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President Biden's agenda is being
canceled by the Republicans. Sen. Mitch McConnell has built a solid
wall of Senate opposition to current Biden initiatives—voting
rights, infrastructure, immigration, police reform, and even a
bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection.
The American people are being led into a dark political era.
The commonality of this opposition
is that they aim it at the obstruction of progress for people of
color. Throughout our history, fair-minded White citizens have
historically aligned themselves with their ethnic minority brothers
and sisters during periods of intense racial subjugation,
polarization, and/or attempts to weaken democracy.
As we enter this political Stygian
night, the hope for the salvation of our republic will hinge on the
good White people who have stood for what is right throughout our
history. They did so in the 2020 presidential election despite the
widely held view that the emerging New American Majority (composed of
ethnic minority groups) was the deciding factor in the electoral
victory.
Although that is true to a large
extent, without significant White votes in the key states of Arizona,
Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a Democrat
would not be in the Oval Office. Throughout our history, they have
been bellwethers of future progress in the most trying of times—from
the period of slavery and immigration of diverse people as America
moved to become the most powerful nation in the world.
Elijah Parish Lovejoy, an American
Presbyterian minister, journalist, newspaper editor, and
abolitionist, born in Maine, became a fervent advocate against
slavery while living in Missouri and Illinois in the early 19th
century. After founding a religious newspaper in St. Louis,
Missouri, he wrote zealously against the peculiar institution; a
pro-slavery mob murdered him at a warehouse where he hid his printing
press in 1837.
Lovejoy was adamant in sustaining
the publication of anti-slavery articles over the intense objections
of his neighbors and friends who counseled him to stand down on this
issue. As a devout Christian, he would not tolerate the servitude of
his fellow human beings.
In March 1965, appalled by the White
response to the civil rights protests she witnessed in Selma, Alabama
while watching TV, a Michigan homemaker named Viola Liuzzo heeded the
call of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and traveled from Detroit,
Michigan, to Selma, Alabama, in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt
at marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Leaders assigned her to ferry
protesters back and forth from Selma to Montgomery during the March,
and while driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the
Montgomery airport, the 39-year-old got fatally shot by Ku Klux Klan
(KKK) members in a pursuing car. It was unknown at the time that an
undercover FBI informant was also in the car with the Klansmen.
Liuzzo became a target of the Klan
after they noticed her passenger was a young Black male. To
discredit and smear her and shield his informant, then FBI Director,
J. Edgar Hoover, launched a disinformation campaign alleging that
Liuzzo was a member of the Communist Party. She was accused of
abandoning her children and going to Selma to have sexual
relationships with African-American men involved in the Civil
Rights Movement. Hoover briefly got away with this ruse.
Between 1961 and 1963, the FBI
monitored Stanley Levison, a Jewish business executive, lawyer,
unpaid advisor, and close friend of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hoover targeted Levison earlier for his supposed affiliation with the
American Communist Party although Hoover admitted that the
relationship was not current. He took these accusations to Attorney
General Robert F. Kennedy and President John F. Kennedy.
JFK pulled King aside during a White
House meeting after the 1963 March on Washington and advised him he
should essentially cut Levison loose, which King ignored. Hoover
used the King-Levison affiliation as a pretext to gain approval from
RFK to set up a 24-hour a day wiretap of King. Hoover fixated on
labeling anyone advocating for civil rights as a Communist or as
anti-American.
A most interesting White supporter
of African American progress was the Rockefeller family that had
established and contributed to Historically Black Colleges and
Universities (HBCUs). But one of its not widely known donations was
the funding of bail for hundreds of protesters arrested throughout
the 1963 Birmingham crusade.
Clarence B. Jones, Dr. King's
personal attorney, flew to New York City and accompanied Gov. Nelson
Rockefeller to Chase Manhattan Bank on a Sunday morning in 1963 and
received a briefcase containing $1 million in cash for bail for the
Birmingham marchers. He signed a promissory note agreeing to pay it
back, but within months without making any payments, he was informed
that the debt had been repaid.
The foregoing examples demonstrate
that there have always been good White people who gave the full
measure of devotion to social justice for Americans of color. In
these racially divided times, it is even more imperative that White
allies continue their support.
As laws designed to suppress voters
(especially ethnic minorities) and manipulate elections make their
way through state legislatures at a rapid pace, White votes will be
crucial in ensuring equity, justice, and Democratic control of the
House and Senate after the upcoming 2022 midterm elections.
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