest corporation, which faced a similar organizing drive from the United Steelworkers Union, decided to voluntarily grant recognition in its plants to the USW rather than go through what General Motors just had. This meant that by the time the US economy started reviving in 1939, the nation’s two largest corporations were unionized, and workers in both of those companies were making far more money than they ever had in their lives, and could walk into factories knowing that foremen and managers would treat them with respect. This resulted, ultimately in those workers becoming bulwarks of a strong consumer economy that emerged right after WWII, and helped make the US a far more equal nation than it had been in the 1920’s.

Birmingham 1963

It is March of 1963. It has been nine years since the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown V Topeka board of education which had declared the separate but equal doctrine, used to justify racial segregation in the South, unconstitutional. It was seven years since the Montgomery bus boycott, which ended bus segregation in that city, and two years since the student sit-in movement which ended segregation in some downtown business districts and two years since the Freedom Rides which ended segregation in terminals involved in interstate travel.

Yet despite these landmark events, the vast majority of the South remained segregated. Hospitals, parks, swimming pools, restaurants, theaters, department stores, gas stations, factories and offices buildings, in both the private and public sector, all kept whites and blacks totally separate, in the process subjecting Black Southerners to almost daily humiliation. President Kennedy, preoccupied with foreign policy issues, refused to put the prestige of his office behind Civil Rights legislation that would compel the South to end these practices. Lobbying and legislation couldn’t move him. Even a year long protest in Albany Georgia, where there were thousands of arrests, but no violence, could not prompt federal intervention.

Dr Martin Luther King, the most important leader of the non-violent protest movement was getting desperate. He saw the gains that Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam were making among frustrated blacks and feared that his entire movement could be disrupted unless he could force federal action to end segregation. So he decided on a gamble every bit as desperate as occupying the flint factories. He decided to lead a movement to desegregate the downtown business district of Birmingham Alabama, where the local sheriff, Eugene Bull Connor, would be almost certain to try to repress any protests with such extreme violence that it would create an international scandal. King moved to Birmingham and started mobilizing that city’s Black churches He persuaded hundreds of well dressed peaceful marchers to go into downtown Birmingham where they would enter Department stores and restaurants and demand to be served. Bull Connor, as expected, arrested them in enormous numbers, filling the jails, but avoiding for the most part, flamboyant acts of brutality for which he was known.

The movement dragged on for a month, with thousands of arrests, but no visible results. People in the Black community were getting tired and discouraged. King had trouble getting enough people to march downtown to sustain the momentum of the movement. Finally, he decided on a truly desperate strategy. In the face of several local criticism, he organized thousands of Black high school and junior high schools students to march with him downtown. This so enraged Sheriff Connor that he decided to unleash police dogs and hoses on the youthful demonstrators, creating scenes of brutality sent around the world. Not only did this enrage people around the globe, it so enraged people in  Birmingham's black community that they started throwing rocks and bottles at police in the city’s Black neighborhoods.

This unrest finally forced the Kennedy administration into action. The President not only sent his brother Robert, who was US Attorney General, to Birmingham, to negotiate an end to segregation in that city’s downtown business district, he decided to make a nationally televised address putting his full support behind the goals of the Civil Rights movement and announcing that he would submit an omnibus Civil Rights Bill to congress that would put the full weight of the Federal Government’s power behind ending segregation, a bill that ultimately passed, after President Kennedy’s death, in 1964.

These two examples show how protest movements that involved grave risk, that broke the law, and that used extremely controversial and disruptive practices, helped organize America’s workers and significantly raise their standard of living and bring an end to legal segregation in the American South.

***

Mark Naisonis a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project(BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.