What Truth Sounds Like by Michael Eric Dyson

Author:Michael Eric Dyson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2018-04-05T16:00:00+00:00

The Activists 1

Policy and Witness

Black activism has existed as long as the white world has viewed black folk as inferior. Black activists have often upset the establishment by demanding justice for the vulnerable and beleaguered—from the enslaved preacher Nat Turner, who led a rebellion to set his people free, to Black Lives Matter protesters interrupting business as usual to seek redress for victims of police brutality.

Bobby Kennedy got angry at Jimmy Baldwin and his friends because he thought they were ignorant of the law, ignorant of what he and his brother had been trying to do to improve race relations, and more interested in witness than policy. Their volatile exchange was a watershed moment in American politics, revealing the limits of liberal goodwill and the explosive power of truth through testimony.

It was the beginning of a disagreement that still rages today: Do black activists seek to improve black life through policies that translate the intent of politics, or does improvement come through the ethical force of witness? Does racial progress happen when black activists appeal to the government for change, or is it sparked by their efforts outside the system? And what happens when black activists cling tenaciously to ideologies that ultimately undermine the political fortunes of the people they claim to represent? Even though there are striking differences between 1963 and our day, these questions linger and continue to shape our perceptions of race.

***

When Kennedy and Baldwin met in 1963, public schools, transportation, and restaurants in the South were segregated. The masses of black folk in the region could not vote. Even though President Kennedy had stalled on civil rights legislation, he threw black folk a bone here and there—standing with James Meredith as he integrated the University of Mississippi and bailing out jailed Freedom Riders in Alabama. The Kennedys were trying to win elections while accommodating social change.

Baldwin and his activist friends believed that elections were useless if they didn’t address the social issues that politics aimed to resolve. Policy didn’t necessarily challenge the racist and classist assumptions that denied black folk their humanity. Witness would validate black humanity. Bobby tried to get off easy in demanding the change of law; Baldwin’s aim was something loftier still—a change of what French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville called the “habits of the heart” so that American democracy could be transformed by spirit as much as by politics.

“Bobby didn’t understand what we were trying to tell him,” Baldwin said.

He didn’t understand our urgency. For him it was a political matter. It was a matter of finding out what’s wrong in the twelfth ward and correcting it . . . like packages or whatever the kids wanted in the twelfth ward, giving it to them and everything would be all right. But what was wrong in the twelfth ward in this case turned out to be something very sinister, very deep, that couldn’t be solved in the usual way . . . And our apprehension of his misunderstanding made it very tense, and finally very ugly.

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