Joy-Ann Reid
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Quase 56 anos após sua morte, o Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. se destaca dos outros líderes dos direitos civis do século XX. Ele foi o mais visível, o mais ouvido e visto na televisão e, em muitos aspectos, o mais criativo na sua abordagem à luta contra o apartheid americano. King teve uma importância tão grande em sua época que alimentou o F.B.I. a paranóia do diretor J. Edgar Hoover de que um messias negro surgiria para provocar a revolução das massas negras oprimidas desta nação.
Mas King estava longe de ser um messias solitário. Um jovem de ambição tremenda e urgente – King tinha apenas 26 anos quando ajudou a organizar o boicote aos ônibus em Montgomery, Alabama, em 1955 – ele construiu um movimento mais colaborativo do que a história lhe dá crédito.
Entre aqueles que se inspiraram em King estava Medgar Evers; eles e Malcolm X formaram o que James Baldwin chamou de o grande trio do movimento pelos direitos civis. A conexão entre Evers e King se perdeu na história. Esses dois homens, de idade próxima, mas trabalhando para organizações diferentes com abordagens diferentes do movimento pelos direitos civis, cruzaram-se de formas que revelam os desafios que o movimento enfrentou, especialmente no Sul, ao equilibrar os interesses concorrentes dos negros americanos nas cidades com os dos meeiros rurais, dos doadores, dos grupos concorrentes de direitos civis e dos políticos em Washington.
Evers, então com 32 anos, secretário de campo do N.A.A.C.P. no Mississippi, escreveu pela primeira vez a King em 1956, na esperança de trazê-lo para seu estado natal. Veterano da Segunda Guerra Mundial, regressou da luta contra o fascismo na Europa determinado a lutar pela “cidadania de primeira classe” para os cidadãos negros no seu país. Evers juntou-se à equipe da NAACP depois de ter sua admissão recusada na Faculdade de Direito da Universidade do Mississippi, apesar da decisão da Suprema Corte de que ela não poderia mais ser segregada.
Evers tinha uma visão mais radical da libertação negra do que os seus chefes em Nova Iorque, que acreditavam que os tribunais salvariam a América negra. Evers viu o boicote de King em Montgomery como um modelo melhor para envolverr os aterrorizados meeiros do Delta, que viviam sob a constante ameaça de linchamento e guerra econômica por parte de pessoas brancas que se recusaram a desistir do “modo de vida do Mississippi” quase um século após o fim da escravidão. Evers passou grande parte do seu tempo organizando protestos e greves, em vez de inscrever pessoas como membros da NAACP e fazer o recenseamento eleitoral tradicional preferido pela liderança da organização.
King também iniciou sua carreira nos direitos civis, de certa forma, em reação ao N.A.A.C.P. Os seus advogados – homens e mulheres como Thurgood Marshall e Constance Baker Motley – lideravam a luta para forçar as recalcitrantes instituições americanas a reconhecer a humanidade básica dos cidadãos negros, e a sua liderança nem sempre acolheu bem a abordagem de King. Eles estavam preocupados que o seu estilo de confronto pudesse levar à prisão de demasiados jovens, desviando fundos cruciais da luta da NAACP para os tribunais, que considerava mais justa e eficaz.
Ainda assim, Evers pôde ver que os métodos de King estavam alinhados com a sua própria visão de ajudar os negros do sul a alcançar a libertação, defendendo-se e agindo em vez de esperar que os brancos racistas obedecessem às decisões dos tribunais.
King não pôde viajar para o Mississippi em 1956, mas um ano depois, ele e Evers se conheceram em uma convenção da N.A.A.C.P. e depois em Nova Orleans, onde Evers participou das reuniões inaugurais da nova organização de direitos civis de King, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Foi o início de uma correspondência, afinidade e admiração mútua que duraria até a morte deles.
Havia riscos embutidos nesse relacionamento. Quando seus chefes na sede da N.A.A.C.P. A em Nova Iorque soube que Evers não só tinha participado nas reuniões de organização da Conferência de Liderança Cristã do Sul, mas também foi eleito secretário adjunto, o secretário nacional da N.A.A.C.P., Roy Wilkins, emitiu uma severa repreensão. Evers foi forçado a escrever-lhe uma carta de desculpas prometendo retirar-se do novo grupo.
King também teve muitos críticos em Washington. A administração Kennedy queria que as ruas do Sul segregado se acalmassem para remover uma poderosa ferramenta de propaganda explorada pelos soviéticos. O ativismo implacável, embora pacífico, de King – enraizado em marchas em massa e boicotes econômicos que perturbaram as economias locais e estaduais – significou dores de cabeça indesejadas para a Casa Branca.
Hoover e o F.B.I. estavam mais preocupados com o fato de King estar acumulando o poder para unir ativistas negros, brancos e judeus – que ele ridicularizava como “comunistas” – não apenas contra uma sociedade branca racista, mas também contra o governo.
Foi um medo concretizado pela primeira onda de Freedom Rides na primavera de 1961.
Evers had recruited and trained scores of young, Black Mississippi activists via the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Councils. Many joined the white and Black Northern liberal activists who poured into the South on Greyhound and Trailways buses for the Freedom Rides.
Some of the Freedom Riders wanted King to travel with them on the buses bound for New Orleans. King declined, citing the fact that he was already on probation for a prior conviction. His decision exposed a generational divide between the young activists in organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality and those like King who were just slightly older — in their 30s — but more tactically cautious out of necessity, with one eye on the streets and the other on Washington.
But an incident that May in a Montgomery church helped to reassert King’s moral leadership. As more than 1,000 parishioners and Freedom Riders, along with King, holed up inside the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church, a violent white mob gathered outside, nearly hysterical over the impending Freedom Rides. From the basement, King and the church’s pastor, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, called Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s office in Washington and at one point offered to give themselves up to the mob, which was vandalizing cars, assaulting Black passers-by and threatening to burn the building to the ground. The Kennedy administration eventually dispatched U.S. marshals, who absorbed the crowd’s fury and made more than a dozen arrests. Ultimately, the governor of Alabama declared martial law.
Some of the Freedom Riders wanted King to travel with them on the buses bound for New Orleans. King declined, citing the fact that he was already on probation for a prior conviction. His decision exposed a generational divide between the young activists in organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality and those like King who were just slightly older — in their 30s — but more tactically cautious out of necessity, with one eye on the streets and the other on Washington.
But an incident that May in a Montgomery church helped to reassert King’s moral leadership. As more than 1,000 parishioners and Freedom Riders, along with King, holed up inside the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church, a violent white mob gathered outside, nearly hysterical over the impending Freedom Rides. From the basement, King and the church’s pastor, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, called Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s office in Washington and at one point offered to give themselves up to the mob, which was vandalizing cars, assaulting Black passers-by and threatening to burn the building to the ground. The Kennedy administration eventually dispatched U.S. marshals, who absorbed the crowd’s fury and made more than a dozen arrests. Ultimately, the governor of Alabama declared martial law.
If the federal government suspected that the various civil rights organizations were working together, they now had the evidence. In 1962 the N.A.A.C.P., the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality formally united, forming a new umbrella organization: the Council of Federated Organizations. Evers signed the compact on behalf of the N.A.A.C.P.
Despite the national N.A.A.C.P.’s admonitions, Evers continued to correspond with King and seek to work with him, using King’s Montgomery strategy to build a successful boycott movement in Jackson, Miss. From the winter of 1962 through the spring of 1963, the Jackson movement persuaded Black shoppers to all but abandon downtown shops where they could not be served with dignity, try on clothes, eat in the main dining area or hope to be employed. By May, when Evers delivered a historic televised address rejecting the mayor of Jackson’s lies about happy Black Mississippians under segregation, he had, if briefly, achieved the Kingian movement he hoped for in Mississippi. In doing so, he also became a top target of the White Citizens’ Councils, the state spy organization called the Sovereignty Commission and the Ku Klux Klan.
After Evers became the first major civil rights leader to be assassinated in the American South, on June 12, 1963, his widow, Myrlie Evers, stepped into his shoes. She was invited to speak from the main stage at the August 1963 March on Washington. An early draft of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered to a crowd of 25,000 in Detroit on June 23, 1963, even included a line about Evers and Emmett Till: “I have a dream this afternoon that there will be a day that we will no longer face the atrocities that Emmett Till had to face or Medgar Evers had to face, that all men can live with dignity.”
When King himself was murdered in Memphis in April 1968, his wife, Coretta Scott King, entered into a sisterhood of widows, forming a lifelong friendship with the widows of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. None of those men lived to turn 40.
When we celebrate King for his martyrdom and for the uniquely brilliant way he spoke the language of liberation, we should also remember Medgar Evers. King laid the groundwork for many transformative changes — in civil rights, voting rights, the fight against poverty and for a living wage and the subsequent shifts toward immigration expansion, women’s rights and L.G.B.T.Q. rights in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But all of these movements were built by coalitions, not by individuals.
Despite the national N.A.A.C.P.’s admonitions, Evers continued to correspond with King and seek to work with him, using King’s Montgomery strategy to build a successful boycott movement in Jackson, Miss. From the winter of 1962 through the spring of 1963, the Jackson movement persuaded Black shoppers to all but abandon downtown shops where they could not be served with dignity, try on clothes, eat in the main dining area or hope to be employed. By May, when Evers delivered a historic televised address rejecting the mayor of Jackson’s lies about happy Black Mississippians under segregation, he had, if briefly, achieved the Kingian movement he hoped for in Mississippi. In doing so, he also became a top target of the White Citizens’ Councils, the state spy organization called the Sovereignty Commission and the Ku Klux Klan.
After Evers became the first major civil rights leader to be assassinated in the American South, on June 12, 1963, his widow, Myrlie Evers, stepped into his shoes. She was invited to speak from the main stage at the August 1963 March on Washington. An early draft of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered to a crowd of 25,000 in Detroit on June 23, 1963, even included a line about Evers and Emmett Till: “I have a dream this afternoon that there will be a day that we will no longer face the atrocities that Emmett Till had to face or Medgar Evers had to face, that all men can live with dignity.”
When King himself was murdered in Memphis in April 1968, his wife, Coretta Scott King, entered into a sisterhood of widows, forming a lifelong friendship with the widows of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. None of those men lived to turn 40.
When we celebrate King for his martyrdom and for the uniquely brilliant way he spoke the language of liberation, we should also remember Medgar Evers. King laid the groundwork for many transformative changes — in civil rights, voting rights, the fight against poverty and for a living wage and the subsequent shifts toward immigration expansion, women’s rights and L.G.B.T.Q. rights in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But all of these movements were built by coalitions, not by individuals.
The right continues to work to dismantle much of what King’s movement has accomplished. Any victories in the cause of racial progress can be cemented only by coalitions. But those are fragile, too.
The fight for civil rights needs no messiah. It needs individuals who are willing to admire and elevate one another’s work and adapt and adopt shared strategies, as King and Evers did. If cohesiveness could exist in their fractured political climate, it can survive in ours.
Joy-Ann Reid (@joyannreid) é a apresentadora de “The ReidOut” da MSNBC e autora do próximo “Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America”.
The fight for civil rights needs no messiah. It needs individuals who are willing to admire and elevate one another’s work and adapt and adopt shared strategies, as King and Evers did. If cohesiveness could exist in their fractured political climate, it can survive in ours.
Joy-Ann Reid (@joyannreid) é a apresentadora de “The ReidOut” da MSNBC e autora do próximo “Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America”.
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